The tech industry is full of passionate people working for aspirational companies that build inspirational products. That said, nobody spends every hour of every day doing work that aligns perfectly with their passions. Meetings need to be fielded, reports generated and emails answered. Combine that with the stress of life outside the office and it’s easy to see how even the most passionate employees can lose sight of the bigger picture. When this happens, it’s critical for managers to have strategies to re-engage their teams.
The value of pulse surveys and offsite team-building activities is well-known, which is why we decided to ask local team leaders for their best outside-the-box approaches.
Leaders from Seesaw, The ReaReal and kea told Built In the atypical tactics they’ve used to improve team engagement and why these seemingly odd strategies proved successful.
In addition to being incredibly fun to do, sharing silly and embarrassing stories is a great way to build trust and camaraderie among teammates. According to Victoria Lawyer, global sales manager at edtech company Seesaw, it’s also a great tool for building sales teams that put collaboration over competition.
What’s a surprising or unique strategy you leverage to improve or bolster team engagement?
A few times a year, we play a game where we share three weird or fun facts about our lives. For example, when I was a kid I sang Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” at a school talent show with a childhood crush. Everyone shares an equally fun or bizarre fact and then we read each other’s and try to guess who they belong to. Once the person is revealed, they share context and backstory into their fact, which typically leads to hours of entertainment.
Every time we play this game we learn new things about each other and it deepens the trust and respect amongst the team. In a remote world, it’s especially critical to know your team. When you know who your colleagues are and have a good relationship with them, there are immediate positive impacts in the way you interact with one another, share resources and mentor each other. A lot of sales teams tend to be more competitive. On our sales team, there isn’t a lot of competition with each other. The competition is with yourself.
We have meetings every Friday called “Woah, what a week,” which is an opportunity for anyone to give a shoutout to a colleague acknowledging the work they’ve done or how they helped them with a problem. Teamwork and recognizing each other’s contributions are ingrained in our company culture. It’s something I encourage my team to participate in on a regular basis.
A few times a year we play a game where we share three weird or fun facts about our lives.”
What makes this strategy so successful? What results have you seen?
When you trust your coworkers, you’re more engaged as a unit. You’re more inclined to share information and give each other pointers and tips that ultimately lead to individuals and the team as a whole being more successful. There’s unprompted coaching going on all the time across the team.
For example, one team member noticed another team member struggling with their conversion rates and went out of their way to host an in-depth training session about strategies that have worked for them. These types of meetings happen organically because the team cares about each other and wants to see each other do well.
Another thing we’re really proud of is our team’s low turnover. When people see me being honest and vulnerable about myself, they are more open with me as their manager. They share more about their career goals and what they’re really excited to do. Knowing what makes an individual tick gives me the opportunity to assign projects to folks that interest them and stretch them in their roles, which in turn creates higher levels of engagement. At the end of the day, it all starts with investing in knowing who your teammates are as humans, which allows them to perform higher and be better team members at work.
Instead of looking for strategies to improve team engagement, Mitchell Rodrigues, engineering manager at The RealReal, has built a culture of learning, accountability and ownership designed to keep his team engaged with their work and each other. Rodrigues has accomplished this by adopting a leadership style that calls for leaders to focus less on delegation and decision-making and more on empowerment and encouragement.
What’s a surprising or unique strategy you leverage to improve or bolster team engagement?
The “leading from behind” methodology. Leading from behind encourages buy-in, solicits feedback and shows your trust in your employees. Leading from behind does not mean surrendering your management responsibilities but using your authority to empower your employees.
You are not trying to eliminate setbacks and failures, which are essential to the learning process. Management’s role is to help the team stay focused and drive their success by helping prevent a lack of planning and foresight. It is essential to create a space for employees to thrive. Creating opportunities to me is about listening, being empathetic and keeping engineers from falling into the typical trappings of development.
Leading from the front takes the approach of setting the tone and agenda. When you lead from behind, you give up that control and instead practice active listening and ask a lot of “why” questions to help teammates challenge their assumptions and stay open-minded to new solutions. The idea is to harness strengths, capitalize on successes, challenge your team and encourage them to innovate.
One of the best ways I have found to help drive engagement and autonomy is through the ‘leading from behind’ methodology.”
What makes this strategy so successful? What results have you seen?
Happy and healthy teams tend to deliver better quality software, and velocity isn’t a leading indicator of a team’s success. This strategy is extremely successful because it focuses on the health and growth of each team member rather than how much code they can deliver. Leading from behind focuses on encouraging the team to lean on each other and diversifying communication channels. This methodology has shown noticeable results in engagement metrics like personal growth, satisfaction and stress.
Leading from behind increases happiness, autonomy and overall wellness. Not to mention, my teams are more likely to speak freely in meetings and feel a sense of ownership in their projects. The best part is the growth that takes place during a time of urgency. All feedback previously coming from me is now coming from within their team of respected peers. This not only greatly increased planning but also our grooming sessions.
Whether it’s a startup in San Francisco or Shanghai, all young tech companies have sync-ups. kea, a company that uses artificial intelligence to automate the process of taking phone orders at restaurants, held sync-ups, but as the company grew, the updates started to become lackluster. Patrick Wingo, a product lead, said the key to bringing energy back to team updates was to adopt a “show and tell” format.
What’s a surprising or unique strategy you leverage to improve or bolster team engagement?
Our team was starting to get burnt out with daily standups and a routine of status updates. “This is what I did yesterday,” and “This is what I’m working on today,” are useful in the context of a small, collaborative team — it helps teammates unblock each other, provide advice and steadily move projects forward. However, as a team scales, these updates lose their nuance and context, and the individual changes of each day don’t provide value across the wider group. To make sure we’re sharing the right context while keeping people engaged, we decided to look to our distant past: kindergarten.
In kindergarten, children bring a special item or a toy to show the group and talk about it. We wanted that same level of enthusiasm and wonder in our team discussions, so we allocated each day of the week to a different team to choose something they’re working on. Each team may present only once every week or two, which gives everyone time to show off something really special each time. Every week we see tangible progress and engaging content from each presenter. Most importantly, we see people excited to talk about their work and their outcomes, and the whole team rallies around that.
To make sure we’re sharing the right context while keeping people engaged, we decided to look to our distant past: kindergarten.”
What makes this strategy so successful? What results have you seen?
I think moving to show and tell over status updates helped shift our culture so that we’re more results-oriented. Instead of telling everyone on the team the tasks we’re working on, we actually show off the results of our hard work.
It’s a lot more interesting for the person delivering the show and tell, and it gives everyone on the team a chance to deep dive into one part of the company: to collaborate, ask questions, provide feedback and ultimately cheer on teammates. We’ve used show and tell sessions to elicit design feedback, share wins, run post-mortems on failures and to demo new product features or infrastructure upgrades. No matter what is being shown to the team, the presenter is passionate and excited to share it with the group. You can really feel the energy each day after the team has engaged with the project.
