Building a government digital services team, 6 feet apart
Is it 2021 yet? I feel like I’ve been holding my breath since last March when the San Francisco Digital Services team moved to a new office near City Hall. We barely had time to unpack before everyone was sent away to work from home indefinitely.
Over the past 10 months, we came together and worked at a faster tempo. Our SF.gov website became the go-to source for easy to understand COVID information during a time of fear and uncertainty. We helped small businesses apply for emergency grants online. We designed the experience for one of the first COVID test centers for frontline workers. And now, we are designing and building San Francisco’s vaccine distribution service. We did all of this and more while staying (at least) 6 feet apart.
While we had to quickly adjust to a new reality, the strong foundation we built through our operational practices allowed us to do our work and deliver for San Franciscans in the City’s time of need.
Here are those operational practices that we’ve found most important to supporting our work:
Create a space for hard work and honest feedback
Our old office was tucked away in a small alleyway near City Hall. We named our meeting rooms after San Franciscan activists: Fred (Korematsu), Maya (Angelou), and Harvey (Milk). We covered the bare concrete walls with endless butcher paper and Post-It notes. We posted our team values on the wall and celebrated our work with giant letters that spelled out “Today was a good day”.
We built a space where we could be honest with each other and ourselves; a place where we felt comfortable sharing new ideas and asking lots of questions; and a place where we felt safe to create, fail, and try again.
Since we moved to remote work, our concrete walls and meeting rooms are now replaced with Slack channels. We celebrate our successes in the #winning channel and learn from our mistakes in #faceplant. The carefully cultivated space is now online and continues to inspire hard work and honest feedback.
Establish team rituals
Our days in the office were filled with rituals such as bi-weekly all staff meetings, project share-outs, team retrospectives, semi-annual off-sites, Friday team lunches, birthday celebrations, and occasional baby showers.
“I like that we had a strong sense of community that started when we worked in the office. I hope people who have joined recently can feel a part of it too,” said a UX Designer during our recent team retro.
All of our team meetings and share-outs have moved online but the spirit is the same. That botched surprise birthday Zoom-bomb will likely be talked about for years to come. Our recent year-end all-staff celebrated two of our teammates who have been deployed to the COVID Command Center since last March. These team rituals ground us in our work and connect us as a team, in person and online.
Re-design government hiring
Hiring in government is a painful process for everyone involved. As we started building our team in the early days, we looked at the overall process as a service design challenge.
We mapped out the typical experience for us and for the candidate. We interviewed our HR team to understand their pain points and worked on solutions together. HR found it time-consuming to do some of the upfront work, and candidates felt lost and disconnected from our team.
To build a better experience for the candidates and alleviate some of HR’s pain points, we took on traditional HR duties like initial resume reviews, phone screens and interview scheduling, and verification document requests. We made sure the applicant had a single point of contact on our team and always kept in touch even when there were no updates.
We designed and built our hiring practices as a team. From assigning a team buddy to planning the welcome lunch for each new hire, we all participated in choosing our teammates.
We are about to bring on our 7th new teammate since being completely remote. The transition to remote on-boarding has been seamless because of the improved hiring process.
This year, we plan to build a meaningful internship program and create proper job classifications that fit new technologist roles. We are committed to finding ways to build more equity in government hiring.
Build strong partnerships with internal teams
On the day that the Digital Services team was officially formed, I went to City Hall to meet with some very important people: our accounting, procurement and HR teams.
They are lifelines in the City because they help us navigate complex procurement rules, pay invoices to vendors, and process endless paperwork after we’ve found that perfect candidate to hire.
As our team delivers for San Franciscans, we make sure to share our successes with our partners. That urgent PO the procurement and accounting teams processed allowed us to build an application for small businesses to apply for emergency grants during the pandemic. The two new bilingual content strategists the HR team helped process are now working on vital COVID information in Chinese and Spanish.
Our partners are the ones who make it possible for us to do our jobs, especially during a pandemic.
Commit to actionable change
A few days after the killing of George Floyd last summer, we shared our raw feelings at a team meeting.
Simply having accessible websites and human translated content is not enough. What we build as a team is a reflection of our collective experiences and until our team looks like and has lived the experiences of the people we serve, we will not get it right.
We talked about what we can do as a team to hold ourselves accountable and commit to actions rather than words. We created a peer-led Equity Steering Committee. We prioritized time for everyone on the team to join a weekly series discussing equity and how it relates to our work. We plan to work with experts in the field to help us do more this year. We will commit to, and not just talk about, hiring a diverse team. We will develop equity metrics because how we choose to measure our success says a lot about our priorities. We will focus on getting research and service design right because they set the direction of everything we build. We will put marginalized and vulnerable San Franciscans before anyone else.
As we continue our work in this new year, I will share more in future blog posts. For now, I will exhale and take one deep breath before getting back to work.
Stay positive and keep wearing your masks! We will get through this!
