Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I'm not sure what time it is where you all are, but excited to have you here today and really excited about this topic today.So, um, again, if you, if you're willing to put in the chat where you're where you're calling in from today, and we're gonna get started here just right at the top of the hour, um, in just a second. And, um, and then, uh, hopefully there'll be a couple of minutes there at the end, uh, for questions, but if not, I've put my linkedin connection information in the chat. I'll do that again, uh toward the end. Um But please connect with me on linkedin. There's one little trick about connecting with me on, on linkedin. Um And I'll share that with you now. Uh So when you hit the connect to connect with me on linkedin because of the mode that I'm in in linkedin, they've changed things around. So you have to click the more button to actually connect with me. There's a follow button which you can do. But if you, but you want to connect with me, just click that more button and then there's a connection request there. So tell me that you saw me here, I would love to connect with you. And if there are any questions that I don't get to um because we have such limited time together today, I would be happy to answer those questions for you uh via linkedin.

So please connect with me on, on linkedin there. And I try to share a few actionable tips for you on Tuesdays or thought provokers. So um would love to have you uh with me there on linkedin. Um Welcome, welcome to you all. Uh My name is Nicky Evans and I run Ridgeline coaching and I am super excited to be here with you today. I have 20 plus years of technology leadership experience in various different roles. Like I've been part of tons, tons of all of the jobs that you can have in in technology I've had in some way or another or worked for or reported to one of those jobs in one way or another. So um excited to be here and working with you all. I was one of those people that was always kind of raising my hands to try something new. So I got to do a lot of different jobs in technology, which is really amazing. Um And uh so excited to talk to you today about team culture and rebooting team culture. And really even if you're not the leader of a team, certainly to reboot organizational culture and to really make a huge change in, in organizational culture and culture overall, you definitely want to have leadership buy in to what you're doing.

But I think uh you've got some pretty practical things that you can do even on your, on your local team in a, in a local level to try to make work better because I'm on a mission to make work work better. I think we spend way too much time with each other working either physically or remotely, but way too many of our working hours with coworkers to have that be such a miserable experience. And I know that many people are either frustrated or starting to burn out uh with current roles. And I think that if we can, if we can make some small adjustments, we can make that work better. So that's what I'm gonna talk to you about today and specifically what can you do to reboot team culture. So let's start with what is it, what is culture? So I am defining culture here as the customs, arts, social institutions, achievements of a particular group. So when you think about culture, this is shared values that you have together. It's the stories that you share together. It's how you, how you behave, what kinds of things you like, what kinds of things you do, what behaviors are accepted and what behaviors are not accepted.

And so I really want your help now to um to let me know, I've got people from all over the world. So this is gonna be really great for us to hear from each other. Um What when you think about culture, what kind of things come to mind for you? And specifically when you think about your culture at work, what do you think your work culture is? And this can be either globally your company culture, what's in your mission statement or your vision statements? But also what do you think your team culture is? What words would you use to describe your culture at work? I'm really curious. So I'm gonna give you a couple of seconds and chat to first an inclusive. Awesome siloed. Yeah. Yeah. Values. We hold. OK. Collaborative. Great, great, great, some really good cultures out there, some really good cultures, some that are not so great and that's why you're here. Fantastic.

So there's gonna be some things that we can tell you to do about it and even with great cultures, sometimes looking for tweaks to those cultures can help and or celebrating what's actually great about the culture and recognizing it so that as you get new people, people are leaving and coming into organizations and droves now.

So as people are entering and exiting, how are you sharing those values? How are you making sure the ones that you care about collaboration and flexibility and you know, openness are staying and how do you avoid the miscommunication and the um issues that some people were talking about that they have in their culture, not great culture. So what are, what are some of those things that you want to make sure are preserved in your culture? If you've got a great one? And what are some of those things if your culture is not so great that you're hoping will start to change? And what can you do? And I think another reason to start looking at, why would we care about looking at culture now is because when the pandemic happened, the work from home, uh culture shifted from about 6% of people who regularly work from home to about 75% of people who regularly work from home.

And right now, we're seeing that there is now a mix of people who are working from home and some, some people are back to offices exclusively. Some people are back to sometimes in the office, sometimes not. And so it's also important to look at that culture if you have an open collaborative culture. Um How does that get expressed when some people are at home? And some people are in an office? It did it change when everybody went home and started working from home, is it going to change again when you go back to a a more communal space? So your pictures might be reversed in this, right? Some people love working from home uh and don't want to go back to the office felt felt the uh felt like the second picture was more representative of how they feel working in the office. But it's important to kind of recognize that some of you feel one way and some of you feel another way. And so even though you are in the same environment, maybe have the same goals, maybe are part of the same team, your experience of that team may be different.

And so in your needs, your personal needs about what the team is and what the team culture is may be different. And so that's part of understanding how to reboot a culture is really understanding what is the culture that we have. Would we all agree if you ask your coworkers, do we have an open collaborative, flexible work environment? Would they all agree with you? Do some of your coworkers maybe think that you do have a pretty good environment, but maybe they're not marginalized in the same way that you are. And so they're not doing any work to try to reboot a culture because they don't see a problem with a culture that you find really difficult to navigate in. So that's another thing that, you know, we can look at as far as culture goes, but I do have a lot to get to. So I wanna make sure I'm gonna move pretty fast. But like I said, there's an opportunity to connect with me uh through linkedin. And if I don't answer a question, we'd be happy to follow up with you on linkedin. So as a framework for thinking about a positive culture at work, you need safety, you need the ability to be vulnerable and you need some sort of common purpose with one another.

So those are cornerstones and I'm not gonna get too deep into exactly all of the things that can go into those cornerstones. But what I will say is that there are some components that you can start to, you know, as you, as you look at safety, some of that is communications, some of that is understanding, strengths and struggles. There are other things that go in those buckets as you keep unpacking that. Um And then with vulnerability and with purpose. So I'm gonna talk to you about three of those things today because I don't have time to go through all five. But I'm gonna talk to you today about communications, gratitude and team agreements as three areas that you can start to impact change in your team. Um So communication is kind of the first one. And I think that this is a problem at Harvard Business has said that 87% of business issues are caused by miscommunication. And I would argue and that study is pretty old. So I would argue it's still at least that much and maybe even more today. Um especially with hybrid work with not being able to really see each other's body language and community.

Even if we're doing zoom meetings, you know, sometimes you're only seeing this much of somebody's face or you're not really seeing all of the you can't take in all of the visual information we've talked about. I'm sure many of you have just fatigued being on zoom because there's so much information to take in that it's difficult sometimes to be aware of all of the cues around you. So we wanna make sure that we are addressing challenges with communication. This is a framework that I'm gonna introduce you to, to think about your needs for communication and think about on your team. What are some other needs for communication? Now, I have a whole talk and a whole series that I can do on just this piece. But in order to give you some practical things that you can do starting today or tomorrow or when you're finished with the conference to start improving communication on your team. I want you to use this kind of framework to think about. Do I tend to think and speak quickly sort of that fast pace or do I tend to be more reflective and more careful about how I think about things? So where, where do you think you fall kind of on that spectrum? It is very close to the disc quadrants. If you know where your disc quadrant is, this is gonna be very close to overlay to that.

And if you think about it in terms of what do you need from a communication standpoint, this is just gonna help you figure out those coworkers that you find really exhausting to talk to. And sometimes it's because they have a different communication need and style than you do.

And it's especially difficult to deal to communicate well with people that are at a diagonal from you in that spectrum. Um, because that's where the, um, that's where the most flex occurs, right? Because if you're, if you're fast paced, then you're gonna do a little bit better with, with each other. Um If you're both results oriented, then you'll do a little bit better with each other. But across the spectrum now, I've got somebody that moves carefully and is more relationally focused versus somebody who's faster paced and more results focused. So this quadrant just gives you a little bit of thinking about where might you fall and where might some of the people on your team fall in terms of need for information. We're often coached to give our leaders this kind of information, this goal setting just give them bullets and options, bottom line, everything for them. But some leaders really like that additional detail and analysis. And so they ask a lot of really difficult questions and they want to dig into the details and the analysis. Sometimes that's that need for information coming out. People with a stability focus, really want to feel safe, they want to know that they're doing it right.

They want to have the instructions. I would say people in both the information and stability quadrants here will be, will prefer to have an agenda for a meeting. They want to know where the meeting is going. They want to know where to go to find additional information. They want to make sure that they're doing things right. Where people that are in the goal setting and lifestyle tend to wing it a little bit more, tend to be more comfortable thinking out loud speaking while they're thinking where you're more careful, folks will think and then maybe won't share anything in a meaning if they don't think it's additive, if it's already been said, they won't feel the need to say it again.

Whereas if your lifestyle and goal setter, people hear somebody else say it, they, they might add on to it or they might say it again because they were, they were busy processing themselves um and say it again. So I think being aware of where are your needs so that you can talk to your team about where your needs are and what you need. And then how might you flex your style to meet somebody else's style? The second area I'm gonna talk about around vulnerability is also gratitude and studies have shown that gratitude has amazing, amazing benefits like it extends your willpower, it helps you counter stress and anxiety. Who doesn't want more of that? Um It helps keep teams motivated and increases productivity when people feel like they're making a difference. And people are grateful for the work that they're doing, it reduces turnover and it can even improve your reputation. The more generous you are with gratitude, the, the more your reputation can improve. So there was a study on college campuses of this where there was a um a sorority that did a Little Sisters Week and those little sisters that were gifted things by their big sisters, um, respected and liked and had a better um image of those big sisters after receiving these, these gifts in, in um Little Sister Week.

So a couple of ideas for you, you're not the team leader or you are the team leader and you're thinking, what can I do handwrit? Thank you. Notes are universally things that people have treasured in organizations that I've worked in or in organizations around. So can you just handwrite somebody a thank you note if you're in the office with them, that's pretty easy to deliver. Um Is there a way that you can get handwrit? Thank yous written for people. Um Sometimes in meetings. Um I, I actually at a meeting one time just brought a bunch of blank. Thank you notes and put each team member's name at the top and then I gave the team time to just write a thank you, write something that they appreciate about their team member on those cards. So everybody left with a thank you card full of things that their coworkers appreciate about them and, and the team kept those cards that meant something to them. You could also just have the team start a meeting with. Tell me something good, tell me something good that's going on in your life. So you are expressing gratitude for something that's a about you or about something that's going on with you.

But it helps give the whole team a sense of that shared gratitude and excitement for sharing in the good things that are happening on the team. One other exercise, I'll give you and I know I'm going through this pretty fast, but I wanna get all the way through all my stuff. Um is you can um as a team agree that you're going to choose a name out of a hat, choose somebody on the team. And then secretly you're gonna do something to make that person's job easier for a month or for two weeks or for three months. And so you secretly do whatever thing it is that you think will make your coworker's job easier. And then at the end of whatever that time period is that you uh allotted at the beginning, they, you and you write down what it is that you're doing to try to make their job easier. At the beginning, you seal an envelope and then they get presented with that envelope at the end of the time they have to try to guess what was it that you were doing to try to make their job easier?

A couple of things happen when you do this exercise, one, you're on the lookout for good things. So everybody is attuned to what good things are happening to me and it changes the, the um environment of the team because people are not on the lookout for what's going wrong, but they're on the lookout for what's going right. And often when we get into the shares of the debrief of that, what we hear is about things that coworkers were doing that um that they didn't even intend to do. Like if I'm on the lookout for you doing things to be helpful to me. I often list many more things than what you were actually doing to be helpful to me because I've been on the lookout for that. So that's a quick way um to change some team culture if you are, if you're looking to do that. And then the third thing around um changing culture in small ways that you can start to address is through your team agreements. And I think specifically in times when you've got a lot of new team members joining or when you're in a hybrid situation for work, you need to go back and re look at your team agreements. How are you going to communicate with each other?

What are the agreements around when you're available with each other. How do you connect with each other? When is that? OK. What methods are? OK. What tools and technology are you going to use for connection with one another as a team? How are you gonna handle conflict on your team? Can you be overt about some of these agreements? I would say if you many teams don't have overt agreements about this, there's an implied sense of what's OK to say and not say that when to email and when not to email, we're often looking at leaders to see what they do and then mimic that behavior. Even if the leader says the words, I don't expect you to answer email after 11. If they're consistently doing that or somebody else on the team does it and then consistently gets rewarded. That's a different message than what was said. So can you, can you codify some of those agreements that you have for your team when you're available? What are meetings going to look like and specifically with meetings? I think, think about what's your default meeting mindset. Um How do you structure meetings? Um who gets to talk in meetings? Where do people sit in meetings? Is there an agenda for meetings? Who gets input on that agenda? Um What does your team actually need from you or from this meeting?

If you have a standing meeting that nobody's getting value from, if you have a weekly status meeting, that you're all putting a ton of effort into, but nobody reads after the meeting. Is that a meeting that you actually have to have, um what are the norms around your meeting? Or is it always the same three people that are presenting? Is it always the same two topics that come up? But nothing ever happens with them? So, really thinking about what's your mindset around meetings as a team? And can you come up with some um agreements about what you want? And I would say you can just start looking at one meeting at a time. What, what do we do about this meeting? What do we do about that meeting? So small changes can actually change culture. When you start behaving differently with your team, it's a small change in the culture and it creates other small changes. So again, if you're, if you get people on the lookout for looking for moments of gratitude for looking for things that you appreciate, if you share with somebody, uh what you really appreciate about them, they might not know, people often will miss out on things that are just easy for them.

And that's something maybe that you really admire in them. If you tell a team member, I really admire this about you, then it's something that they'll remember and maybe something that they'll try to do more of. And so you want to reinforce good behavior that you're seeing. So where things are collaborative are you thanking each other for being collaborative and flexible. Are you acknowledging that that's part of the culture when new people come into the team? Are you helping make that possible? So I wanna make you two offers today. I went through stuff super fast. There's a ton of information here. Um But I have for you a meeting agreement worksheet. So some questions that you can ask of yourself or of your team to come up with better agreements around your meetings. So you can get that download if you're interested in that or if you're not sure where you would have fallen on that communication discovery, I can do, I can share a communication discovery for you. So with that communication discovery, um you can uh get your own report right away and um sorry and uh see um where you fall. So I'm gonna stick those uh those links in the chat here. And thank you so much for your time today. I know it was there was a lot to share, but I'm hoping that you walked away with at least one thing that you can do today tomorrow the next day that will help you shift culture on your team and reboot a little bit of your team culture.

So if you're taking something away, can you just give me a yes or a thumbs up and chat? Is there something that you're taking away that was valuable for you today? I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much.