With over 20,000 employees across multiple worldwide locations and disciplines, it's also important that each team at the ±«Óătv understands other teams working methods and cultures.
Helen Olney, Creative Director of Systems and Service Design at the ±«Óătv in London, discusses how collaboration, encouraging constructive feedback and learning through play makes for a healthy design team.
Promote open communication
I think building a positive team culture is largely about encouraging open and honest communication. Having that level of trust with your colleagues to ask questions, collaborate on ideas and provide critique is naturally going to improve the health of any team, regardless of how well-acquainted people are.
There's a particular statistic that sticks in my mind and this is focused around the ideal praise-to-criticism ratio within top performing teams. For every one piece of negative or constructive criticism, top performing teams were found to give five pieces of positive feedback. This is something that I try to promote within our team. As a design leader, I try to lead by the example of admitting my own failings, so that others in the team feel comfortable to do so too. However, there's a fine balance between displaying this level of humility and also being decisive.
We also try to maintain a collaborative culture with our remote workers by ensuring that there's a designated facilitator in every meeting. The facilitator's job is to make sure that the remote worker's contributions are heard by the rest of the team. With our team now expanding out into Salford, I'm conscious that we need to build on these kind of processes even more.
Encourage learning through play
The art of learning through play is something that tends to be discredited beyond our youth, but it's something that's really helped improve our team dynamic within UX at the ±«Óătv.
As our team is quite new, the act of getting creative together and building something through play has helped to create those bonds that are essential for a healthy and productive team.
On a monthly basis, we have our 'Learn a Thing' days — a chance for people to come together and learn something new. One of our 'Learn a Thing' days was focused around learning to code and everyone got something out of it, regardless of their skill level. These sessions are just as social as they are informative and often involve elements of role playing and being 'silly' together. Breaking down those formal barriers really helps to build trust and create a sense of safety within a team.
Respecting team cultures
As UX designers, we're more likely to bring our ideas to life through post-it notes, marker pens and physically sticking things up and moving things around with our hands. However, this visual way of working doesn't always work for every team and this is something we'll always consider in meetings with other disciplines. Because our team's users are ±«Óătv employees, we naturally work with lots of different teams within the company. Through this, you quickly learn that every team has a different dynamic — News can be very fast-paced and pressured, for example. When working with these different teams, it's important that we strike the right balance between maintaining our core culture and respecting other cultures in the process.
The design leader's role
Whether it's learning to collaborate effectively or driving new skills through play, all of these methods require each team member to get involved, play their part and help the dynamic of the team grow and evolve.
However, the ideal team dynamic can't be created overnight. As a design leader, I recognise that culture and routines need to be built up gradually and there will always be processes that don't stick around for the long term.
Ultimately, I believe my primary job is to enable people to do their best work. It may sound cliche, but seeing others grow within a team dynamic is what this job is all about.
This article is part of our Studio Culture series, which explores the important factors that help design teams excel and collaborate effectively.
