5 ways to create Comfort Zones at the workplace
Co-authors: Yannick Hoffsess & Maxime Fouilleul
In the age of remote working and context switching, Engineering teams navigate between projects, operations, ceremonies, and communication. In this challenging environment, “comfort zones” are indispensable to nurture strong bonds, giving rise to impactful teams and individuals. Academic research supports this notion, proving that feeling at ease in the workplace improves productivity.
Many articles will urge you to “step out of your comfort zone” to conquer your fears and venture beyond the bounds. However, at BlaBlaCar, we create comfort zones in the workplace to boost confidence, productivity, and a sense of accomplishment. Here are five of them.
Engineering Managers Literature Circle
This monthly event gathers people passionate about leadership practices, and junior managers eager to expand their skills.
Participants come prepared, having read the chosen book or article in advance, ready to share their insights and engage in thoughtful discourse. Led by a single moderator, our meetings foster open-minded dialogue as we dive into one pre-selected piece at a time, to discuss and hear one another. Each article is chosen to align with our core value of continuous improvement. Diverse topics were touched upon so far such as easing hard conversations, or assessing performance with OKRs and peer feedback.
Anyone is welcome to participate, as long as they commit to learning and developing their engineering management skills.
Co-Dev Meeting Framework
Authenticity, Confidentiality and Kindness are the three main principles of this quarterly session.
This 2-hour session works ideally with groups of 4 to 7 people, homogeneous in terms of experience and problems, but diverse in perspective and context.
First, participants nominate the “Facilitator”, who in turn asks each participant to formulate a problem statement, for example: “members in my team lack confidence to express themselves”, or “I struggle giving value to my stakeholders”.
The group then votes and selects a problem to discuss. The participant owning the selected problem becomes the Client, and the rest hence become Consultants.
Most of the session is then spent on clarification, questioning, and problem-rephrasing. After that, Consultants offer solutions and share relevant experiences with the Client.
Listening to the offered solutions, the Client selects 3 actionable items, explaining their rationale.
Finally, everyone shares their learnings.
The beauty of Co-Dev is that consultants learn as much as the client. The lack of judgment and feeling at ease with one’s co-dev group is essential to this framework.
Manage, Learn, Succeed.
Directly inspired from the “Code-review your Management Decisions” exposed in Leading snowflakes by Oren Ellenbogen, this practice illustrates one of our key values: Fail, Learn, Succeed.
Format is simple: Manager A chooses an experienced Manager B, whether soft-skilled or technical oriented, to express a dilemma. Feedback by Manager B and retrospective exercise results in a learning experience or a corrective action that will help facing one’s next challenge.
This safe space promotes sharing, improves trust and creates alignment between managers.
RISE Mentorship Program
This internal mentorship program started as helping women’s professional development at BlaBlaCar, and expanded further to men. To date, over 100 BlaBlaCar employees joined the RISE program as mentees. BlaBlaCar’s suite of mentors includes many of our C-levels, and even our CEO, Nicolas Brusson.
The RISE program targets 3 objectives: connection by creating a sense of community, establishment of a non-judgmental environment, and skills development. Within this 5-month program, the mentee and mentor are paired based on the mentee’s objectives and the mentor’s professional experience. The mentee leads the relationship, committing to their initial objective such as “improving my negotiation skills’’. The mentor shares their experience, sheds light on how other teams are working and gives practical tips.
This framework requires vulnerability and transparency from both mentor and mentee to be impactful. The recurring setup encourages follow-up and continuous advancement.
Satisfaction score from the program is 4/5 and 4.2/5 for RISE mentors and mentees respectively. For further reading on our internal mentoring program, see this previous article.
Classrooms
Teams need discussions, debates and knowledge sharing. That’s why we created Classrooms. They efficiently carve out time for these. They work as consulting sessions, with a “client team”, bringing questions, and concerns, seeking expertise. And on the other side, the “specialists’ team”, dedicates time with a weekly “free-to-book” slot to share their experience.
The goal is for the client team to have high-quality support in a reasonable delay and for the specialists’ team to stay focused on their daily tasks without pushing back support requests.
As an example, see the below request from a Software Engineer. By acknowledging the request and proposing a classroom slot, the team can dedicate quality time to answering this topic.
Finally, when considering using one of the above 5 comfort zone initiatives, be mindful of timing and team dynamics. Introducing comfort zones to premature teams may overwhelm or create tension. Once a comfort zone technique was implemented, revisit its effectiveness after a certain period. Use continuous team feedback and be ready to adapt new techniques or drop existing ones.
By implementing these five initiatives at BlaBlaCar we witnessed the transformative power of a supportive and inclusive environment. We encourage others to follow this strategy, ensuring that individuals feel empowered and valued in the workplace.
Thank you Cyril Cadoret, Emmanuel Martin Chave, Sigbjørn Dybdahl, and all the Engineering Managers who shared their Comfort Zone initiatives. Without the dedication and collaboration of Maxime Fouilleul and Yannick Hoffsess, this article would not have been possible. Thank you both for your invaluable contributions.
