Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:47: Principles over policies

00:06:47: Good examples of approaching ways of working

00:10:35: Three areas addressing ways of working

00:12:07: Researched principles to adopt

00:17:08: Roles and responsibilities

00:25:22: Tools and tech

00:35:00: Rhythms and rituals

00:40:32: Which of three ways-of-working modes are you in?

00:43:07: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi, I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly podcast where we talk about the ins and outs and ups and downs of work and careers and give you some ideas for action, probably a little bit of support along the way, and hopefully some things that you can discuss about your development with other people too. Every one of our episodes, of which there are over 300 now, come with a PodSheet, so it is a downloadable summary of the things that we talk about so that you can reflect a little bit more.  We've got coach-yourself questions, for example, you can dive in a bit deeper, there's lots of resources that we recommend and you can talk about it with other people too.  So, you can always get that on our website, on amazingif.com.  If you just go to the podcast page, find the podcast that you want or you need right now, and you will be able to see the PodSheet and also a PodNote, which is a very swipeable summary, all there for you, all summarised in PodMail, which comes out on a Tuesday too.

Sarah Ellis: And so today, we're going to be talking about ways of working.  Now, in some ways, I'm surprised it's a topic we've not talked about before, because it's one of those phrases we all feel quite familiar with and probably talk about, and actually I think in a Squiggly Career, ways of working are probably more important than ever.  As everyone's moving more flexibly and fluidly between teams and projects, different parts of an organisation, the ability to quickly understand a team's ways of working, or a project's ways of working, I think is really critical to being efficient and effective; and it feels really timely. 

There are lots of organisations at the moment that are continuing to work out how does everybody work together post-pandemic, when maybe you're working in a hybrid way, maybe you're fully remote, maybe everybody's back in the office every day, but it feels like there's an opportunity to redefine what that looks like. Certainly in my experience, Helen, I don't know if this is the same for you, I think ways of working often gets mixed up with or included as part of things like employee handbooks or things that you find on an intranet, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can then end up meaning that they feel more like policies, or not things that we might get that excited about, or something we don't probably spend that much time with day-to-day, a bit like those job descriptions you read when you're applying for a job and then you never go back to again.

Helen Tupper: Well, I feel that there's two ends of this.  It's either really, really formal, like it's in a policy and no one ever looks at it and it's just laborious to go and find stuff; or, it's so informal that people aren't sure if it's the right thing to do or not.  They're like, "Well, my manager says… but I don't know if I'm supposed to say that or not".  Rules have gone rogue, that kind of thing! I think what we're trying to say is actually, to be really effective, we want to surface these ways of working, not stick them in a handbook so that no one ever reads them, but also not make them so random that people are still a bit unsure if they're doing something good or bad with it, really surface it, really be transparent, co-create things, so it feels like an empowering thing for people, a positive thing for them in terms of the way that they work, rather than a policy that gets stuck in a document. It always reminds me actually of a pre-pandemic conversation about ways of working.  I do think it's a marker in time, isn't it, because I think ways of working have changed so much because of pandemic, but a pre-pandemic conversation with a lady called Jodie from MoneySuperMarket, who we did lots of work with, and I was talking to them about their flexible working.  I said their, "flexible working policy", because at the time, they were really progressive and I said, "Talk to me a little bit more about your flexible working policy, I'd like to learn about it". They said, "First things first, Helen, it's not a policy, it's more of a principle.  We don't want a policy that gets stuck in a document, this is more about our culture as a business and therefore it's much more of a principle", and that point always stuck with me, that if you want these things to be embedded in the way people are working, then a policy can often feel too formal.  But a principle can often feel a bit more cultural, "It's the way we do things around here", rather than what gets written in a book.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think that's really interesting, because we know that when people have got autonomy and freedom, that's when people are happiest at work.  So, I think there's potentially a danger sometimes with these kinds of things that you then get so formalised that you take away the thing that matters most.  But when we do think about why ways of working are important, we also know that people benefit from and really appreciate clarity. So, on how we do things around here, if that is all unsaid or you have to second-guess, that's quite stressful for people, particularly if you're new or perhaps you see different people doing different things.  So, it gives everybody a sense of shared knowledge and understanding, and it stops the unwritten rules, which I think can be really confusing. 

And particularly when we are all so interdependent on each other I think to progress and succeed in our jobs and in our careers, it's just really good to know how are we going to work, and to actually transparently and openly make some choices and decisions about that. I've been thinking about this a lot over the past couple of weeks, because we've been working on our ways of working for Amazing If, hence the podcast topic, and you realise just how much you don't write down, or how maybe part of a team could be doing things in one way and another part of a team could be doing things in a different way. 

Maybe that's just happened organically and for very good reasons but actually, is that still useful, is that still serving you as a team? Even when I'm doing workshops, I'll often say, as a very specific example to people, "As a team, do you all need to have notifications on?" or, "Do you all have notifications on?" and everyone will be, "Yeah, we all have notifications on".  And then I'll ask the question, "Do you need to?" and then you get a bit of a mixed response.  Some people say, "I do need to", and some people will be like, "Actually, I'm not sure, I've not really thought about it". Then I will say to people, "As a team, have you ever talked about or agreed how you view using tech, particularly in terms of notifications?" to just keep it really specific.  And the answer to that is pretty much always, "No".  But some people are definitely assuming, "I must have my notifications on, that is a must-do", whereas other people are like, "Well, I'm choosing this", and then other people are just not sure. So, I think it's just one of those areas that often gets missed, because it will always feel like it never ends up being top of the to-do lists, it never ends up feeling like a priority, but if you invest in it, you know, the sort of medium-term gains I suspect far outweigh the short-term, "We've got to have a few conversations, we've got to figure this out as a team".  I suspect it's always worth it if you spend time on this.

Helen Tupper: And other than us, who are on obviously a mission, a very conscious mission with this, who do you think, in terms of the companies that you've worked for, have approached this best, most collaboratively, most transparently?

Sarah Ellis: I don't think I have a stand-out example in terms of who I've worked for.  I've been very impressed with -- I've been researching some organisations that open-source their more employee handbooks/ways-of-working documents, and they're often what's described as asynchronous, remote-first organisations, so almost from the nature of how they work, they've got very, very good at ways of working, of really thinking about it, asking useful questions, involving people, and then writing it all down in a really simple and straightforward way. There's a company, I've never come across them before, I don't know if you've heard of them, called Oyster, who I think do hiring, so I think they're a sort of HR organisation, and there's actually a really long list, and I'll put all these links of organisations that do share their ways of working just for everyone to read, and I read those and I was like, "Right, that is the benchmark", some of these are really impressive and they've definitely inspired some of the things that we're going to talk about today. In terms of the places I've worked, they've tended to be a bit more formal, a bit more policies on an intranet that probably you only accessed if you needed to.  I have worked in probably one team where as a leadership team, we might have had some chats about ways of working.  But interestingly, again as I was researching and thinking about this, I couldn't pinpoint or remember very many of these conversations.  I've had teams where I've felt like this has been better than others, but I don't think I've ever been part of a team that's addressed this brilliantly.  That's what I'm hoping obviously we're now going to do!  But what about you?

Helen Tupper: Well, I think I had some involvement with Hoxby, which is an organisation run by Alex Hirst and Lizzie Penny, and they had a fully distributed workforce from the outset of building that business, and they used Slack really sophisticatedly before I saw a lot of other companies doing that.  So, I look at what they have done and how they have built Hoxby and I think it's a brilliant example, to the extent that they've written a book on it, called Workstyle.  So, they have really looked at how to do this and then shared those ideas with other people. But I was also reflecting on other places that I've worked, and early on in my career, I worked for a company called Capital One, and I worked in project management for them.  And what they were particular good at was when you started a project off, you'd have a project team charter, where this project would be made up of people coming together for a finite period of time from different functions in the business and as part of that kick-off of the project, you'd have this moment in time where you agreed how you were going to have meetings.

  It was a bit less platformy-tech-based then, to be honest, because we're going back a little bit.  But in terms of the ways of working as a project team, it was a conversation that was had and a discussion about, "How are we going to come together and how are we going to resolve disagreements?" and, "We will learn by doing lessons learned", all that stuff was covered. It made me think that that might be common practice for projects now, but it's easier to do in some ways, or it seems easier to do in a project, because it's something that has a neat start point; whereas often, teams don't often have a neat start point, you know, everyone's coming together day one on a team together; these teams are often pre-existing, so it can sometimes feel like, "When are we supposed to have this conversation?"  Project team, it makes sense, but a team that's on day 742, does it still feel relevant; and I would say yes, absolutely. 

I think this is something that maybe you discuss annually and you review within that year, "Is it still working for us?"  So, I guess my point is, I think it is still relevant for everybody, but I can see why in some situations, it might feel easier to start. So, when we're thinking about ways of working, we want to, I guess, break this into some simple things that we can move forward with.  So, there are three areas that are useful to address when we're thinking about what are ways of working.  The first is roles and responsibilities, so does everyone know what everyone does, and does everyone know how we make decisions around here.  So, that's a useful starting point to make sure the point that Sarah said on clarity, you know, when you don't have that clarity and there's ambiguity about responsibilities, there's a lot of crossover, it can become a little bit dysfunctional.  So, roles and responsibilities, area number one.

Second, tools and tech, increasingly important now.  What tools are we using and how do we use them?  I think when we don't discuss this, and I've seen this in lots of businesses that I've worked in, you have a couple of people who use one bit of tech, a couple of people who use another, and then it all becomes really frustrating, because some people are communicating on WhatsApp and some people are putting things in shared documents, and duplication, frustration, not that fun.  So, having those conversations and creating some clarity around tools and tech is really, really useful. Then the third one is about your team's rhythms and rituals.  So, rhythms might be the meetings, like when are your regular meetings, what do we do remotely, when do we come together.  And then, what are those moments that I think are uniquely you as a team, those rituals you do that maybe other teams don't do that help people to feel like this is a distinctive and different team that they're working in.  So, there are three areas that we think are important to explore when you are looking at your ways of working as a team.

Sarah Ellis: Just before we dive into some questions maybe to ask yourselves as a team, some tools, some options to explore and then just what we've used from our experience, just a few principles from the research and the reading that we've done that I think are really important before you get started. The first one, as Helen's already mentioned, is about being adaptive.  So, your ways of working are not set in stone.  If something starts working against you rather than for you, there should be that shared accountability and ownership to call that out and to say, "We have been doing this, but this is starting to feel frustrating [or] this doesn't feel like it's working".  Perhaps our team has changed, perhaps it's doubled in size and that means your ways of working need to change.

When I was reading lots of organisations who share those, you can really get that clear sense of, "Maybe previously we've done it this way, but we have learnt something along the way and now we've slightly adapted it to make it work even better for us".  So, I think I was reading by, I think it was a company called PostHog, which is for engineers, quite a techy company, from what I could understand when I was reading about it, and they talked a bit about their application of OKRs, so Objectives and Key Results, which lots of organisations use.  And they talked about, "We used to do it in this way, but we've just made some adjustments that probably reflect our culture, maybe the nature of our work, to make them even more useful".  So, I think just that it's always work in progress is good to have in mind. The second principle, that it's specific to you and your context; and I think when you read really good ways of working examples from organisations, you get a real feel for what it would be like to work in that company, whether you'd want to and whether it would be right for you.  So, this should feel right for your team or if you're doing it at organisation level, across your organisation.  So, I don't think you have to copy or feel like, "We must use this word [or] we must use this way of describing it".  So, we were saying, I quite like "Ways of working"; that makes sense to me.

  But I've seen other people say, "Operating manual" or, "Operating system" or, "Employee handbook".  So even, I think, the language and the words that you use need to feel right for your culture. The third principle is that it needs to be co-created.  I think if this feels like it's been written by just one person, it's very unlikely to achieve the advantages and the upsides that you get from really effective ways of working.  So, you need to involve people and it needs to feel like something that everybody has; almost you've got to have shared accountability for it, because there's no point Helen and I saying, "We're all going to use tools and tech in this way", and then if nobody understands it or nobody does it, you're not achieving anything, nothing is different.  So, it has to feel like it belongs to everyone, rather than belong to an individual, even though one individual might be responsible for updating some of the documents, or whatever it might be. Then, the fourth area, which is not really a principle, it's just more of a suggestion and partly a thank you from me, is to those organisations that do open-source their ways of working.  It is a really brilliant example of where people have just thought, "Do you know what, why wouldn't we share this externally?  If that means that we can help other people to get better, why wouldn't we do that?"  In the main, I've seen people create these on a platform called Notion, which I'm still learning and getting my head around how that works. 

It's not a million miles away from something a bit like an intranet, I guess, but quite easy to use.  So, you could even create your own Notion for your team, it wouldn't have to be for your whole organisation.  And as far as I can see, it feels free.  Everything I've discovered so far is free; I'm sure at some point, they must make you pay for something, so I don't know how they make any money! But there is a lot out there that you can learn from and be inspired by, and I've definitely thought, "I'm going to borrow some brilliance from this company" or, "I like that idea, but what would that mean in the context of Amazing If".  So, definitely have a look at those links that I have shared.  Again, those are from people who are sharing loads of different ideas and people who live and breathe this stuff every day.  So, really amazing to see that.  It's probably the best example I've ever seen of people open-sourcing stuff in a way that just felt really generous.

Helen Tupper: I think it's like this self-fulfilling cycle in terms of their brand, because you read that stuff and then you're like, "Wow, I want to work in a company like that one", and I go and work for a company like that.  So actually by sharing it, they're not really giving it all away, they're just almost celebrating what they're doing.  I think it's generous, but it's also smart, so this is also a particular advantage for them; so, it's really smart at the same time. So, what we want to do now is we want to take those three areas that we talked about, roles and responsibilities, tools and tech, and then rhythms and rituals, and just give you a question to consider for you if you're approaching this, and then some options to explore, and then just share a little bit of what we've tried and tested ourselves.  So if I take the first one. The first one we talked about was the roles and responsibilities, and a question for you to consider in this area is, "How do we make smart decisions in our team and organisation?"  So, hopefully that will prompt some thoughts on what you might already be doing well, which is often a good place to start.  Then, some options to explore, if you want to improve how you're looking at roles and responsibilities, there might be some models like RACI, again I saw a lot of this in project management land, Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed, from my memory of my days in project management.  And, Sarah, you know about the RAPID model as an alternative to RACI?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think all of these acronyms essentially try to do exactly the same thing.  But RAPID is, Recommend, Agree, Perform, provide Input -- I always feel that's cheating a little bit where you have to put a word before it -- and Decide.  I think the slight difference with that is it doesn't specify the order in which you have to do things, but it's all about, again, just being very transparent about who's doing what.

Helen Tupper: And in terms of what we've actually done, one thing that I've tried and tested that I found quite useful, mainly to make a team realise how interconnected they were, so I was at the time managing this team who felt a bit siloed, to be honest.  Everyone was working in a slightly different way on slightly different areas, and it felt like they were a random collection of people rather than what I would think of as a high-performing team.  And so I put loads and loads -- I just remember getting loads and loads of flipcharts and I put everybody's name on this flipchart, sort of spread around it, and then I got everybody to draw, they all had a different colour pen, and I got them all to draw their interconnections between them; so, "In order for you to be at your best, who do you need to work with, or who do you need to get work from, and draw the lines between you". It was really interesting.  There were arrows going from people, arrows going to people, I got everyone in the team to do it and this was probably, in terms of the amount of people, this was maybe about 12-ish people, something like that, and what actually ended up was a mess, a mess on a wall, to be honest, that we then talked through the arrows and the directions and the colours, and who was kind of almost like hub people, because they had a lot of them. 

So, it led to some really interesting discussion.  But the main realisation at first was that, "Wow, this is a very interconnected team.  We might think we're operating in silo but actually, if we don't come together and understand who needs what when, and who's responsible for what and how, then this could all turn into quite a big mess". So, just that visualisation of it worked well.  And if you are quite a remote team, I mean at the time I did that in person, but you could use a tool like Miro just the same to plot this all out so that people can see that on a screen, you don't have to get together in person to do it.  But it's quite a useful way of just understanding the interconnections, and then to help you to refine some of those roles and responsibilities a little bit more.

Sarah Ellis: And I think one of the other things I've noticed on a couple of the external examples that I saw, is how explicit people are about making decisions.  So, you know sometimes you get into analysis paralysis, or things don't move as quickly as they should, or people just are not clear about, "Well, whose decision is this?"  So, there's a company, again this is on Notion, so anyone can go and read, I think you pronounce it Juro, their handbook; is that how you'd pronounce that, Helen, do you think?

Helen Tupper: Yes, I would come to the same conclusion.

Sarah Ellis: So, I hope I'm not pronouncing their company name wrong!  But they even have a section in their handbook called, How to Make Better Decisions.  I've put that link for you in the podcast show notes.  And they just share a framework of basically going, "If you need to make a decision", they give you a bullet point checklist and they just ask really simply questions like, "What is the question we are deciding; why now?"  And then the next one is, "What impact do we expect this decision to have; metrics, team, other?"  And they ask things like, "What kind of decision is it?  Does this decision have a high upside or a high downside?" So, they distinguish between -- and they use Daniel Kahneman's work on systems thinking.  So, a system one decision, basically you can just make the decision and move on, don't overthink it, don't spend too long on it.  If it's a system two decision, perhaps you just need to dive a bit deeper, you probably need a bit more data, you need to think a bit about options; it then, again, gives you how to make a system two decision. I shared that with our Amazing If team, and actually this is the place I saw the RAPID framework, because they talk about that there as well, and they create a little table that you can literally just download and use; so, "Who do you recommend does the analysis?  Who must agree with the decision?  Who's going to perform the actual work, who's going to do the work?  Whose input do you need?  Who's going to make the final decision?"  I read that and I just thought that's so clear about how to go through a decision process. The other very famous example, I guess, that I was thinking about is Amazon. 

So, Amazon have a very clear decision-making process, with the famous one page and six pages, and there are some great posts that you can read from people who've worked previously at Amazon about why Amazon use those and some of the expectations around, I think, I could be getting it wrong, someone from Amazon might listen and be able to tell me, when you first go to a meeting, I think people actually have time to actually sit and read the one page or the six pages.  But there's very clear guidelines about how you write those, and if you want to succeed there, you need to get good at it.  Now, you never know how much of this is urban myths that surround somewhere that you don't work and you don't actually know.  But I do know people who have worked at Amazon and talked about, that is very clearly how decisions are made. I think this is thinking about, "What does that look like for you?" 

In Amazing If today, to give a very practical example, we did something called a Challenge and Build session.  So, we're still establishing this as one of our ways of working, so we were testing both an idea and the ways of working at the same time, but we write one page which describes an idea or a proposition or just a concept that you want the rest of the team to challenge and build on; you send that one page out to everybody at least two days before, just to give people a bit of time to read and reflect if they want to; and then we spend an hour together on challenge and build.  The idea is the person who's written that, or the people who've written that, their job is to really be in listening mode and everybody else's job is to give their fresh-eyes feedback, what were their first thoughts, what were the questions they've got. It created a really good discussion today with the idea that we'd shared with our team.  It felt like quite a different way of working, something that we wouldn't normally or naturally do within our week.  So again, I think sometimes you have to test these things to figure out, "Did that feel right?"  I think, Helen, you and I both came out of that conversation going, "That felt really Amazing If, it felt useful", which is our number one value.  It felt energetic and everybody could contribute.  So, we're at the start of that being, "Is that a way of working or is it not?" but it certainly felt like it had got something in it.

Helen Tupper: And just to connect it to the point of roles and responsibilities, I think what the team mapping exercise and things like challenge and build help you to do, is to get away from hierarchy because they are free of hierarchy.  The challenge and build, you don't need to be the leader of the team do that; anyone can put an idea forward and then they position themselves as the listening person.  And if you do the mapping exercise that I talked about, one of the things that surprised me was some of the most influential people when you're mapping, so some of the people that have got the most lines through them, are not the most senior people; they're the enablers, and it's those people that you're like, "How do we really help you, because you've got a lot going through you?  So, if we don't support you, then actually you're probably blocking quite a lot of work getting through". It just takes that old-school, hierarchical, ladderlike view of how work gets done, and it really helps people to play a role that they're going to be better at, and to try out different things and to look at how an organisation works from a real perspective, not something that's 100 years old in terms of the hierarchy of companies.

Sarah Ellis: So, the second area of ways of working is tools and tech, and I think this is probably the one lots of us go to when you're first thinking about ways of working.

Helen Tupper: There's an app for that!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, there's an app for that!  So, a question to consider here, "How do we use tech to make our life easier and our work more efficient and effective as a team?"  So, I think that's always a good place to start, because I do think with tech, you can quite quickly get lost and drawn into platforms or notifications or personal preferences, but I think it is worth remembering what that tech is there for, what is the purpose of that tech, or what is the purpose of that tool. One of the first options I think to explore here, which I can definitely see in our Amazing If team that we are getting better at, but probably still not established in terms of our ways of working, is understanding individual versus together tech.  So, individual tech is what you choose to use, having the autonomy and freedom to go, "I use the Notes section of my phone, or I use bits of paper or Post-it Notes", or whatever it might be.  Helen uses Planner in Microsoft Teams, I don't use Planner. But what's your together tech, so what are the things where it is really important that you consistently do things in the same way?  So, is it about the Teams channels you've got; is it about notifications; is it about when are you using Teams versus when do you use WhatsApp?  Because I think, to Helen's point, if we're just using all tech all of the time, that very quickly becomes frustrating and overwhelming.

Helen Tupper: And when you're thinking about tech as well to help a team with their ways of working, I think hardware is also as important as software.  So, "Do I have a laptop that holds its battery charge?" because if you don't, then you can't work in many places because you've always got to be near power, for example; or, does everybody have a laptop, because if they don't, maybe they don't have the autonomy.  So, I think making sure that people have got the hardware that they need as well as the software.  It's really easy to leap to software because it's cheap, there's loads of apps, there's loads of platforms and things that aren't that expensive for people.  But actually, if they haven't got the hardware that works very well for them, then that software doesn't go very far either. So, I do think you've got to have a conversation about, "Well, how are we setting you up for success", individually and as a team, "with the tools and techs that we use?"  And so, for example, for our team, we have a working-from-home fund, for example, because the majority of our team work from home. 

They can choose what they use that fund on.  That could be a desk, so that supports them, or it could be a laptop, or whatever, a camera so they look good on screen; it's up to them.  But I do think making sure that you're supporting people with hardware, as well as platforms and stuff like that, is quite important. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I read about that in lots of these ways-of-working documents, which sounds like I got quite lost in, which I actually did, because I was really enjoying reading them!  I think if you're a bit nosy/curious, they're a dream, you're like, "Oh, this is absolutely fascinating!"  And there was definitely more than one organisation that I read about that talked about noise-cancelling headphones.  So, because these are naturally very remote organisations and they want to give people that flexibility and freedom, they invest in really good noise-cancelling headphones for people so that you can go and work in a café, you can go and work in other places, and you've not got to be worried about surround sound that might come from there. So I was like, it's really interesting how, you know almost how detailed people get?  And I think they are trying really hard to think about, how do we create an environment where people can do brilliant work and do their best work, and that made sense to me.  I was like, "Oh, the noise-cancelling headphones".  The pet ones as well really make me laugh, when people talk about pets and what pet stuff is allowed and isn't allowed; that's very funny!

Helen Tupper: It's quite emotive, isn't it?!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, it is quite emotive, yeah!  So, one of the things that we are, again, at the early stages of at Amazing If is being clear about different tech and how we use it to communicate.  So, we started to realise that we'd got messages flying around left, right and centre on WhatsApp, voice messages, on Teams, on Teams channels, just comms everywhere and in every place and we weren't being very considered or intentional about what do we share where; and I think that was the key question. The other thing that I've really realised since I've been thinking a lot about ways of working, is just how important it is to write things down.  So, there might be some things that you assume everybody knows.  Perhaps you assume because you're like Helen and I, you've been in Amazing If from the start and so you go, "Of course we use Teams in this way", and you forget that, okay, I might have just joined Amazing If, how would I know that; where is that written down?  That, "Where is that written down?" is a really good question.  I've actually found it's not written down, or it was written down three years ago in a random document that there's absolutely no way I could find, even if I tried. So, we just agreed together, okay, we're going to use WhatsApp a bit more in emergencies; we've got certain Teams channels that are very clearly labelled for certain things; and we also agreed that we would call people out in a friendly and nice way if we were using any of those tech or tools in a way that was different from what we were saying.  So, if I then start messaging Lucy in our team on WhatsApp a lot during a day, is it because it's an emergency, which is what we've kind of agreed it for, almost instant response emergency, or actually if it's not, then she might just gently nudge me and say, "Shall we move this back over to Teams, because that's where we need to keep a record of it?" I think you've got to agree your way of working, you've got to write it down somewhere that everybody can easily access and keep coming back to, and I think you've also got to create a culture where, as people are starting to practise it, when you inevitably forget or get a bit lazy, or do something wrong, and I'm putting myself in this category because I just know this is definitely going to be me on some of these areas, that people do just go, "Actually, no, we need to stick here to what we said we were going to try".

Helen Tupper: One tiny build on it, and I think this might come more from me than you is because I love tech so much, I do find it really interesting to hear the individual uses of tech.  So, I think it's really important to agree the together tech.  But I still want to hear, I'm still like, "What is that tool you're using?"

Sarah Ellis: You love a tech hack, don't you?

Helen Tupper: Well, I do love a tech hack, and I find that actually, quite a lot of other people have quite smart little systems and things that they do, little things like, back to Lucy in our team, when she was doing some adding up on something, she'll use Siri to check her sums and I thought, "That's a quick little help, just ask Siri what X is".  But there's just little things. Or, I use Otter, for example.  If I've had the first of a series of meetings that I'm going to be having with somebody, what I'll often do is use this app called Otter, and I will take two minutes after that meeting to just summarise what I said and what I thought I heard, so that it's sort of in a bank.  And then, before the next meeting, I'll just play that little two-minute clip back to myself, so it brings me back to that moment.  And I find I don't have to keep so much in my head, it's like a second brain on my phone to just put that conversation in while it's fresh. There's lots of little things like that that it might not become together tech.  But to be honest, until you talk about individual tech, you don't really know how to improve your collective tech.  So, I think being curious about what other people are using for their own personal ways of working can help you to identify some things you can do differently as a team.

Sarah Ellis: I loved it when you asked our team that question, you were like, "What tech hacks have you got?" and I was like, "I literally have none"!

Helen Tupper: I mean, you entirely opted out of that.  Everyone else was like, "I do this, I do that", and you were like, "What?  No!"

Sarah Ellis: I didn't opt out, I just didn't have anything to say, I just didn't have anything to share, I was like, "I don't know, I've got a phone"!

Helen Tupper: I have the Notes app, it's full of many notes!

Sarah Ellis: I do use the Notes app on my phone quite a lot.

Helen Tupper: But do you use hashtags in your Notes app to make it easier to search for all of your Notes?

Sarah Ellis: No, but I don't need to because it's just my own system, it's my own!  But I do think that point about just experimenting, and I think what is really good is when you do know people's individual tech, if there is something that is universally useful, then it can go from individual to together.  And you often read actually in my favourite ways-of-working documents, I really liked that they often had a bit of a mix between, "This is what we all do", so they might say, "Here's all of our together tech", and that's a name that we've made up, by the way, not one that they've used; so, "Here's our together tech", and then they might have a separate page which is just ideas to inspire.  That's where, for example, you might have all of your individual ideas. I did read a lot of that from these ways-of-working documents like, "Here's some really interesting reading if you want to improve your decision-making", or if you're into careers, if you're into career development, you could image people going, "Go and have a look at the Squiggly Careers podcast and go and have a look at all these free resources".  I actually had a tiny hope that one of the ways-of-working documents might have Squiggly in them, because the organisations are actually often really good at career development, but I didn't see Squiggly, we didn't make the cut so far.  So I was like, that's a new ambition, to see Squiggly in an open-sourced ways-of-working document from a company, because I think those companies would naturally embrace Squiggly.  So, we're yet to feature, but I could imagine that being something that we could help those companies with.

Helen Tupper: Our Squiggly spotters can let us know.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.

Helen Tupper: Okay, so our last area that we want to talk about was this idea of rhythms and rituals, so regular meetings, reviews, things that you do that are uniquely you as a team.  So, a question for you to consider here is, "What are the meetings and moments that matter the most?"

Sarah Ellis: And I think a sensible place to start, given how much time we all spend in them, is your meetings.  So, when you're just thinking about as a team, what is your approach to meetings?  I saw this in lots of the documents, "Does every meeting have to have an agenda?" for example.  One of the things that we know from Priya Parker, who was on the podcast talking about gatherings, is the single biggest failure of most meetups in any walk of life is that they're not purposeful.  Does every meeting invite, for example, that you send out within your team, does it have to have a single sentence that describes the purpose of that meeting?  I think that's quite a good idea.  That's not something we do in Amazing If, but I can see how that would be a good idea. 

So, how are you on meeting agendas? What about meeting times?  Lots of organisations I know are now experimenting with, "Okay, you actually do 20- or 40-minute meetings, because we're trying to encourage people to spend less time in meetings".  Do you do stand-up meetings?  And I think obviously it goes beyond meetings.  It might go into things like one-to-ones; it could go into things like, I think you could have things like career conversations in here; you could have things like we have walk-and-talks, we have quarterly walk-and-talks in Amazing If; and then you might get into things that feel a bit more like moments, rather than meetings.  So, things like we have mistake moments in Amazing If.  Make a mistake, we share it on Teams, we talk about what we've learnt.  This is where you could have things like feedback, what worked well, even better if. This is really I think where you get into almost the people aspect of when we get together, or when we do things that's going to make our work better, what does that look like?  These are things that I think often you should feel proud of. 

Like, "Do we feel proud of how we approach our meetings?"  I bet most people are like, "No, we just don't want to be in them".  What would make you proud of meetings; what would make you think, "I'm really looking forward to that moment in a day".  And I think it is often helpful, we've seen, and I know that organisations that we've worked with have seen, it's helpful for them to feel ownable and to feel like you. Our mistake moments feel really like us.  What worked well, even better if, is very Amazing If.  Walk and talks, I know loads of people do walk and talks, so we're not unique in that, but we all love them as a team.  Every time we all do walk and talks, we all really enjoy them, so they're not going anywhere.  There one of our rhythms, they're part of our ways of working.  Again, if you said to me, "Where is this all written down for Amazing If?" we couldn't show you, we haven't done that.  That's what we're in the process of doing now is going, "What have we already got that we think is going really well?  What gaps have we got?  And actually, what are we just going to leave that's more individual, where not everything needs to make it into a ways-of-working document?"

Helen Tupper: There's a few provocations here.  I think if you said to people, "You can only keep three meetings from this week, which ones would you keep; everything else goes; which three would you keep?" I think that would be really interesting.  I would definitely have, we have a Monday morning meeting, which I feel is a really good way to see everybody and connect with everybody at the start of the week, because then everyone works quite independently for the rest of the time; I would always have a Sarah and me meeting, I always feel a loss if Sarah and I just haven't had a moment to share and discuss and progress some stuff together; and then I'd have to really think about that third.  If I could only have three, I'd have to really think about what that third one would be that I would feel would help me in the business.  I can't answer it now, but I think it would be good, if you were to have that conversation with everybody and then to see those.

Then, I think the second provocation is that if you were to "even better if" each one of those meetings, which is obviously already still quite important to you because you've identified it as one of your top three; but if you were to even better if it, just one thing for each of them, what would you do?  Because, imagine if the three meetings that mattered the most to you each week just got a little bit better, then I think that would be an important way of taking stock a little bit and moving something forward.

Then something specifically that I've seen done really well, and it really helped me when I joined a business actually, was when I joined Microsoft, a lovely guy called Rob, who was my manager, talked me through the ROB; Rob talked me through the ROB.  So, the ROB was the Rhythm Of the Business.  And it was full of a lot of acronyms, quite complicated!  But he basically on a big whiteboard, he drew out the year at Microsoft, particularly in the team that I was in, and he went through the quarterly meetings and then what happened before them, and he drew a rhythm of the business for me so that I had a really clear view of what was coming and what I needed to get engaged in and why those moments mattered to the business and how I would be contributing to them. As somebody coming into the team, (a) there was a rhythm of the business that was pre-existing, like that was already there; and (b) it was so clear that somebody could communicate it to me by drawing it out, and I remember seeing that and thinking it was really powerful, it wasn't debatable; it was the rhythm of the business, it had an acronym, the ROB.  I would quite like us to have a Rhythm Of the Business, and it's not, as we said before, it's not set in stone, it's not like you can't decide as a team that something isn't working any more, but it was quite nice to have a visual of that rhythm so that I knew each month and each year what moments I was working towards.

Sarah Ellis: And so, as a final thought, Helen and I were just discussing how you make all this really useful, because you might be at different points and you might have different priorities depending on your context, your culture, your team.  And I think for each of those three, are you in one of these three modes; and it might help you to just think what you might go away and do next. So, are you in "explore", where you're just thinking, "We need to explore what tools and tech we want to use and we need to try some stuff out and we need to explore and experiment, so we're quite far maybe from something being as definitive as ways of working"? 

I think that's absolutely fine, you just know what you're working towards, so maybe you're in that explore and experiment. Maybe you've got something in place, but the focus is more on improving, so that would be more the examples that Helen just talked about in terms of, "Well, we've got meetings, but are they as good as they could be; are they purposeful; have we really thought about our rhythms and rituals; have we written down our rhythm of the business?" those kinds of things. Then, I think when you get to a point where you feel confident and comfortable that you go, "This is how we do things around here", don't forget to write them down.  I find that bit really hard.  I'm never very good at the last 20% of anything.  So, I get very motivated by explore, a bit motivated by improve, and not very motivated by capture. 

But I have really recently seen what can go wrong when you don't write things down, when you've not created somewhere for this to live and breathe and be dynamic, and that's what those organisations, who I've been reading and researching, like the PostHogs and Oyster and Juro, that's what they seem to have done so brilliantly; they've not over-complicated it. This doesn't need to be a massive, mammoth piece of work; these are often just simple one pages that very clearly describe how you do things around here, that rhythm of the business, how we approach meetings or decisions, why is our company here.  They usually have a company vision, goals, mission summarised just to keep reminding people, that's what we're here to do, that's what we're trying to achieve. So, I think for each of those three areas, your roles and responsibilities, tools and tech, rhythms and rituals, just think where are you; are you in explore, improve or capture?  And you might be at different points at each of them, and I think that's normal, and you can then just think, "What should we do next?  What would make the biggest difference for us in our team?  Where have we got the most energy to spend some time?"

Helen Tupper: And we would love to hear from you about this episode and this topic, because we'd love to learn from you.

Sarah Ellis: Who else can I steal stuff from?!

Helen Tupper: Whose brilliance can we borrow, I think might be a better phrase!  We would really love to know if there are things that you do in these areas or outside of them that you think really help your ways of working as a team, please let us know, just email us, we're helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com, because you will be helping us in our thinking about the team so that we can help more people with their careers too.  And as I said right at the start, everything that we've covered today will be summarised in the PodSheet, you can get it on our website, you can get it in the show notes, you can get it from PodMail every week on a Tuesday.

Sarah Ellis: And next week, we're going to be talking about learning in the flow of work, so how you learn in the moment, particularly as a team.  So, I hope that these two episodes back-to-back will actually feel quite connected, and they might be two things where you listen to our ideas in terms of learning in the flow of work, and some of those ideas could be things that might become rhythms and rituals, or might become part of your tools and tech, who knows?  So, hopefully that will feel like a useful next topic for everybody.

Helen Tupper: But we'll be back again next week with that episode, so bye for now everybody.

Sarah Ellis: Bye for now.