A'verria shares her leadership journey working with team culture. In this clip, she talks with us about what she did to help her staff feel connected to something bigger while creating closeness with one another.
Leaders bringing together a disconnected team culture
Working in a remote world inherently creates distance between employees. We don’t get those micro-moments, those water cooler interactions that create bonds.
Without those little moments, staff can feel alone and even disempowered. But just because we are in a remote world does not mean your staff has to continue to feel this way.
It feels so foreign for leaders to create deeper connections online, especially when we are used to being in person. Today’s clip is from my interview with A’verria Martin who is the Director of Research Operations at Service Now.
As a business consultant who works to help develop team cultures, I know that A’verria is someone who truly cares and thinks deeply about how she can support who she works with.
In this clip, she shares with us what she did to help her staff feel connected to something bigger while creating closeness with one another.
Transcript
So what were some of the things that you did to kind of counteract that what were some of the steps you took to try to overcome that?
So, we actually I think a couple things happened right is based on based on knowing that this was an issue. We put together a small tiger team. I got to be the leadership sponsor, which is amazing of these amazing researchers Michelle Munoz and Fails and Dion Bellinger and Nancy Sing.
We all got together and we actually by Design thinking to see the problem. So we empathize with the users what was happening for them? Why do you think they were feeling this disconnect? We started to get into problem statements how might we use and then kind of dive into the solution space and we had a couple different tangible things. We could do throughout the year, but we started with this thing called insights trios and inside treos is we put together a list of every insights researcher.
And we randomly selected groups of three and everybody was given their insights Trio members and they were tasked with meeting bi-weekly for three months for 30 to 60 Minutes to hang out. And just get to know each other. And so we finished our first cycle in late November early December and we saw a huge spike in people feeling like they were part of something bigger. Yeah. I mean it was a huge win. Right?
I mean it's an ongoing process. But I think really making concerted effort to part of the issue is not feeling like you have a closeness with a colleague and that's not built in business meetings. Right and and we're not able to do it necessarily because we're in the same geographic location.
So how can we be really purposeful on making sure that we're putting these groups together with people can actually start to get to know their colleagues.