Influencing design team culture, growth, and engagement
The Challenge
Build and implement a playbook for facilitating annual design team building
How might we prototype team building + development activities that support individual and team growth to develop a repeatable approach which team members can carry on long term?
Identifying growth opportunities & nurturing team culture
Associate Director of Design
August 2021 - November 2022
I paired with the Director of Strategy, Wilma Lam, to expand on the pilot team vision and goal setting activities into a long term design culture playbook.
Reflecting on 2021
Radical interrogation of past goals and team culture
I designed and facilitated a 2 hour end of year workshop for 10 members of the design team to create space and solicit feedback from the team to inform our strategic vision for the following year.
2022 Goal Setting
Defining team vision and supporting individual growth
Our team collaboratively set goals across the pillars of Culture, Capability Building, Process, and Brand (external). We then voted and aligned on priorities and self-assigned responsibility.
Continuous Improvement
Exploring new mechanisms of feedback
Building off of the goal setting and EOY reflection from 2021, I explored different ways to capture design team feedback to create a reusable, scalable process for managing and measuring team engagement.
Evaluation
Evaluating team meetings
I created a Google survey to understand the current engagement with design team meeting structure to help identify areas of improvement and to ensure out meetings were providing value to the team.
Bi-Annual Check In
Capturing team health across time
I used the Spotify Squad health process as inspiration in addition to Gallup Engagement to build a twice annual team health check. By creating an ongoing measure of team satisfaction, leadership could support design team needs and identify potential areas of opportunity.
Outcome
Experimenting on action items
Based on the outcomes of the health check, it was clear that the team wanted to understand how to grow in their career, and more opportunities for peer feedback and critique. The UX Director and I implemented "No Prep Crit” to trial a new way to receive feedback. I designed a FigJam template to support this effort and set up a new Slack channel to support asynchronous critique.
Next Steps
Re-designing an intentional end of year team workshop
In addition to the EOY survey sent in 2021, I designed an updated Miro design kit for our 2022 workshop.
