Our unofficial Tobe Talk mascot, Toby the alien (available here: http://designtobe.eu/)

Improving Teamwork through Knowledge Sharing

Internal meetings for team unity.

Ryan Canfield
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

The Backstory

When I began working at Helpful Human last June, I noticed a communication gap in the team. Not the type of gap that leads to misunderstandings or ineffectiveness in working together, but the type that inhibited individual developers from the benefit of working alongside other developers. The thought of working together toward a single goal was secondary to getting the job done.

We didn’t know each other’s strengths and, as a result, couldn’t benefit from them. To remedy this issue, I wanted to establish a periodic team meeting where we would discuss ideas, issues, new technologies, improvements to work flows and other ways we could either optimize our workday or increase our effectiveness to work together as a team. The main purpose was to be a catalyst for the conversations that would lead to us unifying as a team.

While the idea was solid, support was lacking, and these meetings, called Process Change Meetings, dwindled. That was until our lead developer, Nick, reinvigorated the idea of teamwork and skill sharing. His idea was to give everyone a role in which they would thrive and be (or become) the domain expert in that area.

This was ultimately too structured of a system for our small team, but the momentum from these meetings and talks carried over into a new joint effort between another Helpful Human and myself. Jordan Bundy had a similar vision of how we could benefit from an established meeting wherein we would learn how to be more of a team. Neither one of us knew what that would entail and, in many regards, we are still finding out to this day.

All Hail Toby

We came up with an idea that every week, one member of the team would hold a presentation in which they would share knowledge of a certain topic. This would benefit the team in a few different ways. It would:

  • demonstrate your knowledge on a certain topic to the team
  • allow the rest of the team to benefit from your knowledge of that topic
  • challenge the entire team to continue learning new topics
  • deepen knowledge of topics that are already familiar

Half of the meeting would be spent doing these presentations. The other half was used to talk about, create, and vote on changes to internal processes and discuss progress on internal tooling. In just these one-hour meetings, we were able to make some excellent headway. The time spent developing internal tools was actually the catalyst for Helpful React Scripts.

The first Tobe Talk, as they have been affectionately dubbed, was on Feb 1st. Over the past 4 months, we’ve had 20 Tobe Talks on a variety of topics from all of our team members and even from a couple of individuals outside of the company. As a team, we are much more aware of each other’s strengths, and we have better clarity into who we can lean on within our team when faced with specific issues.

Looking Ahead

Interestingly, however, these talks didn’t completely solve one of the original goals of these meetings, which was to build a stronger, more unified team. Going forward, our goal with Tobe Talks is to integrate another meeting format in order to shift focus more toward teamwork.

The plan is to split our developers into 2–4 person teams to complete a portion of a task that integrates into the other team’s code. When combined, the teams’ contributions will create a complete piece of functionality. These mini-hackathons should improve our teamwork in a more direct manner.

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Thanks to rynnjacobson

Ryan Canfield

Written by

UI Designer, Front-end Developer, Thinker

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