Learnings: Ask for help and help others. Nurture cooperation and have culture workshops. People shape cultures and cultures shape people.
At work, we are solving real-time customer challenges and the surrounding of telco and digital business is complex and constantly evolving. The teams I’m working with every day are building company-wide solutions and software. That means a lot of cooperation with different stakeholders and developers with a good variety of needs and requirements. At the same time, it means interaction with the brightest minds to ensure the best outcomes for all.
Finding the right people can be sometimes tricky. Instead of using organisational hierarchy-based finders, ask a quick-witted person who would they recommend being the next bright person for your problem. This takes some time, especially in big companies, but usually, within some weeks you have created a map of people who matter to your challenge. Going back to these people, and helping them in return makes the magic start to happen.
This of course applies even more to the people outside your company. As I’ve quoted a wise friend of mine before: The best ideas aren’t in your own head, they are not in your team, or not even in your company. The best ideas are out there in the minds of other bright people and they are born in cooperation when you join forces and help each other.
How to nurture cooperation
Cooperation enhancements can be grouped into three levels depending on how closely people work together.
1. Company level or outside of your company. Value other people’s time. Be well prepared and do your homework when asking for help and cooperation. Use visualizations and concrete examples of your challenge, and be very clear on what you want the other person to give input to. With good preparation quite often within 30 minutes, you are able to explain your matter and give the other person enough time for feedback and guidance. This kind of user test logic with only one person at a time works often, even though sometimes you need more co-creation and a bigger and longer workshop.
2. Within collaborating teams. Invest time in culture workshops and in building encouraging interaction when developing cooperation within teams working in the same area. I’ll open up the concept of culture workshops below.
3. Team level. Use lean and agile methods to support day-to-day cooperation, making it more like drinking water or breathing than anything special. Let the people themselves decide the best ways of methodological support, whether to use sprints, kanban of hybrid, live or remote etc. without forgetting retros and demos to keep the learning curve going up. You know these basics.
All levels. Share your learnings as often as you can. Help others as often as you can. Be inspired and try to inspire others.
Collaborating teams benefit from culture workshops
The culture workshops are for bringing people together from different areas of expertise and letting them share best practices and pain points. It’s funny how it’s often easier to give advice to someone else than to see your own fix clearly. The teams I’m working with every day have many types of expertise from deep tech to business solutions and design. One of the teams is developing a common digital identity across all the businesses and services with 360 views of the customer, one team company-wide authentication, single sign-on and new methods like Mobile ID v2, and one team is developing Elisa’s Design System and unified user experience.
These teams have similar kinds of challenges, how to develop cooperation, align thinking and form shared development goals with many teams around the company. How to get people to participate at the same time in the development with teams with their own backlogs and priorities. These teams also have the same kind of reasons for joy. With company-wide solutions, the impact can be huge for example with better customer experience for hundreds of thousands of customers. Also often many other teams are working for the same goal, so the shared joy of success is within reach.
A culture workshop aims for focused time together with shared learnings and concrete ideas for improving ways of working and cooperation. I facilitated the last two-hour culture workshop myself, but I’ve learned a lot about these methods over the years from the best Sami Kallinen from 8-bit-sheep. This time we started with Give a compliment -post-its because complimenting each other is important at work and in life in general. Then we listened to three short inspiring speeches prepared beforehand. During the speeches and for enhancing ways of working we used Start-more-keep-less-stop -Starfish and post-its filled first individually. Then the findings were shared in mixed teams and then with the whole group. Sharing with the whole group brings new ideas for the other teams as well. Lastly, everyone chose their own post-its to carry enhancements further if they felt like it.
The culture workshops are for increasing the happiness of the participants, and that’s why also some fun activities, like paper plane throwing contests, are in place. For all talking about happiness and emotions at work might not be the most comfortable topic. But we are not as rationable as we think we are. Quite often our feelings and emotions lead us more than our thinking. That’s why focusing on our individual happiness is a very rationable thing to do and will help us work better together. When we can be who we are, and feel secure in sharing vulnerabilities, we are often able to create better ideas and solutions together.
Getting to know each other better, sharing experiences and building trust are at the core of culture workshops. In this last workshop for example brilliant Kristofer Pasanen shared learnings and failures from his past career in software development with media companies, and from his current work as Design System PO. The Design System itself aims for helping others to succeed easier, faster and in an accessible way, in what they are developing, so a spot-on topic for a culture workshop. Leading our emotions is also a perfect topic for a culture workshop and once I’ve had, at least in my eyes, the best Finnish speaker about emotions in work-life Camilla Tuominen sharing her learnings.
A culture workshop aims for creating more like campfire conversations instead of bullet point meetings, in a similar way that Jitske Kramer talked about in NBF this year. “People shape cultures, cultures shape people.” Kramer listed skills that are needed in these days of uncertainty: openness, acceptance, personal autonomy, emotional strength and creative power. She summed up that cultural transformation is about new collective patterns of thoughts, beliefs and behaviours. She also elevated the concept of Power Love, with Power having goal-oriented, results, setting boundaries and rebellious in it, and Love consisting of relation-oriented, connecting, trusting and holistic ways. I find these to be very good guidelines for culture workshops and in work-life in general.
The importance of joint actions and having some love in the interactions have been very clear to me during the first year at Elisa. I shared some learnings already in a blog after the first 100 days, but the emphasis on people and joy has become even clearer. There have been many great people who have chipped in ideas and concrete contributions in different areas of development. The willingness to share knowledge and learnings has blown my mind, and I’m thankful for all the conversations and people. If you want to continue chatting about these topics please send me a message on Linkedin or Twitter. Thanks for reading and have a lovely wintertime!
Photo of Kristofer Pasanen and Eija Moisala is taken by Anssi Pehrsson.
Small experiments and inspiration 