Written by Starting a new job is exciting but it’s always hard. You need to find your feet, figure out who is who, and who does what, what your immediate priorities are, how they fit with the wider organisation, what’s the expected standard, etc. It’s even harder when you’re based at home and your whole team is remote and you have never met them before.
Now add a career pivot to the mix (it’s my first role in tech, coming from corporate responsibility) … during a global pandemic. It’s information overload galore!
Sometimes we forget that our jobs aren’t just a sequence of tasks to get stuff done. We’re people, not resources. It’s just as much about how we manage our energy levels, how we absorb information, the different types of work and focus required, and of course the people we work with.
I joined the LexisNexis Legal & Professional (LNLP) Engineering team about three months ago. There’s just three of us. But that doesn’t automatically make things easy. For starters, we’re distributed across three different time zones, which means a fair bit of adaptation and being mindful of each other’s local contexts: is my colleague still on their very first cup of coffee? (and is now really a good time to go through an endless to-do list?) are they having a longer day today so they can accommodate an important meeting? do I really need to send that email or IM right now or can it wait?
Then there’s the fact that the three of us are an assortment of completely different personalities, make up four nationalities between us, have divergent life and career experiences, and our brains function in different ways, across varying degrees of introversion and extroversion. That means that we all need to make an effort in the way we communicate. It’s easy for us to misunderstand, or even disagree, with each other even though we may all be saying the same thing (sound familiar?).
We are putting a lot of focus on gelling as a team, and working as a dynamic unit that leverages the variety of perspectives, insights and skills we all bring to the table. To do so, we’ve established our team ways of working, which we are still defining and refining. From my perspective as being new to Engineering and to LexisNexis (even though I come from RELX, LNLP’s parent company) this has been a game changer. Two practices that have really stood out for me are our daily standdown and having a laser focus on identifying and organising different types of work.
The standdown
The daily standdown has been instrumental for us in creating a high level of psychological safety in the team. For one, rather than sharing what we got done, we share what we have learned. This varies a lot for each of us every day, and can include things like a technical skill, something happening in the organisation, getting to know a colleague’s priorities or pain points, or a task that turned out to be more challenging than anticipated. This means that the emphasis lies on continuous learning, and therefore always entails a level of experimentation. And within that, it’s deemed safe to share what didn’t go to plan. The important thing is that we’re using the learning to identify a way forward.
The standdown also covers what we look forward to and how we feel. It’s a place to celebrate as well as to express frustration, fatigue or anxiety, and to acknowledge and reflect on those emotions. Spelling this out is not only cathartic, it also offers an opportunity to check in on each other and to ask if someone’s OK, or to do a virtual high-five. Onboarding into a new job can be a rollercoaster and having this space to share the good, the bad and the ugly has felt incredibly supportive.
Defining and organising types of work
The other practice I’d like to highlight is around labelling and organising our time. We make a distinction between manager time, focus time and maker time.
The three of us do very different jobs. How the various types of work time are distributed across a typical week is unique to each member of the team. What’s important here is that we proactively think about how we are spending our time in the first place, and that we consider how each type of activity affects both our energy levels and our personal impact at work (beyond the to-do list).
Manager time spent coordinating and collaborating with others, attending meetings and making connections is hugely important in a global organisation like LNLP. But it can be draining, particularly if you’re introverted, and it doesn’t always help with getting things done. So what do you do to balance that out? Do you block some dedicated slots in your calendar for maker time coding, or writing for example? Do you identify the quieter times in your day where it is fine to leave your inbox alone for a bit to do some deep thinking and research during some focus time?
We do all of the above. Of course it’s not always easy - things come up, someone might need your help, or maybe you have just too much on your mind on a given day to fully focus. But even just going through a process where I proactively label types of work in my mind, or where I allocate some calendar slots for the upcoming week has given me an improved sense of ownership and self-determination. In turn it has had a positive impact not just on how I feel at work, but also my productivity overall.
Your team can be your superpower, especially in these strange new times. How will you leverage it?
