DesignOps Summit 2021 – C’mon Get Happy (Tess Dixon)

Design Manager at Conde Nast

Introduction and Background: 

• Design Manager at Condé Nast
• I am a DesignOps team of 1
• Though I’ve been working in tech for 18 years and managing people for 10, I’ve only been in the design field for about 2 years (transitioned over from the tech support world) and in some ways I’m still getting my bearings sort of like an infant and in other ways what Design Ops people do are like what managers and leaders do in other fields
• Before Condé Nast, I was at Tumblr for 8 years, where I was a Director of Support for a chunk of that time
• Before Tumblr I was at Media General – a company that owns a bunch of small southeastern newspapers and news websites

 

What I’m going to be talking about today is team happiness

• Reviewing misconceptions about team happiness
• The pressure to “make” people happy and where that pressure comes from
• Focusing on taking care of the basics for your team and creating opportunities instead of obsessing over making people happy

What does team happiness mean?

• In DesignOps, we hear a lot about team happiness and its nebulously related terms like:
• Health
• Engagement
• Satisfaction
• Team Mood
• Moral
  • For the number of times, we’ve heard these terms thrown around, we don’t necessarily remember which is which, and what each one refers to
  • Everyone has a different definition for these terms (above) which results in most of us having a “stock image” understanding of what a happy team looks like

If you do a google search for “happy work team,” you’ll get image results of people laughing and waving their arms around a conference room table, which really rings hollow to me because it’s just one manifestation of team happiness

 

Measuring Team Happiness

There are a lot of good methods for measuring happiness

• One talk that I really enjoyed was 8 Types of Measures and Design Operations (Kristin Skinner and Kamdyn Moore)
• They propose asking a few simple and basic questions to gauge happiness on a team:
  • Do external people know our work?
  • Are you excited to work here?
  • Are you improving your craft?

• Erin Casali’s Health Checks involves a really detailed rating system
  • If you want to get specific, her system breaks out measurements into 3 categories: person, team, and product
  • Having those three categories instantly contextualizes the health check questions for anyone participating
  • Questions that my team asks in response to team happiness questions (Am I happy with this or that? Do I feel fulfilled? Do I feel like I can do good work here?)
    • Do you mean in the context of me and my boss?
    • Me and my cross functional team?
    • What are we talking about here?
    • The Health Checks system really clears up ambiguity especially if you’re in a big matrixed organization.

• I’m not here to go through the nitty-gritty of measuring team happiness because I think it’s already been done very well.
• I’m here for an existential mind shift to examine why we still have these unrealistic expectations about team happiness
• I think one reason is that we’re constantly bombarded with cartoon fantasy levels of the “happy team” everywhere we turn
  • Our culture is full of this kind of imagery:
    • It’s on every career site
    • it’s on almost every company’s “About Us” page
    • Articles and major publications that spew propaganda about how we cant experience happiness until we get back to the office

If you’re anything like me you’ve heard comments in real life reinforce these team happiness misconceptions

For example: There was a moment of silence at work for a tragedy that happened. Afterwards I was in a meeting that a stakeholder decided to attend that day, where a coworker shared some serious health news. The whole meeting, I was nervous just thinking – Oh this is bad timing for this person to come hangout with us because they’re going to think our team isn’t doing well because we’re just serious and glum right now because of what’s happening today. I talked myself down from it thinking it’s ridiculous because people don’t judge team happiness based on how much cackling is happening in the room, but sure enough the stakeholder messaged me within 30 seconds of the meeting ending – “The team seems a bit subdued. In my meetings, there’s a lot of joking and laughter” and started talking to me about how I can fix this big problem on my team where people are frowning. Which just confirmed everything that I feared.

• DesignOps folks and managers are under a lot of pressure, not just on the topic of team happiness
• As the people who are accountable for and to an extent set team culture, we are consistently barraged with advice in talks and conferences we attend, management books, podcasts, and think pieces

Here are examples of headlines I’ve come across in the Ops and management space:

• If you’re a fixer, you’re going to see headlines like these and want to know more, which I think results in a general feeling of anxiety towards everything that’s related to their job
• What’s worse is that a lot of the advice in these articles are conflicting. Have you caught yourself reading an article and thought wait a second this is the opposite of the other article I was reading?

 

Why is there so much pressure for Ops professionals these days?

• Increasingly people see their work as their identity, that these things are one in the same
  • My theories on why this feels so common now:
    • Un-coolness of faith – the loss of community that human beings have had throughout the ages when gathering for regular rituals in times of worship
    • Increased mobility of people, generationally – It’s Less likely for you to live near your parents than the generations before which means less and less guaranteed consistent family contact
    • Maybe our friends’ achievements and travel plans are more visible because of social media causing us to feel pressure to keep up with appearances which takes money and a career so we’re more and more obsessed with our careers
    • The pandemic which cut us off from some of the last few remaining things we had going on outside of work which exacerbated the rest of it
    • Work may be the last man standing out of a bouquet of things that use to make us happy which makes it more important whether teams are happy at work

• Our culture has diminished a lot of the other things in life that are supposed to give us meaning and put infinite pressure on work to be everything to us all the time
• Bill Burnett talks about this expansively on Episode 1 of The Reconsidering podcast with Meredith Black

We need reject this notion that work is our only identity

• Our culture has diminished a lot of the other things in life that are supposed to give us meaning and put infinite pressure on work to be everything to us all the time
• Bill Burnett talks about this expansively on Episode 1 of The Reconsidering podcast with Meredith Black
• Your job is hopefully a wonderful and enriching part of your life but it’s not your entire world and you shouldn’t assume your teammates job is their entire world either
• You can’t make your team happy; no one can ever make anyone else happy, ever
  • You might recognize this advice from your romantic relationship, your friendships, or your relationship with your parents.
• There’s nothing you can do to make 100% certain that people are going to be happy

What you can do is take care of the “basics”

• When I think about what is important at work, on a needs pyramid, I think about things you can’t measure by how hard people are laughing in a conference room.
• Fair salary
• Adequate benefits
• Officially and culturally allowed to take time off from work
• Whether or not your boss knows what time you end work, so they aren’t bothering you during your off hours
• Folks are happier on a deeper level when their basic needs are taken care of first. If you don’t have the basic needs met, anything else you do is just noise

Creating Opportunities

• Examples of creating opportunities:
• Creating space and time for things that need to get done
• Introducing a new segment at team meetings for folks to participate in
• Firing up a Miro board with an unhinged team building activity and letting the team go wild on it
• Sitting down and pointing out to someone on your team leveling framework where they can focus and what they can work on to grow in their career and to work on things that are interesting to them
• There are a lot of things you can do to carve out the space for opportunities, but you can’t force it
• It is your job to create the opportunity spaces but at the end of the day it’s the individuals who choose whether and how they take advantage of those opportunities

 

The alternative to what I’m saying is scrambling to stay on top of every whim that’s thrown at you

• DesignOps folks can get into the habit of catering to everyone’s increasingly trivial whims and preferences, which takes us away from the real meaty Ops work
• You end up playing the nursemaid/caretaker role instead of planning ahead, directing traffic and making things more efficient for the whole team which inadvertently diminish the profession rather than elevating it

My hope is that by naming the struggle, by talking about it out loud, we can diffuse some of its power and start making it okay to hold on loosely to the goal of team happiness

I hope you’ll join me in taking these unrealistic expectations about team happiness and putting them right in the trash

As DesignOps leaders, if we’re taking care of the basics for our teams and creating opportunities for them to thrive, we can get out of the way and let them do their jobs well and have the freedom to attain happiness however they see fit.