How we ensure good communication within and beyond our team
I gave a presentation recently at the Communications and Marketing department all-staff meeting, in which I shared some of our team working practices. We use regularly scheduled sessions to ensure good communication and support within the team, and to ensure we deliver a steady stream of updates to our stakeholders across the University.
I put a lot of emphasis on our communication and dissemination efforts, as I learned a long time ago that (in universities at least, possibly elsewhere too) it’s not enough to do a good job.
(Note: The things I talk about in this blog are over and above the usual team meetings we hold on a fortnightly basis that are pretty much run of the mill, and (I imagine) just like what any team does. Certainly the same as I’ve done in every job I’ve had.)
My responsibility as a team manager
To do our work effectively, to push for change in the University’s ways of working and to encourage more user focus, we need the constant drip of information and insight.
We need other people to be advocating for us. We need to be providing the ammunition for colleagues to use on our behalf.
It’s long been said – Work in the open, it makes things better – but it’s really true. And to do this, unfortunately it means moving more slowly.
- Spending time talking about what we’re doing instead of actually doing.
- Spending time bringing people together to share our insight and work-in-progress.
- Spending time setting the shape and scope for co-design with subject matter experts and users.
All of this takes more time than just holing up in our team; writing content, writing code, designing interfaces.
As a manager, I recognise that:
- If I don’t make time for collaboration and communication, things don’t necessarily happen.
- If I don’t set expectations and set an example, people don’t automatically do things.
- This is my responsibility. I make the space for collective personal development, reflection and sharing.
I set the expectations that our project requirements and plans to evolve as we learn.
I’m as interested in how students interact with what we’re producing as I am in what we’re producing. I help team members to work with their stakeholders to externalise assumptions and agree anticipated outcomes for what they’ll produce.
I want to be managing a team of capable communicators, who are confident in what they do and why, who can advocate for the prospective students they serve.
This doesn’t come naturally for everyone, and not everyone wants to be putting themselves out there. But I try to create the space for everyone to grow.
Why? Because ultimately, if you want to be the best designer you can be, if you want to progress in your career, you need to be able to communicate and advocate for your work and your discipline.
Working practices to facilitate better collaboration and communication
Some things we do regularly are:
- show-and-tell sessions
- collaborative blog writing sessions
- Lean Coffee meetings
Weekly show-and-tell sessions
We have a weekly 30 minute slot which anyone can take over. They don’t necessarily need to use the full time.
When you’re not all working on the same thing, coming together to share your work informally helps keep us feel like a team and provides a forum for exchanging ideas and support.
But most importantly it provides a safe space for people to get comfortable with talking about their work.
Not everyone wants to be up in front of an audience, but to be able to do our best work we need to have confidence in our ability to talk about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and why.
Monthly blog writing sessions
Similarly, we need to be comfortable with writing about our work. It’s really easy for blogging to fall down our set of priorities especially as so often, one project is ramping up as another is winding down.
Once a month we all come together and commit to writing or pairing up with a colleague to talk through ideas and flesh them out. This doesn’t often deliver completed pieces, but it does keep up the momentum. It helps ensure we get blogs over the line and published.
And why does that matter? Well it’s good for your personal profile, for one. Blog posts by each team member essentially produce a portfolio of work that they’ve done, which is great to share in professional networks and also include in job applications when they decide it’s time to move onwards and upwards.
One of the things I love about higher education is the opportunity to talk about your work. From the humble blog right up to presenting to peers at conferences. So often, ideas that are covered first in blogs provide the backbone for a subsequent talk.
But individual blogging is also really good for the profile of the team, and for the dissemination of our work.
So often I’m in a meeting and something comes up where I can draw on our previous experience; a project that we’ve run and appraised, a technicque we use, or some learning about prospective students we’ve learned from discovery work we’ve undertaken. Instead of just mentioning it, I can actually share a link to more detail.
A blog becomes the collective memory of the team. It provides a touchpoint informing future decisions and approaches.
It can also be a reference point for our advocates. There are people right across the University who feel like we do, and want to deliver the best student experience possible. But they aren’t usually UX specialists or user centred content designers. Our blog is giving them the material that empowers them to speak up for us.
This institutional memory of what we’ve done, how we did it and why is vital.
Open discussion with Lean Coffee
If you’ve not encountered this approach to collaboratively generating an agenda and running a discussion, I strongly recommend it.
We hold Lean Coffee sessions quarterly. The first 10-20 minutes are spent generating a list of things people want to talk about, and then dot voting to prioritise the order. From here, we cover the topics based on popularity with the conversation timeboxed to keep things moving along.
Read my blog: How to run a Lean Coffee session
Democratising the agenda like this is a great way to bring our team together to cover what really matters to us as individuals. It empowers everyone to have a say about what is covered and can be a confidence boost when things you want to bring up are voted for by others too.
It’s easy to run and empowering, so it’s also a great way to bring in collaborators and subject matter experts together. Again, this gives our team a platform and enables more of us to share our work with a wider audience.
Any questions?
Hopefully you’ll see a theme running through these approaches – communication and empowerment.
If you try any of these, leave a comment and let us know how they worked for you.
And any questions before you try them, just get in touch.
