This article has been indexed from The Duo Blog
From knocking out high-velocity sprints to successfully delivering key features, everyone on the Endpoint Health team here at Duo really feels like they’ve hit their stride. Handling customer issues quickly and efficiently, and having in-depth, successful technical conversations have become normal, expected occurrences within the team, which provides us with a great sense of accomplishment. Looking at these things together, we asked ourselves why. What have we been doing well that produced successive sprints and left us feeling accomplished and proud of our team’s work?
The answer wasn’t just one thing, but rather a combination of factors among our team that have contributed to our success. Even better, these factors aren’t unique to our team; they’re as relevant for engineers as they are for a creative team, customer support, and everyone in between.
There’s no single, easy answer, but we think we’ve found some of the reasons we love working together. Ensuring effective communication, fostering a sense of ownership over your product, and maintaining a general sense of positivity all work together to create a successful, cohesive team.
Communication is Key
Communication now, more than ever, is vital to our daily operations as a team. Word choices can make all the difference in fostering team unity. Using “we” and “us” instead of “I” and “me” can make successes feel bigger and failures feel smaller. For example, instead of saying “When I worked on the feature,” you could instead say, “When we worked on the feature.” This language switch helps to solidify a unified front as a team, where everyone feels recognized for their contributions to the product overall.
An easy way to make this kind of communication more natural to nurture the personal connections between everyone on the team. The microinteractions throughout a normal day in the office have disappeared, and video calls have seemingly been forced into all-business mode. This change to remote work removes a lot of the “chit chat” that naturally happens in a workspace, so it’s important to encourage any level of non-work-related conversations that happen during video chats. For example, we’ve added a weekly “icebreaker” to our first standup of the week — it helps us get to know each other better and find common interests.
When people feel a pers
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Read the original article: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Why We Thrive on Collaboration