How to build (and adapt) for better team collaboration

Even when you have a team of super-talented, naturally collaborative people, it is important to be intentional about the way you work together.

With some trial and error, we’ve found there are 3 key ingredients for successful team collaboration — and we try our very best to stick to them to make sure everyone is on the same page before we dive in:

1. Thoughtful objective-setting
2. Clear delegation (including a lead to see each project through)
3. Consistent communication along the way, from all stakeholders

When there are thoughtful intentions and repeatable processes in place, it becomes almost second nature for everyone on the team, and it is so worthwhile to put the work in upfront to get it right.

We’ve also developed a few strategies along the way to help ensure that when we find that oh-so-perfect balance we can scale the magic, and adapt as needed along the way.

Set your intentions, then create a clear process

For us, the intentions part starts with two very important ingredients: alignment and individual creativity.

I am obsessed with creating alignment across all parts of the organization. Why? It brings clarity and sound reasoning to the decision-making process (especially when things get hard) and makes life easier for everyone.

While it’s impossible to manage a development team exactly the same way as a customer success or marketing team, we try to take the learnings (good, bad, and ugly) from each team and apply the best parts across all teams. This has created a sense of transparency and understanding across all teams and had an incredibly positive impact on our culture.

This brings me to the individual creativity part of the equation. When the big picture makes sense, and we are aligned, there’s more room for individual creativity.

This is the stuff that gets each team member out of bed and excited to go to work (or, you know, their home workstation) each day — it’s what empowers each individual, and produces a better outcome for all.

When we’re aligned and creative, collaboration just works.

Start with the tactical stuff: which tools, and for what?

Now and for the foreseeable future, tapping each other on the shoulder just isn’t an option. Kind of sad, isn’t it? Well, we’ve created a few virtual rules of thumb for our team to communicate and collaborate more effectively:

Slack is for quick yes or no questions and check-ins. On the odd occasion, it’s for checking to see if someone has 2 minutes to chat (which works well, and the built-in calling feature is perfect for that).

For us, Slack is the virtual tap on the shoulder.

It is also the best way to broadcast a message, fast. Ie: ‘All-hands meeting notes are here — check out this link for more info’ or ‘new version of Shift just launched, here’s a link to the release notes’ or ‘grab your bevy, virtual happy hour is happening on Zoom!’

To make sure Slack channels, and groups, stay organized, we are very thoughtful about what goes where:

Is this message for this person only or a group? If it’s for the group, is it for the whole group or just a few people? This helps keep communication flowing in the right direction.

Email is best for communicating more detailed messages or passing along information that requires a more thoughtful response. This isn’t a tap on the shoulder, and may even precede an in-person discussion or call so everyone has time to prepare. Where possible, we try to keep our emails short and to-the-point. If it’s long, or just wordy, things will get missed.

Workflow or project management tools like Asana and Jira, in our case, are for mapping and assigning projects. We’ve created a simple build plan template for major Asana projects to outline major objectives, ownership, and subtasks as clearly as possible before we dive in. For Jira tickets, we’re even more scientific but we’ll save that for another day.

Unscheduled calls/texts are mostly used for urgent matters, especially if it’s after-hours when Slack notifications might be turned off.

Finally — Zoom, oh, the beloved Zoom. I have to admit, we’re still learning how to optimize our video calls, especially for larger groups. But, it has definitely helped fill *some* of the void of seeing each other face to face. In most cases, we’ve found agenda setting, and turn-taking is really important in the video calls to make sure all stakeholders are heard. While we try to stay on task and on schedule, we’ve found leaving a few extra minutes at the beginning and end of every call is really important for catching up/non-work chat now that we are all working from home (and missing the usual office banter!)

How we do meetings

We try to keep a healthy mix of quick check-ins/update-style meetings and the more collaborative problem-solving focused meetings for deeper discussions and brainstorming.

Here’s how that looks:

• Each team at Shift runs a daily 15 minute Stand Up in the morning to check-in, discuss any blockers, and set a plan for the day.
• These teams also each hold a bi-weekly or sometimes monthly strategy session for brainstorming, and focused problem-solving (more on that later).
• As a company, we get together every two weeks to review general updates and OKRs. This is one hour, with room for questions and discussion at the end.
• Managers set up 1:1s on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to talk about whatever is most top-of-mind.
• Other internal meetings are scheduled on an as-needed basis to ensure each one has a clear purpose and agenda.

Why the why is so important

When collaboration is done right, it makes for a happier, healthier, and more productive team.

So, why does it so often go wrong? I’ve found the most common offender to be the issue of ‘too many cooks in the kitchen.’ And if you ask anyone on our team, that really is the worst feeling ever…for everyone.

This often stems from a lack of clear direction, which results in team members jumping in to get stuff done before objectives are clear, and often all at once. This is dangerous when it happens often, driving up frustrations, and driving down motivation.

So, how can you avoid it? What I’ve found works, almost without fail, is revisiting ‘the why’ as often as possible, with the entire team, and assigning clear ownership from the start.

These go hand in hand. When everyone has a clear sense of the big picture, their ownership in it starts to make a lot more sense. It also results in ownership of the process, not just individual tasks, and empowers each team member to be part of the decision making process. It’s as simple as the captain, and the first mate, needing to know the destination so they can both steer in the right direction, together.

Remember: with ownership comes responsibility for each collaborator. And that makes it work. It also helps add diversity to the decision-making process along the way and helps minimize the tendency for leaders to micro-manage important projects (which usually leads to a less motivated team and less optimal project). But don’t confuse this with democracy on every decision — not every small task needs to be communicated with every single stakeholder, or ‘voted on.’ As long as the big vision, the why, and expectations for each collaborator’s individual outcome is clear, things usually come together pretty nicely.

Staying aligned, and ready-to-adapt

The needs of a marketing team are often quite different from those of the customer success team, the software development team, and the product team. That said, there are some lessons we’ve learned along the way within smaller teams that we’ve been able to apply across all, and this has made for incredible company alignment.

Our development team at Shift created a bi-weekly meeting lovingly referred to as #DevStrat. This came from feedback our Director of Technology received from a few team members who were interested in creating more opportunities to collaborate and strategize on the best path forward before diving into any new ticket/project.

This made a lot of sense — and it was something we knew we needed to prioritize and actually build a process around to do it right as the team continued to grow. We have an incredibly talented team and this would give all of us the opportunity to learn from each other.

These meetings were a turning point not only for this team but across our entire company.

“As developers we are always trying to do more, faster and this can get us into a routine where we are only looking a few tickets ahead. We created dev strat meetings to force long term thinking and learn from each others’ experiences. It’s about stepping off the hamster wheel to address systemic problems and plan for changes that span multiple releases. For us, it improved the health of the dev team and the codebase.”

– Stewart Lord, Director of Technology, Shift

Perhaps counterintuitively, we’ve found these meetings are most effective when not overly agenda-driven, but focused on a specific problem. So, be thoughtful about how often you come together and who is included. We’ve found every 2 weeks works well, and no more than 5 or 6 people per meeting.

Suggested tools: Zoom for virtual meetings, Slack for planning/quick follow-ups, Google Docs (for meeting agendas and notes), Asana and Jira for documenting tickets that come from strat meetings.

Try OKRs (objectives and key results) for company goal setting

We use the OKR system, and take a very collaborative approach to the process, which has worked well at least at our current size and composition.

Objectives and key results, known as OKRs, were developed by Intel in the early 1980s but grew in popularity after Google adopted the system in 1999. Google’s OKR playbook defines the objective as the ‘what,’ and the key result as the ‘how’ for achieving goals. Now, OKRs are widely used by other companies including Dropbox, Twitter, and Spotify. It is, simply, a way to create goals that can actually be measured. Many companies, including Shift, use a color-coded system of red, yellow, and green to track progress towards those goals.

At Shift, we’re sticklers about how OKRs are developed and worded because it’s critical that progress can actually be measured at two-week intervals. That’s all to say, if you use OKRs, make sure each team member understands their direct impact on their team’s OKRs and that each one has a clear owner for consistent tracking and accountability.

Suggested tool: Google Sheets

One last thought on asynchronous collaboration

We’ve actually found that in some cases, not being online and ‘available’ all the time — rather, collaborating with others asynchronously — is often even more effective. For many of us, having more time to think about things, and respond when we are ready makes for better communication. We’re still learning how to strike the perfect balance, but it’s something I was surprised about as we started working from home.

Suggested tools: Sheets, Slides, Docs

Finally: keep it simple

From your collaboration toolkit to your processes and ‘rules’ (spoken and unspoken), the most important thing is to keep it simple so your team can just do what they love to do, and get stuff done.

What works on your team now may not work perfectly when you double in size, so keep an open mind, but stay true what makes your team tick and make your team’s collaborative superpowers a competitive edge.