Rebuilding your team culture to support wellbeing

Hello, I'm Erin Shrimpton. I'm a chartered organisational psychologist and an expert in workplace behavior change. I work as a consultant and coach with people, teams, and leaders and I help them to change their experience of work for the better.

In this lecture, I want to focus on how to rebuild your team culture to promote well-being. I want to give us this time to think about how things have changed for us in our team cultures, particularly in terms of how we operate. Actually how taking a bit of time out to think this through with your team could be the key to helping them to manage their well-being effectively. We'll define what we mean by culture and ways of working and then we'll really hone in on rethinking or even simply rearticulating your team routine.

First, I want to start with an interesting piece of research. Researchers Hackman and Wageman, both experts and professors of work psychology, and in particular, focusing on the design of work, put together a model back in 2005 that's had quite the resurgence since our ways of working changed so drastically in 2020, but first, let's talk about what they found and then we'll talk about why it's had such a resurgence. They tested out different predictors of team success, and they found something interesting about the ratio. They found that 60% of a team's effectiveness is based on the pre-work in designing the ways of working in the team. They then found that 30% of the team success is down to how that's launched and simply, 10% is down to your day-to-day coaching as a leader. I think most people would find that quite surprising because we know that coaching is such an important part of managing and encouraging our people and our teams to succeed. I will talk later about why I believe it is a very important 10%, but this research has had a resurgence recently because Tsedal Neeley, who is a Harvard Business Professor, wrote a book called "The Remote Work Revolution". In that book, she talks more broadly about this too. She cites this research and talks about how in light of our current context and how things have changed so much over the last few years and in order to set up successful virtual and hybrid teams, we need to be thinking about what happens before we start the work. She says that the biggest predictor of a team's success is of course, what happens before you start the work, how you set it up, and how you contract with each other to make it work. This is important for successful outcomes as a team of course, but it's also a big factor in managing well-being, particularly as we all discussed today, when you give people on your team more autonomy to work out the ways of working that work best for them. This is all very interesting in theory, but unfortunately, nothing stops to let you have time to do this pre-work, does it? I wish I could give you a magic wand and stop work for two or three weeks so that you could really sit down and think about this, but unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Not only that, but you as managers and team leaders have been the ones leading this big transition in how we work since 2020. I always think of this analogy when I think of the role of the people leader over the last few years. I imagine Serena Williams arriving at Wimbledon and the organizers telling her that her racket was lost in transit and telling her not to worry, but handing her a cricket bat instead and wishing her luck in winning the title. Well, I think this is a lot like what has happened to managers and team leaders over the past few years. When virtual working became the norm, the way you lead people at work changed dramatically, but the work was still there, targets still to be met, tournaments still to be won. We have to have a fundamental rethink about how we work, how we manage ourselves in this new world work and how we're managing our teams. A great way to do this is to have a look at how you operate as a team, how you give agency in this new working routine, and how you work that out together. One that works for everyone of course or one at least that you're all happy to experiment with, but we have to do that in a way that is manageable for you as a team leader and for your team, given all the demands that you already have.