Putting your colleagues into boxes — how to understand them better
Do you know how when you buy a new fridge or washing machine, you are given a user manual so you know how to operate it? Turns out Atlassian came up with one for humans/colleagues.
Given the pandemic and the realisation that the future of work is remote, leaders are asking how they can create a positive culture and get a better understanding of their team members. This is especially relevant for somewhere like Whispir where the speed of growth is almost exponential (not true technically because it’s not infinite), but we have new people join us every week (we’re tracking at a rate of about 5 people each week across our global team).
I thought it’d be great to give newcomers and existing staff an insight into the preferences of each person in the product team. This can act as a bit of a shortcut for new people. It’s popular enough that other departments have taken to doing up their own user manuals for their teams.
Each person in the team filled out a slide deck to talk about their preferences when it comes to working (location, hours, etc), giving and receiving feedback, hours for meetings, etc. We took turns presenting our user manuals to each other and have stored them on the team Confluence. This way, any new person to the team can come in and read up about their colleagues. The presentation sessions are actually great bonding opportunities.
Some key themes that emerged were:
- people in the product team like to uncover for themselves and understand why we’re doing things and are not happy to be told “it’s how we’ve always done things”
- people like collaborating and bouncing ideas off of each other
- people really dislike email
- audio-only calls are “rad”, video calling while immediate and better than email, can tire people out (Zoom fatigue is a real thing)
- feedback is best when in person, 1 on 1, about specific events, and as close to the event as possible
It’s important to try and have a better understanding of your colleagues and how they prefer to work. It builds greater empathy and makes you a better leader and colleague. I’m also a big proponent in diversity in teams just so your blind spots are covered so it’s really good when your team are diverse in their preferences. It creates more debates for sure and decisions tend to take longer, but that is something we deeply encourage in our product team at Whispir — I guess this is why we are over-indexed in people with a “Questioner” tendency. I just wish we had more night owls in the team so people are have the same level of enthusiasm during afternoon meetings as they do during morning meetings (when I’m at my lowest energy level).
Somewhat controversially, each team member also disclosed their MBTI profiles — I acknowledge that the science behind the Myers Briggs Type Indicator is shoddy at best but it’s just a bit of fun. The alternative that was floated was: which Harry Potter house do you belong to or which Ninja Turtle are you (written by our very own Ryan Collingwood against the MBTI).
Below is a quick snapshot of our team’s preferences. One of our team mates has opted to do a visualisation of a heat map of when people prefer to do meetings. We have found that some people are more alert/receptive in meetings depending on what times they are. I, myself am not a morning person so my brain is usually sub-par before 10am. This goes against the majority of the team as we’ve somehow over indexed in morning people. I’ve always identified more with engineering teams in this regard. Did I mention how much I dislike morning meetings?
Anyway, I’ll leave you with an image that I put in my user manual at the very end — it’s from a tv show called Archer — I remember seeing it on an episode that aired many years ago and screenshotted because it resonated with me so much:
Have a go with your team so you can gain a better understanding of each team member — I truly believe this is a step towards creating a culture with remote workforces — you don’t need to force people to come into the office to create a positive culture. Most people just want to be understood and this is one way you can start to build empathy towards your colleagues. I’m interested in hearing how you go!
