Learning Launch

Challenge

I am a member of my organisation’s Technical team. We work on multiple technical OS platforms to  develop and maintain an enterprise wide job scheduling tool. We are a team of 5 people, all senior  members, with respect to experience level, and a subject matter expert in respective technical skills.  We used to have multiple discussion meetings when we were working in office premises. However, In  the pandemic era, when whole world is going through tough phase to survive from COVID-19, we were  made to work from home for everyone’s health and safety reasons. The challenge came from working  remotely with limited sessions to interact and discuss. We want to maintain a healthy culture of work  which we have established over a period of time and also boost up the morale of our team members  to strive through the tough time.

Selection:

We discussed within our team and came up with learning launch strategy to connect informally and   discuss the mindset of other individual in the new working normal situation. We named it as “Meet  and Greet”. As we were not sure of how long we have to keep working from home, we need a way to  keep the communication going. This was a 5 min handshake programme where we scheduled webex  meetings to open your video and say “Hi”. The motive was to remain face-to-face connection and stay  active as if we are in real office.

Application

We already had scheduled meetings to update the work done. However, we applied this small  experiment to enhance the communication and boost the moral of the team. In the Meet and greet  meetings we didn’t talked about work but only about the thoughts that we share as an individual. The  idea was to make ourselves comfortable to the remote working environment as we are working from  home. We created groups of two team members each to connect and share their thoughts. The  meetings were scheduled and progressed.

Insight

The course changed my view to look from “My angle - my scope” to “Our Team- Our Scope”- a broader  angle and broader scope. I used to have many ideas but I always felt that how can I implement these  ideas and test them, what the team will think about these ideas and take it up or not. After this trial,  we got to know that we all have many brilliant ideas that we kept to ourselves. When we got a chance  to demonstrate our thoughts and expressed them, these ideas

We already have multiple channels of communication however we were not using these to connect  within the team. The interplay among individuals helped to express ideas and thereby lead to easily  solve our problems as one plus one is not always two but eleven sometimes.

We also got to know that people are trying to settle down with enhanced responsibilities of working  with family away from family is different than working with family for them.

Approach

Now we know what is going with each individual, what is their thinking process and we are more  comfortable to the risk free culture we have now.

Our idea was greatly appreciated among our team members and by other teams also. We are working  on next stage called “Showcase“- it’s a longer duration presentation where we can present our ideas  and open up with whole team. We are trying to make it more informal and trying out the ways it will  prove to be more productive to other teams.

