Team Culture Project

Project Overview

Improve team culture and establish a supportive and uplifting environment

Personal Contribution

Directed the reimagining of team culture by and delivering culture-boosting engagement practices

  • Project Lead of 4 designers

  • Presented and reported on deliverables, actualizing cultural change by improving employee experience ratings by 178%

The Challenge

Team’s pulse scores revealed many employees did not feel safe expressing their ideas and opinions. On a design team, psychological safety immediately impacts creative and innovative output.

As a high priority, I was asked to lead a dedicated team through the design process and identify solutions to empower teammates’ expression.

The goal was to understand conditions that allow the team to feel free to express ideas and opinions and design implementable solutions to foster honest communication and genuine connection.

Pulse Survey Results

Only 55% of colleagues felt free to express their ideas and opinions within the team

Research & Discovery

  • 50% of team participated in blind interview, ensuring data represented a variety of levels, experiences, and company tenure

  • Responses from interviews were fully anonymized, removing all identity-revealing attributes from recorded data, verbal storytelling was used within the design team to best understand context without disclosing identities

Intentional Approach

explore a diversity of experiences

•

recognize power dynamics

•

protect identities

•

leverage complementary work streams

•

explore a diversity of experiences • recognize power dynamics • protect identities • leverage complementary work streams •

Opportunities Areas

Team culture was defined within three key dimensions: intimate settings, team-wide meetings, and communication and embodiment of team norms.

Fundamentally,

we all bring our culture

we all build our culture.

Team-Wide Meetings

HMW

…hear unheard voices?

…address the hard stuff?

…give space for more difficult topics?

…allow new employees to get to know the team?

Intimate Settings

HMW

…leverage intimate settings to build relationships of value?

Communication and Embodiment of Team Norms

HMW

…make norms more actionable?

…hold one another accountable?

…celebrate one another?

Insights

When extracting unwanted and wanted behaviors, categories of values revealed themselves.

Data regarding participant’s values was further sorted, giving way to examples of desirable behaviors show up in the three opportunity areas: team-wide meetings, intimate settings, and communication and embodiment of team norms.

I worked with a few targeted wordsmith experts to explore how we might best articulate such family structures and identify language that best suits a positive work culture.

Team Values

  • Transparent

    Offer frequent, clear, and sincere feedback and support

  • Steward

    Cultivate and champion others so they make to learn and succeed

  • Confident

    Trust in self and team while playfully pushing boundaries

  • Human

    Act with kindness and respect, recognizing needs and boundaries

  • Intentional

    Deliver well-designed work with purpose and relevance

Final Solution

  • Five simple team norms were reintroduced to the department. These were values upheld by teammates and framed in a positive manner.

  • Quickly becoming a team favorite activity, postcards were shipped to teammates around the globe with stamps. When individuals wanted to recognize one another, they could select the corresponding postcard and jot a quick note to their teammate. All teammates were challenged to send 3 cards in the first month.

Colleague posting multiple kudos cards

Results

  • 100% extremely satisfied with Team Norm delivery and Kudos Card behavioral design

  • Team used Kudos Cards 3X more than originally projected, surpassing original goal of 50 exchanges of Kudos Cards within 3 months

  • Adoption of team norms celebrated was explored in team-wide meetings as leaders leveraged celebratory activities to ground team culture

  • Project acted as a North Star for other Pulse Survey improvement efforts across organization

Pulse Scores Increase by 178%

98% reporting they feel extremely free to express their ideas and opinions
“This project is brilliant! What your team did leading this cultural challenge and turning it into an incentivized behavioral approach to propel our organization forward was phenomenal. More of this, please!”
— Luisa Schumacher, Ford Motor Company, Design Thinking Catalyst Lead