🏆 Atlympic Event: Teamwork Lab

[#1]

Hello Community! 

Quick disclaimer: We are running a contest on Community (The Atlympics!) from July 23rd - August 8th of 2021. If you are interested in participating in this contest (prizes! badges! fun!) please read more and sign up on this post.

---

AND WITHOUT FURTHER ADO...

We are pleased to present the Teamwork Lab Atlympic Event: 

Create a new post in the Teamwork Lab Group with a question you might post to a work therapist. These questions can be sourced from your personal experience or from your imagination. Here are a few examples of the types of questions you might ask:

• Dear Work Therapist,
  
  My company is scaling and culture and values are falling by the wayside. How do we keep the intimate “Startup family” feel while the company is growing so quickly?
  
  Sincerely,
  Sucker for small startup culture

• Dear Work Therapist,
  
  My company went remote during the pandemic. Now, instead of chatting at lunch, we’re all chatting via Slack all day. I want people to know that I’m online and being a good collaborator, but I also want to be able to get off Slack and get some actual work done. How do I get my team to balance being in the know and doing actual work?
  
  From, 
  Frustrated but willing to help start change

Bonus points for recording videos of yourself asking these questions! Perhaps wearing a silly costume?!

Winners will get an Atlympic medal AND have their “Dear Work Therapist” question answered by the Atlassian Teamwork experts!

Tips for getting more engagement on your post:

• Invite coworkers/friends/family to the Teamwork Lab

• Have your peers upvote/comment on your post

• Share your post on social using #Atlympics

[John Funk]

Dear Work Therapist,

There are team members on various teams across the company that don't want to follow the processes that are clearly laid out for using Jira and following Kanban principles. Despite "promises" that they will do better, there is no real change - only excuses. 

Sincerely,

Where do I hide the bodies?

[Kishan Sharma]

Here is my post !

[Suvradip Paul]

Check out mine - here !

Cheers

Suvradip

[Kelly Drozd]

@John Funk While I don't have a place for you to be hiding bodies, I have felt your pain! I usually go one of two ways on this topic. Like you, I get really frustrated at people not following the process especially when it's mean to help them.

The problem with #1 is that it drives me crazy.

The 2nd way is that I look at it as a "problem to solve". Why? Because if someone isn't following a process or doing what has been taught then that it probably means that it might be driving them just as crazy as me and two people going crazy is not helpful. 

When my former team and I were introducing agile and lean principles, it was a very different way for them to think and work. A lot of them didn't want to change and I didn't blame them. At first, we didn't do a good job at helping them understand the "WHY".  We had to go back & help people understand why working in a certain way is going to solve very specific problems for them. 

- You don't want to visualize your work? Well, you told me that you are exhausted by the number of requests you get for updates on where work is. 

 - If they have a problem with WIP limits - this video says enough! ->The resource utilization trap 

Now, these are sort of silly examples but I have heard these things before!

Taking the 2nd approach helped us continually improve. We learned that some processes were being broken or not followed because the way the team worked changed their process & the tool setup/config need to change as well. Or that we were changing too fast for people & need to do more to help bring them along. 

People are tough, changing people's behavior is really hard. If you aren't familiar with BJ Fogg, I'd check out his behavioral model . & his book Tiny Habits. Reading his work helped me think about how I approach change (myself and changing others).

If it has anything to do with Jira specifically, I just got done responding to a few pain points from @Suvradip Paul (here is his post & my response). The key takeaway here: AUTOMATION FOR THE WIN! 

Thanks!

Kelly

[Linda Milne_Togetha Group_]

@John Funk  

[Aryan Jain]

Check out my post.

Thanks!