The Work of Healthy, Happy, High-Performing, Global Teams
The following is a collaboration between Irina Tsyganok, Global Director of Engineering for Vogue and myself (Tessa Ann Taylor, Director of Engineering for The New Yorker) and is part of a series on creating happy, healthy, high-performing, global teams.
In this series — The Culture, The People, The Work (below), and Taking it Global.
The Work
Now that you’ve developed your culture and secured your team, it’s time to get to work. The order of this series is intentional— if you start with the culture and team, the work will come. There are, of course, tips, tricks, and tools that help shape this part of the process as well, which we’ll discuss below-
What: Process
The word ‘process’ doesn’t immediately spark joy for many people. This is because the wrong process for the job can be more harmful than helpful. Done right, the process is an invisible multiplier that allows teams to focus their efforts on the work.
How: Constantly audit your existing processes to see if they are still serving your team. Hold retros to identify gaps that can be filled with process improvements.
What: Clarity/Context
To do their best work, engineers benefit from context about the project they’re working on. This is because no matter how detailed a spec or design, engineers will always have to make a lot of small decisions about how a feature is implemented or how a project is designed. The right amount of context gives the engineers enough information to be able to make good decisions in these moments, without having to drop everything and ask questions at every turn.
How:
Meetings. Engineers have a contentious relationship with meetings, and rightfully so. Engineering (or any other creative pursuit) requires dedicated time and brain space, and even a single meeting in a day can be enough to tank creative productivity. However, if meetings are clumped together and sparingly used, they can be a great vehicle to generate alignment or to provide an avenue for feedback and conversation.
Artifacts. Asynchronous communication is much more conducive to creative pursuits, as it allows people to pick it up and put it down depending on their brain space, creating artifacts that can be viewed, reviewed, and referenced asynchronously is very important.
We hope this helps, and would love to hear your strategies coordinating work on your teams.
