The Infrastructure Team’s take on our favorite team norm(s) on ACLU Analytics!
Norm was loosely defined here, can range from team culture norm(s) or even work style norm(s).
Tom Bescherer: An ACLU Analytics team norm that I appreciate is our use of rotational leadership for team meetings. Each week one team member volunteers to facilitate the meeting. Their core responsibility is to read the announcements and keep the agenda moving.
Every person on the team really brings their own energy to the meeting, which can lead to some unpredictable results. Most memorable for me is Jacob’s recent team meeting where after completing our regularly scheduled announcements he switched us over to an unanticipated round of the quiz game Family Feud, complete with sound effects pipe in through Zoom. He seemed to take extra relish at buzzing wrong answers.
Working from home over the past year, it has been hard to find opportunities to be in space with the whole team and forge a personal connection with each other. Giving each team member a platform to showcase a bit of their personality each meeting has definitely helped with that. It is also a great way to let junior team members practice running a meeting! I’d recommend this strategy to any team.
Jacob Werderits: Hi, cob here.
One collective idea we, at ACLU Analytics, share is that we can all continue to grow. This translates into norms in a few different ways. We have dedicated time to educate ourselves on issues about equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Team members take turns bringing up topics and hosting thoughtful discussions. I find myself learning a lot from both the individual pursuit of a topic and also from the collective minds of my colleagues. I find these discussions invaluable and would try to bring this practice to any workplace.
We also have a weekly “White paper Wednesday” discussion (not always a white paper, or on Wednesday). This is an opportunity for the infrastructure pod to explore a technical topic as a team. Topics can also include work culture and other norms. This is a smaller setting and we are able to exchange ideas and opinions freely through friendly debate.
And of course, we have individual growth time. We all need some copy + paste from Stack Overflow, but we’re also given the freedom to explore projects and techniques we have little to no experience with. I’m fascinated by things I haven’t tried before and being part of a supportive environment to grow is rad.
Maria Restrepo: Hi 👋, as a data engineer on the Infra team there are norms I greatly appreciate that we implement in our working style. These qualities are intentional code improvement, thoughtful problem-solving huddles, and empowered self-management.
On the Infra team, we do a lot of data manipulation using SQL. Over time it can be hard to maintain a certain SQL style if you’re constantly pushing quick fixes and relying on your future self to go back and fix it. This is where intentional code improvement comes into play. As a team when we’re reviewing a pull request with new changes to our datasets we also try to enforce our agreed-upon SQL style. While it’s not always easy, in the long term it reduces ineffective time spent on trying to parse through difficult-to-read SQL. Also, it isn’t fair to your future audience!
Secondly, our thoughtful problem-solving huddles are interesting, challenging, and most importantly, safe. When we huddle to solve a problem, we’re doing so in a way that is beneficial to everyone’s learning. We’re also creating a space to question the author’s choices behind their code which at the very least is easy exposure to different approaches that lead to the same solution.
Lastly, our norm of empowered self-management allows us to take reign over the quality of work in a way that makes sense to us. We’re still held accountable to our weekly sprints, but how we accomplish that work in the allotted time is up to us (side note: as a team, we’re sympathetic ❤ to unplanned/ad hoc type of work that can sometimes take a lot of productive time & adjust our sprints as necessary). This style of working is greatly beneficial for a team because you allow team members to use their own productivity habits at work and that will yield better results than a forced upon flow of working.
TL;DR: The major key is trust.
