"I love my team"

 

“I love my team, and I know everyone in any organization in any team will say this (as long as they're still in that team) but I genuinely mean it”

This was the response by one of our engineering team members, when we recently conducted an anonymous survey reflecting back on our overall working experience in 2021. It was one of the most unexpected and touching responses, and a pleasant surprise to kickoff 2022. (Interesting Fact: this was from a guy). 

Borrowing a page of Simon Sinek’s book “The Infinite Game”, one of the priority tasks we wanted to work on throughout 2021 was to Build Trusting Teams. 

The following are were two simple habits our team worked on towards this goal

1. Weekly team Huddle – we initiated the practice of having a 1-2 hour meeting every week, where each of us share what we’ve done for the week, how our current workloads are, and what we anticipate the coming week. It was a platform to share their current challenges, reach out to others who are experiencing (or who have, in the past, experienced) the same, and an opportunity to practice generosity, and share any insights or lessons learnt they gained. The most important thing was consistency: we committed to it with ferocious discipline and barely missed a week. It started out rather stiff at first as team members mainly focused their own respective updates, but as time went by and we knew each other’s’ work better, huddles started becoming more and more exciting, as more people are willing to share, speak up and connect with each other. Only drawback was that it started spilling over to 3 hours at times!

2. Sembang Petang – In a move to care for our mental health and working relationship working from home, our section head triggered this brilliant initiative to meet up every Friday afternoon, where we have an informal 1-hour session rotating hosts to facilitate all participants to talk about anything except work – cycling topics on personal sharing such as favorite hobbies, fresh graduate experiences, biggest achievements, memorable university experiences, teka teki quizzes, favorite YouTube channels, etc. This really brought the team together, as we got to know each other on a much more personal level and really helped enhanced our working relationship, despite working from home. Which was really helpful for me, as the new guy – considering I still haven’t met most of my team members face to face! The key here was also consistency, as the team – including the managers – kept it up every week no matter how busy things got, which lent a serious atmosphere of commitment for togetherness.

Perhaps you can consider implementing these at your respective teams.

I am very grateful to the team for playing their part and actively contributing to enhance our working environment. Here’s hoping we keep up the team spirit as we continue building trusting teams in this Infinite Game!