During my time at Zenergy Technologies, I had the esteemed responsibility of the employee engagement section of our monthly newsletter.  This is where I share tips and tricks on employment engagement, and describe how we walk our talk as an Agile Organization.  I am sharing a few months worth of posts here, and my farewell to our readers for posterity. 

February 2018

For those that have been regular readers of our newsletter, this is a new section. While discussing ways we could expand the horizon and share even more about all the great things going on at Zenergy these days, we decided create space for focus on employee engagement. Every month, this section will be dedicated to the many ways that Zenergy uses people-centric processes and feedback loops to create a work atmosphere that is not only engaging buy hyper-productive.  In fact, we walk our talk as an agile organization. The core staff at Zenergy consider ourselves an agile team. We are small, cross functional, and dedicated, with a clear vision and shared values. Over the coming months, we will be sharing insights into the various protocols, tools, and experiments we are running. These are all in an effort to not only make our workplace a fun and engaging place to be, but also to drive superior value for our clients. So, consider this an introduction of sorts, and stay tuned for the next edition!

March 2018

One of the first agile practices that we established here at Zenergy Technologies in order to become a more responsive and focused organization was standup meetings.  We maintain a Trello board as a visual management tool for all of our work-in-progress (more on our use of that technique in a later edition). Twice each week, we have a short video call (the goal is 15 minutes or less, we are still working on it in our journey to becoming a high performing team) to review current work, and what lies ahead in the immediate future. This is also the perfect opportunity to discuss blockers or impediments that are in our way. These could be framed as simple requests for other members of the Zenergy staff, or maybe a larger problem that we need to address at a later time.  Either way, our check-in with each other multiple times each week allows us to stay connected, keep focused on the work at hand, and make sure we are moving the ball down the field together.  If your team or organization is not leveraging the power of frequent (multiple times per week) meetings, you are missing out on simple technique to keep your team rowing smoothly.

May 2018

In this edition, I want to talk a bit about focus. As you may have picked up if you regularly follow along with our newsletter, Zenergy has developed and operational cadence, or heartbeat, for our team. Part of that cadence is a monthly meeting where we all get together and review the major initiatives we have in plan and prioritize what we want to focus on for the upcoming month.  

At the start of all of these core team meetings, we have a check-in round where everyone takes a turn sharing good news, what is on their mind, or what they hope to get out of the meeting.  This can be round-robin style (linear, person to person around the room) or popcorn style (spontaneous).  We just had our April meeting, and we tried something a bit more expansive that worked really well.  Chris led the exercise, and he asked everyone to put all devices away and fully focus for the next 30 minutes.  He then asked us to think of the one or two things that we should all focus on for the month. We then went around the room, one-by-one sharing a key initiative that was top of mind.  We established up front that there would be no reactions or clarifying questions to allow for seamless flow.

In the end, we had about 20 awesome ideas!  Most of them we already in flight, but we had not verbalized in the group forum that need to focus, or swarm on them to drive them to conclusion.  Afterward, we of course allowed for clarifying questions and reactions, took a break, and then dove straight into planning to define the path for April.  We now have a refreshed Kanban board for major initiatives, and shared understanding and commitment to focus and swarm as needed.

We will likely continue this practice during our next monthly meeting as a check-in and warm up for good collaboration. How are you maintaining motivation and engagement in your workplace?

July 2018

Last month in this section I talked about a neat check-in process to open up a meeting. It facilitated a form of inclusive brainstorming designed to focus the team on major initiative in progress. We then agreed as a team on which major initiatives we wanted to pursue for the month.

In this edition I want to continue the conversation about focus, and explain how we carried those ideas forward. As I have already explained, we use a digital task management board to track our work across multiple functions in the organization.  We have a Trello board called Major Initiatives and we use a Kanban system to manage our workflow.  I will likely explain more about our Kanban system for visualize workflow and task management in a later edition.  

Each of our major functions in the company has a work-in-process (WIP) limit of 3 (for now — we will of course inspect and adapt this policy as needed).  We intentionally limit our WIP in order to provide a laser focus each and every week.  For all of our daily standup meetings, we of course check-in with each other and make a plan for the day. But the main focus is on just those major initiatives, who is the owner(s), and who needs help.

The Scrum Guide, the official the official document explaining the core framework of Scrum (the most popular Agile method) prescribes three questions for teams. We have a slightly different take on the three questions model and we use it to drive our standup meeting conversation as a team.

1) What are you doing to support our current major initiatives?

2) what else are you working on that you need to share?

3) where do you need help?

This three-question model gives each and every team member a framework to focus on major initiatives that they own and identify other areas they can contribute. With only a few items in progress for each function, we can see less than 10 issues at one time, all in one place. This gives a holistic and fully transparent view of everything we are working on.  Nobody is idle, and everyone knows what to work on next. Wow, what an awesome way to get everyone rowing in the same direction!

 

August 2018

It is with a heavy heart that I announce here that I will be leaving Zenergy as a full-time employee.  Thus, this will be my last contribution to this section of our newsletter. I wanted to take this opportunity to not only bid farewell, but also to reflect a bit on teamwork.  Being a part of the Zenergy team over the past year has been a tremendous opportunity for me. One of the biggest takeaways that I have from my experience working with the core staff at Zenergy is how well a team can work together asynchronously and remotely. Being on the road nearly every week working with clients as an Agile Coach would have made keeping up with with the daily activity at Zenergy a challenge for me. However, through many of the awesome employee engagement practices and online tools that I have explored in this series, we do an excellent job of keeping all team members informed, engaged, and challenged in their work. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such an excellent team of professionals, and I look forward to taking these ideas around remote collaboration and employee engagement with me to my next opportunity and to more agile teams out there.

 

Until the Next Iteration . . .

Jason