Weekly 7 - Your Culture Code

Do you know what your whole conversations constitution is and how does your team reflect on those on a regular basis? I've been thinking about it quite a lot this past week and I'll be talking about it a little bit more in the learning section but in the meantime in the change of scenery, I am now sat on the Thames in Windsor reflecting on the past week of Petals in the seventh Petals Weekly. This is the seventh Source Weekly with Mei Jobling talking about all good things Petals that's been going on over the past week. As I've said in the introduction, I've been away this weekend so I'm been working in a co working space today and I I'm using the opportunity to kind of just reflect, capture some thoughts and record in a quiet space where I could find one. Before we get into the weeds, let's do those scores. Productivity 2 Enjoyment 3 Teamwork 4 Learning 4 Serenity 4 which brings an average of 3.4 which is down 0.2 from last week. Let me explain as to why. So productivity took the typical mid sprint dip last week and to be honest not sure how it's going to match the five from the previous week. So that's probably the region highs. How do you sustain that? However, things have been ticking away and as you can see from the other scores, things have been holding quite steady across the board. A lot of good teamwork going on this week I sat down with Brian, one of my developers who has managed to integrate Google Looker into our data set. So we get some better, more interesting metrics off the back of it. And this aligns quite nicely with the okrs that I was talking about previous week before setting out some key metrics that I want to look for for this year and this quarter and now we've got the data analysis tool available, it's much easier to know how we're doing on those. So when I've been feeling more comfortable sharing that stuff, I don't think we're there yet. But eventually I would love to start using this in the week piece to explain what's been going on with Petals and open it up a bit more in the good old nature of open source and being out there looking back at the OKR plan on a page that I talked about last week, it's not been going very well as you can probably tell because of lack of creativity. I've been chipping away at my Petals dev time in the evenings, but things haven't been quite as productive as I'd hoped. Another thought I did have with one of the other guys in the team with Adrian was the idea of what about the long term goals? What about the other okrs that might be tied to the project? So for now we're looking at Q1. What do we look at Q2, 3 and 4? Should they be on the back of the page? So you've got an easy refuge to point to that as well. And maybe you think about the vision of the project and the organization as a whole. Something we will talk a little bit more about later. I did set up the newsletter again in Brevo, which we use for all our email providing. We use that with the app for the live emails, but they've also got campaigns built in. So I've been using that to get the newsletter going again, referencing the weekly content that we're doing here. I'm trying to work out the right cadence. I want to do a couple of weeks and a week cadence to see if that actually engages. If not, then I might reduce it down to fortnightly or monthly to be less annoying for those people that are following along. I'll also be reaching out and saying what is it you want to know as well? Obviously you signed up for the app or the newsletter. I don't know. I'm not going to make any assumptions, but if there are things that they're not getting that I want to find out and try to address that. And back on last week's goal, which was the Shadow CN component library for building the web app account, I did have a look at it. It wasn't like I didn't look at all, but it was a lot more complicated than I anticipated. So I need to do a bit more team look. Based on what happened this week, we got some good stuff out of doing some teamwork and a bit of random sort of ad hoc calls to look at stuff that we'll try to do the same again with that component library. But that being said, it is the half term week in the uk, which means a lot of parents are struggling for childcare and that might also impact what's going on. It's always worth thinking about what outside forces have got in your place and how that can impact your serenity or your productivity. Something I'll definitely talk about when I'm bringing petals, conversations in retrospectives, for example, what's going on in your world, not just at work but also at home. It's a great conversation start and it's really useful to pull out some of those really behind the scenes thoughts that people are scared to share. So this week's learning I was listening to a blink about S. Chris Edmond the Culture Engine over the weekend and it got me thinking a bit more about organization constitutions or culture codes or whatever you want to use. These are things where you generally as an organization think about what is it we are trying to achieve? What's our long term vision and goal? How do we want to go about doing that? A lot of organizations talk about this stuff. I think a couple of organizations I've worked in recently, they've got these sort of things in place as well. So it's generally like how do we want to interact with each other? What is our boson d'etre? How are we going to satisfy and work with our customers? How can we be better selves? So there's a lot of sort of behavioral kind of of approaches that you want to kind of standardize or make sure people are being held accountable to, but it's generally for the greater good. Google used to say don't do evil. Obviously that went in part. But yeah, these are sort of angles that you want to think about as a team or as an organization. Whatever level you're talking about Petals think about how are we going to interact with each other. We've been thinking about this as a petals project recently. What is the long term goal? I've used the phrase growing team health together as a sort of first draft, which I kind of like. This is kind of focusing on what we don't talk about team health, how we can improve it grow, but also with that kind of language around nature and petals and flowers and it's doing it together as a collective. So that's why I like growing team health together as our sort of long term vision, but then as a behavior. We want to make sure that we are collaborating, always collaborate if you think it will get better results or make sure you're constantly learning. I know. For example, rightmove referred to them as hows the general behaviors as we were to work as an organization. And ASOS also had a very similar concept in place. You can Google this stuff. I'll put some examples in the show notes to find out what good examples look like, but bring it down to the team level. What are your behaviors, what you want to standardize across the team? What kind of concepts and mindsets do you want to plant in your team members and how can you help each other do that? These are really interesting conversation starters and might even warrant a proper retrospective just focused on this as a whole. You can have your Petals snapshot at the start of the retrospective. Spend five, ten minutes talking about the team as a whole and then dive into some of the behaviors that you want to kind of drive towards as a team. Spend the hour brainstorming, refining, voting however you want to play it, and then document it into a charter that would sort of identify what all these things it should be. You can publish it, you can print it, you can handwrite it however you want to do this. But then you've always got a reference point as a team or organization on all these behaviors that you want to kind of align to as a culture code or as a charter or as a manifesto. These words are thrown around a lot within the software engineering community, but you want to find the language that you want to use in that sense. I'm not a big fan of Constitution. It feels very formal and very sort of political in a way. Think about who you are and what sort of organization you are, what kind of language you want to use while you're publishing and thinking about these things. So that is this week's weekly. Plenty for you to think about, hopefully some exercises you can hopefully often do with your team members or think about as a leader and definitely let me know what you come up with. I'll put some more examples out there on the show notes so you can have a reference point to these things as well. And hopefully your team will be in a better place to behave well together, bringing the best out of each other and you're growing all together. Get in touch if you are doing this stuff. I'd really love to hear your thoughts. If you want to join me for a conversation on a weekly, absolutely welcome. Could just be a very quick video call we pull out as a snapshot and I'll be back next week with more reflections on all these petals and what you can do to grow Team Health with your team.