Everyone Contributes

Instead of relying on hierarchical management, organizations must create systems and channels where everyone can equally consume and contribute information, regardless of level, function, or location.

If people don’t have the opportunity to contribute because of their background, where they live, or their stage of life, we miss out not only on team members’ valuable perspectives but also on the creative solutions and essential productivity each provides.

When building a foundation for equal contributions, the goal is to create a model where everyone can contribute, but not everyone is required to contribute. This is especially important when preparing for decision making. Anyone is welcome to voice their ideas and opinions, but requiring universal consensus prior to implementation undermines operational efficiency.

Action tenets of facilitating equal contributions, including real-world examples of each, are below.

Asynchronous workflows

Working asynchronously does more than free up calendar space. TeamOps prioritizes asynchronous communication as a way of enabling equal opportunities for team members to participate in conversations, receive updates, share insights, or deliver results no matter where or when they are working. In conventional organizations, information exchanges are tightly linked to meetings, which severely limits contributions to only those who are in attendance and are comfortable in a live, spontaneous discussion dynamic.

Instead of spending time scouring schedules and time zone differences to discuss something synchronously, shift the focus to creating clear documentation that will allow team members to contribute both on their own time and with greater intentionality. This gives agency, reinforces a bias for action, and bridges the knowledge gap, resulting in more total iterations.

Establishing a thriving asynchronous culture also requires leaders to celebrate incremental improvements and fight the urge to seek immediate gratification. To do this, they can encourage their team to strive for iteration; transparency; and progress, not perfection.

Directly responsible individual (DRI)

In organizations practicing TeamOps, every project or decision has a single directly responsible individual (DRI). Assigning this person is crucial. The DRI is the person solely responsible for a project’s success or failure. To be clear: that person isn’t responsible for doing all of the work; the DRI is simply the ultimate decision-maker.

This decision-making model combines beneficial dynamics from both hierarchical and consensus-guided organizations. It opens decisions to a wider collection of voices and perspectives while avoiding unclear expectations and delays that might result from having too many people involved in reaching a conclusion.

Leaders must foster a culture where DRIs are empowered, able to escalate to unblock, and willing to share their ideas in the open. This unlocks the team’s highest potential. A successful DRI should consult and collaborate with all teams and stakeholders and welcome input from a broad range of diverse perspectives as they form their thoughts.

It’s important to note that TeamOps still allows flexibility for team members to disagree, commit, and disagree, but it reduces the risk that disagreement or dissent will prevent a bias for action.

Well-managed meetings

Even though TeamOps teams prioritize asynchronous workflows, it still treats synchronous discussions as a critical element of organizational operations. Well-managed meetings maximize the efficiency and productivity that shared time permits, so meetings shouldn’t just be gatherings of people for a conversation. They should be a resource for decisions and tasks that are best made with immediate feedback and collaboration from multiple people. This means that any conversations that could be facilitated asynchronously should be, including unidirectional presentations, company announcements, results reporting, and brainstorming.

Documenting parameters for meeting management and participation help maximize the investment of time for all participants, and prevent meeting fatigue throughout the company. These guidelines could include rituals such as 25- or 50-minute “speedy meetings”, mandatory agendas, or thorough note taking in a live doc.

When working with external teams, follow our three main points to foster communication and education regarding our shared values.

Cross-functional collaboration

To address the challenge cross-functional execution at high velocity, TeamOps advocates a stable counterparts model. It works like this: every functional team (e.g., Support) works with the same team members from a different functional team (e.g., Development), so each member of one function always knows who their partner in another function will be. Stable counterparts enable greater trust and familiarity across the organization, which in turn speed up decision making, facilitate stronger communication flows, and reduce the risk of conflicts.

In addition to standard communication channels, recurring opportunities dedicated exclusively to updates and knowledge sharing can help optimize awareness, questions, and feedback about an ongoing project. These Key Review Meetings allow a functional group to stay updated on and discuss essential success measurements, such as: progress towards goals such as OKRs and KPIs, blocked tasks, new assignments, workstream changes, etc.

In conventional organizations, this is apt to be a more informal conversation between a department head and their manager. Broadening the audience of attendees for a Key Review Meeting—to include, for example, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the function head, stable counterparts, and (optionally) all other executives and their direct reports—broadens the pool of people who can contribute feedback, insights, and advice. It also forces the presenting department to be more mindful of execution, consider areas where they are falling short, and gather input for potential iterations toward progress.

Similarly, cross-departmental conversations—known as Group Conversations within GitLab—can provide the same visibility and inclusion to other projects and teams, to help consider how a project may impact OKRs for teams throughout the organization. Such recurring meetings offer regular updates across all teams on a rotating schedule. It’s the same concept and content as key review meetings with one major difference: all team members are invited! These meetings are designed to give the entire workforce context on what other teams outside of their own are focused on (and how they’re executing). In this way, TeamOps stresses that execution isn’t solely about executing your own goals; it’s about understanding what and how others are executing, too.

Stable counterparts, key review meetings, and cross-departmental conversations help keep operational pace, policies, and practices consistent throughout the organization, while also fostering a sense of inclusion.

Tool prioritization

In virtual-first environments, software becomes the shared workplace – instead of an office, it’s a new, digital location for information to be shared, results to be stored, and team members to collaborate together. The tool stacks that comprise these work environments can often be infrastructures built from a combination of dozens (or even hundreds!) of tools.

To create an efficient navigation experience and prevent information overload for your team members, it’s important to classify and prioritize each of the tools that you use. In TeamOps, three categories are recommended:

• Primary – Your core digital infrastructure, or the few tools that all of your staff members use every day and have full public access to.
• Supplemental – Tools that enhance the user experience of one of your primary tools or provide a niche functionality for certain departments. For example, bots that you might integrate into an asynchronous communication platform (like Slack), or graphic design software for the marketing department.
• Substitute – Tools to use instead of the primary tool for certain scenarios. Use these sparingly to prevent redundant costs and conflicting sources of truth.

Psychological safety

An organization’s speed of decision-making slows dramatically if its members are worried about sharing their thoughts quickly and honestly. This hesitation typically stems from an absence of trust or fear of conflict, which are two of the five dysfunctions of a team.

Adopting a TeamOps mentality means having short toes and feeling comfortable with feedback, suggestions, and contributions to the work you “own.” It also means speaking up when you see an opportunity for iteration. Eliminating a territorial mindset allows for better collaboration, greater diversity of thought, and ultimately faster decisions.

Adopting a TeamOps mentality means providing the psychological safety necessary for all team members to feel confident while sharing ideas, giving transparent feedback, owning impactful project decisions, and managing themselves independently. Eliminating a territorial mindset allows for better collaboration, greater diversity of thought, and ultimately faster results.

To create stronger psychological safety in a virtual-first team, try communication-based tactics, such as:

• Create internal catchphrases and code words to use as reinforcing language
• Leverage shared values and informal communication to express care, get to know your team members’ various working styles, and remind your team what they have in common
• Provide positive feedback when you see courageous behaviors and impressive contributions, just as much as you provide constructive feedback when you see results that need improvement
• Create time and prompts in both synchronous and asynchronous channels for collaborative support and questions
• Include conflict resolution training in both onboarding and leadership development curriculum