DesignOps2020: Team Resiliency Through a Pandemic (Session Notes)

Speaker: Ariba Jahan, Director of Innovation at The Ad Council

— Ariba is a biomechanical engineer turned product leader and director of innovation for practice and design sprint
— Member of The Ad Council it is her first time at a DesignOps conference
— For the last few days the group has talked about how resilience shows up in a team, even team of one
— The last few months have been rough with the upcoming election, racial justice, pandemic
  • We all had to show up with resilience
— However, per Ariba, just because you are talking about team resilience doesn’t mean you have figured out
— You need to have strategy and tactics for resilience and managing it in your team

— Let’s define resilience: Resilience is being able to maintain your self-needs.
  • This happens as you ride waves of changes and have emotions
— A person’s mental/emotional physical bandwidth is a like battery that can be recharged or depleted.
  • The “battery”, like the person, is never just stuck in one state

— The above definition of resilience is a good one.

— Resilience is not just survival. With survival you are trying to hold on and make it through an event at any cost
— Survival is equivalent to roller coaster, creating bigger spikes and drops in energy
  • You can even start new work while still in the red zone

—In terms of resilience, When a storm (emotional or physical) hits, you need to show during and after storm that you will not be depleted
— Don’t fixate on showing up at any cost, but keep yourself steady at 70% battery charge

 

—To add context, the pandemic interrupted it all
  • If resilient, you have have enough to adjust and come back in yellow zone
  • If in the red already, you don’t have further to give and drained further

— Resiliency is not a finite moment but a practice that can continue over time
— Things that kept you resilient before pandemic are different, but ability to notice when closer to red and ability to recharge and get yellow, remains constant

— For Ariba, she ended up leading a design sprint during the pandemic to improve unemployment access in the US
— Sprint consisted of a core team of three, and an extended team of seven

— To lead team with resilience in mind, needed to see where people were at

— The starting place for Ariba was: people were all working to figure out remote technologies, and work-life boundaries disappeared, saw lives of colleagues
— No onboarding or transition period,
— People were being overworked and taking vacation days to respond to emails Slack messages and threats
— Burnout occurred as pandemic productivity peaked

— Ariba decided to create check-ins: creating space for people to acknowledge their needs
— Reflect on questions (What do you need from team?, What’s in your headspace?, What’s in your heartspace?)
— Didn’t have to go from project
— Check-In statuses ranged from great to not wanting to present on video
— Ariba tarted hearing about how overwhelmed members of team were with demands of life
  • Raising kids
  • Caretaking for immuno-compromised parents

— Creating space to ask questions allowed people to unload emotional weight
  • Ariba could ask for what people needed to move forward

—Instead of relying on just their own ability to understand their own resilience, team-mates on the design sprint asked each other questions to look for signals as to whether they were in the red or yellow.
— Red zone for one teammate could be crying, another could be complete silence
  • Looking for the signs of red/yellow helped Ariba figure out who needed support, and how they needed to be supported.

— Wasn’t sure what shifts need to be made for the work environment
— Asked team to let Ariba figure out what skills they wanted to build and how to foster growth

—  Ariba co-designed environment and expectations for the team
— Clarifying the best methods of communication (i.e. virtual of someone coming to desk when no email arrived)
— Explored which methods of communication to use and what purpose
  • Slack/Email/Meetings
  • Location of Documentation
— Activity got clarity regarding expectations and what team needed
  • Helped normalize for when video needed to be off
    • To minimize permanent engagement
— As an aside, her husband, who is a teacher, was begging high school student to turn their cameras on

— Ariba recognized different headspace and bandwidth needed for different asks
  • Interviewing users requires different level of attention than solo thinking
— During emotional check-ins she noticed emotional drain, and proposed postponing certain actions, which was a relief to team members

— Ariba had to constantly question existing norms and processes to make adjustments that make sense was muscle to build in team
Three rituals happened:
  1. Check-ins
  2. Check-outs
  3. Reflections

— In addition to check-ins, check-outs happened at end of day to share any changes or shifts that needed to be made or surprises that happened

— Reflection were check-outs that happened at the end of the week, and identified unknowns the team wanted to explore.
— Helped see small wins, suggest  improvements
— Normalizing allowed people to ask questions, and built a muscle of curiosity and equitable decision making within team
— Signaled that work-day and work-week was over
  • Expectation of checking out and doing things that served

—Ariba also points out you don’t need a chief diversity office to hire more diversity

— Pandemic created new level of compassion for colleagues that didn’t exist before
— Topics on racial justice, and mental health could no longer be ignored

—All tactics contribute to team’s resilience which can be nurture over time
— New change will always happen

— Resilience is not static, and and there is no final resilient destination. Times where you can stay resilient, and can waver off course
— We can’t thrive in the red zone. Our resilience is impacted by team structure, environment, and health

— Give yourself and own resilience, and didn’t realize until she got the DesignOps talk on team resilience
— Just missed when she felt burnout
— Having to do talk felt she had time to reflect, had own signal and way to recharge

— Ariba’s roadmap for building resilience

— Ariba’s tips for team resilience, as listed above.

— Finally a note on self-resilience.
  • Ariba, grew up in an immigrant household, and never saw her parents truly relax
— It is easier to support teen’s resilience and nurture her own

— People get irritated easily and not possible to do all things, all of the time
  • You need to pick what is feasible and right, given the circumstances
— Per Ariba, you need to hold space for hope and progress, while being grounded in reality
— Commit to nurturing, as it does help

— In short, here are Ariba’s main takeaways for team resilience

— A few final thoughts
  • Won’t get it right all the time, but can keep trying.
  • And  its okay to turn video on the Zoom conference off
— Ariba thanks the DesignOps 2020 team for joining her and helping her out

Speaker questions

  1. Thinking about what is causing need for more crossing out of boundaries of work/personal lives?
  • What are potential drawbacks of this
  • If people don’t want to cross work/personal life, can they opt out?
How to create boundaries, and what should the boundaries be.
When you did check-ins careful of language used, and what’s in heartsease and head-space.
People got to se their own boundaries. Not a matter of sharing things for personal sake
If sharing helps you feel you have enough belonging, if you feel you need to share to be checked into the work.