Relationship Building & Culture
I want to give you one more skill area with some tactical tips — the relationship building and culture building. I want us to all get on the same page in terms of what we mean by culture because oftentimes, I hear people say that team culture is the same as having virtual happy hours and doing those fun activities. While having fun is part of your team culture, but really, what team culture is? It's the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors shared by a team. It's how people work together toward a common goal, how they treat each other. And different teams can have different cultures within the same company.
If you have a large company, you have some company values and company culture, but in the team that I led, for example, we had to figure out what was our own team culture within that kind of bigger umbrella of the company. And what's interesting about this is that when you're working in a virtual team, when you're not all co-located together, it can be very hard to know what the culture is of the team. Because you have these virtual curtains between you where you only get little peeks into this, depending on whether you are reading into a digital communication like email or Slack or a little peek when you have a meeting and see how people are behaving and treating each other.
So what to do about this? So I do a whole workshop on building culture and distributed teams, but part of that workshop is setting some of these foundational building blocks is to think about:
✔ Team Values
✔ Team Goal Setting
✔ Operating Principles
Have we established our team values? And if not, we need to have a discussion to establish them, make them public, recognize and reinforce them. Also, have we established team goals? Not just individual goals, but are we sure that we're all aligned to the team's same goals cross-functionally? And lastly, the operating principles. Back to expectations setting, have we defined what these expectations are for our teams? And have we made that public and transparent? Many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with GitLab, and it is a great standard to look at their employee handbook in terms of how they make their operating principles, their values, their culture really accessible and searchable through their online handbook.