Rebuilding a Team after COVID

Connecting

With this explosive growth, however, we also experienced some growing pains.

Our team had been colocated in San Francisco prior to the pandemic, but now we had Designers across the US (San Francisco, New York, Austin, Los Angeles and Boston) and Brazil (São Paulo) — and most of them had never met in person. Designers were commonly staffed cross-regionally, and the first few days of a new case could be pretty tough. Not only were the Designers getting to know their Innovation and General Consulting teammates, they were also getting to know each other for the first time.

Sensing the disconnection amongst the team, I started to ideate on possible ways to foster a better culture amongst our Design Team. Up until that point, our weekly “Design Labs” meetings primarily consisted of a pipeline update, a quick status update from each person/team on what they were working on, and any other pertinent announcements. People were encouraged to share photos from their weekends in a Slack thread, which we’d share during the meeting, but the thread was often easily buried in other conversations, and the frequency was hard to keep up with (especially during a pandemic when every weekend was eerily similar to the last).

So, during one of our weekly Design Labs meetings, I held a brainstorming session to gather ideas from the team themselves - what sorts of new things they wanted to try, what things they wanted to keep, and what needed to go. It was very clear that our team not only wanted professional connection — training/learning content, case shares, design critiques, etc. — but they also wanted personal connection — sharing recent photos, team fun/games, and even just space to learn about each other.

From this brainstorm, the Design Labs Shared Space and Content Calendar were born.

During the pandemic, our team had enthusiastically embraced Miro for a lot of our case-related work and client workshops. When I was considering the best way to “bring us all together,” it seemed like a natural tool to consider, and so I created the Design Labs Shared Space Miro board. Within it, I made an area for Designers to share recent photos and a space to collect links, articles, images, etc. that we found inspiring or interesting. I also created a “Stretch Check” for the team - allowing us to easily communicate in a low-effort, low-stakes way how we were feeling about work. As a team, it was decided to alternate weeks between Recent Photos and Stretch Check, so there was less pressure to take photos every weekend, and the overall meeting would have more time for various types of content.

To inaugurate the Shared Space and bring the team together more personally, I also hosted a special “Getting to Know You” edition of the weekly Design Labs meeting, where we used cartoon avatars of ourselves to answer questions like “Where are you from?” and “What kind of designer do you consider yourself?”

Through these Monday Design Labs meetings, our team has been able to connect across the Americas, leading to a greater sense of camaraderie amongst the team, as witnessed by some of the comments in our 2022 Design Labs retrospective.

In true "agile” fashion, the Content Calendar began as a backlog of topics and ideas for our Design Labs meetings. Any topic that has an owner is moved into “Ready for Scheduling,” where I then find a spot for it within our upcoming meetings, which are laid out in a calendar format within the Shared Space.

Since its inception, the Shared Space has evolved to also include Welcome messages for new teammates, Birthday and Promotion celebration cards (with lots of memes!), mini-workshops, design challenges and ice breaker activities for guest teams (such as our counterparts in EMEA) and other activities.