There’s a comment that regularly comes up during our team culture programmes. Some kind of variation on:
“This has come at a busy time.”
But it’s always followed by how much participants valued the time together to reflect, share ideas, learn more about each other and think about the big picture.
Someone even said “forced time together to reflect”, and meant it as a compliment.
While I don’t like to think this work is about forcing anyone to do anything, it’s a key point.
We’re always going to be busy, but when we finally carve out time for team reflection, we realise how valuable it is.
We know our best ideas come when we’re not in back-to-back meetings and head down in our to-do lists. We know our work improves when we make space for deeper thinking.
Yet, we don’t often allow ourselves to do it together.
While we will always have “urgent and important” tasks, we also need to take time for the “important, but not urgent”.
And that time often only comes when we intentionally carve it out, during a programme like ours, or otherwise.
(N.B. This reflection time doesn’t need to be about team culture – it can be anything that provides a space to pause and think.)
Here are some things I’ve noticed happen when teams get this time.
Learning more about the person behind the work
In an increasingly digital world, work can become overly transactional. We might save time when we mostly communicate through email, Slack and comments in documents, but we can lose context.
When we learn a little more about our colleagues’ personalities, their approach to work and their communication style, it can soften interactions that may seem sharp on the surface.
The social glue we develop when getting to know each other makes us less likely to make assumptions. And if conflict does occur, we have already built the connection that enables us to address and resolve it more quickly.
Try: Ask your colleagues about their previous experiences – personal and professional – and how it has shaped their approach to work.
Understanding more about each other’s expertise
More than getting to know people on a personal level, it’s also about having more insight about the range of skills and knowledge you have on your team. When your team knows who to go to for what, they can save significant time in getting their questions answered.
This opens up opportunities for giving and getting support from each other, quicker problem-solving and creating value by collaborating on new ideas.
Try: asking what your colleagues would love to do more of if they had the time, or what they could offer/share with others.
Realising you share similar challenges
I once heard an audible sigh of relief in a workshop when one person openly shared a challenge that it seems many others have also been holding. This can be extremely connecting as a team.
Firstly, it shows team members that they are not the only ones struggling with a particular problem. Secondly, once these common challenges are surfaced, the team can create a unified approach to addressing them.
This starts to build a team of peers who realise they are on the same side of a problem.
Try: ask everyone to share a tension that keeps coming up in their work. If it comes up multiple times, it could signal a team-level tradeoff. When you get to the root of this, it could release some significant pressure in your team.
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What’s interesting about having more conversations like this is that, eventually, you’ll need fewer of them! The time you spend upfront will save you time later. As you start to embed new collaboration behaviours and team habits, working on team culture becomes less of a project and more of a practice.
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