Team care, pandemic or not
A leader’s guide to facilitating dialogue on mental health and making tactical team-care programs that keeps people happy and healthy.
Earlier this month, in our Design Monthly session, I guided the team’s discussion around mental health. My structure was:
- things we are doing well and complimenting the team on the culture they’ve all helped built and proactively contribute to,
- understanding people’s struggles and strategies so that we can help each other and ourselves,
- come up with tangible ways we can address the gaps, and follow through.
Learnings below…
Modelling healthy behaviour. Are your teams modelling healthy behaviour? I am responsible for people’s happiness and productivity. People are productive when they’re healthy and happy: sleeping well, eating well, enough physical movement, happy with their workload, feeling progression and ownership, and feeling supported and cared for.
Overcommunication on Slack has been key in modeling healthy behaviour.
- We check-in and check-out in the mornings and afternoons with simple “Good morning” and “Have a lovely evening” messages and GIFs on Slack.
- We post photos of our lunches and snacks, share fast lunch recipes and encourage each other to eat and take a post-lunch walk.
- We ask for help and provide help for anyone who asks.
- Slack channels and the relationship spaces to express yourself and a team that laughs together stays together. There is genuine joy in this place.
When you see others doing these things, you start to evaluate your own habits and understanding the group expectation is to have lunch and a walk instead of skipping lunch due to meetings.
I personally block “Lunch” in my calendar every day at 12:30, and suggested that others do the same. I see team members asking others to take on meetings on their behalf (demonstrating trust) or help with tasks they are unable to take on alone.
Strengthening our culture of connection. As the team grows larger, I fear I won’t have the same connection with the new joiners as I have with the “original crew”. In addition to that, with the team being spread in Berlin, San Francisco and São Paulo in various states of lockdown, new joiners start without meeting the rest of the team in person. I mourn the cold, isolating experience this has been for people.
While I accept that I won’t be able to know everyone as deeply, I introduced “A Question A Day” practice in the team. Anyone can ask a question, and typically various team members answer. The questions range from the practical “What’s a little app/plugin that has changed your life?” to the emotional, “Share a picture of the house you grew up in.”
It has been wonderful to learn about each unique personality in the team.
Being flexible and generous. A team member demonstrated generosity by delivering their colleague’s monitor from the office to their home, when they discovered their colleague struggled with a small Macbook screen.
Another team member struggled with balancing childcare due to nurseries being shut during pandemic lockdown. HR’s response was that they needed a few weeks’ notice before a different work schedule could be organised. So we decided as a team to re-organise ourselves around our colleague’s adjusted working hours.
There is genuine care in this place.
I used ahaslides for this interactive session. People typed in their answers, as many as they like in 2 minutes, and the answers are rendered in word cloud format. We picked a few answers and discussed them in the group.
We brainstormed ideas on how to solve some of the struggles people have had. Coworking in someone’s home was one idea to give a change of scene and for face-to-face interactions we so dearly miss. Timers for check out and an evening walk was another idea to end the working day.
Learning about people’s coping strategies was eye-opening. More importantly, it gave people ideas on ways they can help themselves. From here, people started to share their cycling and hiking routes in a wider Slack channel, with the desired outcome of getting their colleagues outside more.
Tangible outcomes of the session. Aside from the new ideas we discussed in our team call and already started practicing, we also agreed to do the following…
- Experimenting with remote team events like online concert and cooking class on AirBnb. I’ll write this up when we’ve done them.
- Ordering lunch for the team and eating together online.
Don’t wait. Take action.
Often it’s too late. Take care of yourself, and take care of your colleagues. Hope this was a useful post to act on team care!
