Accelerated norming for distributed teams
Summary
The sooner a new team can norm, the sooner it delivers value to its stakeholders. When teams are distributed by default, leaders may find it challenging to accelerate team-norming. Here’s a recipe to follow.
Recognise your team’s remote work maturity. This’ll help you acknowledge how intentional your norming actions must be.
Identify norming objectives with your team. That way you identify what it’ll take for you to perform.
Consider a co-located iteration zero. That way you gain the speed and breadth of synchronous interactions and you can also build trust-based work relationships.
Develop sensible defaults so you can minimise thrashing and debate in the norming phase. Limit debates only to practices that are obvious misfits in your context.
As a bonus, adopt a predictable work rhythm during the initial months, so your team can improve their remote work maturity and move to an autonomous, flexible schedule.
In a previous post, I referred to Tuckman’s model of group development. I’ll repeat the four key steps here for convenience.
Forming - we get together as a team.
Storming - we then discover that teamwork is harder than we expected.
Norming - we discover our equilibrium and start functioning as a team.
Performing - we deliver at a high level of efficiency.
The four key stages of Tuckman’s model
Tuckman’s model is particularly important for services companies like the one I work for. At its core, our business model is to put teams of talented people in service of our clients. Our clients expect us to hit the ground like a SWAT team. Or Navy SEALs. Or a fire brigade. Pick your favourite comparison. With those client expectations, we must get from forming to norming as soon as possible. Only then can we perform at a level that our stakeholders demand.
While the need for accelerated norming is crucial for service companies, other organisations can’t ignore this requirement either. In a recessionary economy, every employer wants the most bang for their buck. Whether through company re-orgs or in the quest to explore new product and service offerings, there are new teams everywhere. You get that bang for your buck when these teams can minimise chaos during storming, speed up norming and then perform.
This is where many organisations are in a pickle. Layoffs notwithstanding, skilled talent continues to be expensive and scarce in the IT industry. To respond to stakeholders, we staff teams with talent from everywhere. It’s rare to find a team that’s not distributed. But most middle managers and team leads aren’t yet skilled at helping such teams norm. So in today’s post, I want to share some ideas about how you, as a team lead can speed up norming for your remote-first team.
Acknowledge the hard parts
When you form a team, it’s important to assess your colleagues’ and your own remote work maturity. Be prepared to be surprised, but don’t assume that just because everyone has at least three years of remote-work experience by now, they’re any good at it. There are four superpowers you must expect everyone to have if they are to be effective remote workers.
Written communication
Distraction blocking
Reading and comprehension
Working independently
The four async-first superpowers
Unfortunate as it may seem, only a few companies have helped their people cultivate these skills. So it’s likely that both you and your teammates aren’t yet the most efficient you can be when working remotely. And that’s OK. All these skills are easy to pick up, if we put our minds to them. That said, it helps to acknowledge our remote-work maturity or the lack thereof when we get together as a team.
If you have a team of champion remote workers, you can gloss over the rest of this article. If not, you and your team must agree that you’ll need deliberate actions to help you be an effective remote-first team.
Recognise your norming objectives
Abraham Lincoln
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
To ensure that you’re not aiming at a moving target, I recommend you work with your team to recognise your norming objectives. These should be the highest priority actions in the first few weeks of collaboration. While you may itch to work on your stakeholders’ problems, I suggest slowing down, instead. The dedicated time you invest in norming will pay off by accelerating your work in the future.
To get you started, here’s a checklist of goals you can build on.
High trust amongst team members.
A commitment to the team's ways of working.
A clear understanding of roles and responsibilities.
Agreement on norms for exchanging safe feedback.
Clarity about the team’s immediate and long-term goals.
Agreement on inclusive ways to achieve high decision velocity.
Well-identified, safe avenues and mechanisms to resolve conflict.
Knowledge and expertise-sharing systems and practices in place.
Visible and referenceable shared values, norms and standards of behaviours.
A shared understanding of the team’s productivity and effectiveness measures.
This is not a comprehensive list. Modify it to your context. The key is to make this list, your team’s primary focus, in the first one or two weeks after group forming. And here’s a hot tip for teams that work with clients. Your clients are part of your team! Make them part of your norming process.
Consider starting co-located
While most people want to work remotely most of the time, there’s some obvious value to meeting face-to-face. When you’re part of a newly formed team, getting face-time at the start of your working relationship can help you build trust amongst each other. Moreover, the synchronous interactions you have at this time, give you the advantage of speed and breadth. The list I shared with you above is long. It can take you a long time to address them remotely and asynchronously, especially if your remote work maturity is low. On a flat social battery, video calls can also be ineffective. Coming together for a week or two at the start can help you work through your norming objectives at speed.
So what should you do in this co-located week or fortnight? Agile teams often have an iteration zero to get their projects off the ground. Johanna Rothman defines this as “an iteration where you set up all the servers, make sure you have a release plan, develop a product backlog, and in general do all those things that ‘assure’ you that your project is ready to go”. I consider your norming objectives part of the iteration zero scope.
I understand that a fortnight of co-location can be expensive and inconvenient. Let’s address expenses first. Every remote team should have the budget to meet face-to-face, every quarter at least. Ignore this basic tenet at your peril! Team managers must build the costs of such iteration zero meetups and subsequent retreats into their team budgets.
As for the inconvenience to individuals, I advise thinking of it as business travel. The inconvenience of being away from home for a few days each quarter facilitates the convenience and autonomy of working remotely for weeks and months thereafter. Not that companies should ignore their employees' needs. Where possible, employers should support their people by providing temporary childcare facilities and other benefits, so business travel doesn’t come at a personal cost.
Develop sensible defaults
Our work constantly expands to fill the time we have available. Even a fortnight may feel adequate to achieve our norming objectives if we don’t have a method to this madness. In software development, there are many ways to skin a cat (or to crack a nut, if that's your thing). But if every team were to debate their way to finding the most suitable version of a practice for their context, norming can take forever. Consulting teams can ill-afford such thrashing around, if they have their clients’ interests at heart.
Most organisations that have existed for a while, know about versions of practices that have worked effectively on most of their projects. At Thoughtworks, we think of pair programming and test-driven development as examples of such practices, from a software development perspective. Such practices are what we know of as sensible defaults.
To help reduce the chaos that leads up to norming, companies must catalogue their sensible defaults so they’re easy to access, reference and adopt. Teams can then use these sensible defaults as their initial way of working. During iteration zero, teams can debate only the practices that may not make sense in their context. For everything else, they can start with a factory default and change it only if there’s a need in the future.
Sensible defaults can shorten the norming phase for teams
Sensible defaults can extend to both technical and non-technical aspects of work. In the screenshots above, you’ll notice that at Thoughtworks, we provide teams with starter kits for different tech stacks to get their projects up and running. There are also sensible defaults for ways of working and team norms. Such packages can simplify your iteration zero scope and help you norm at speed.
So let’s recap the four essential aspects of remote team-norming.
Assess your team’s remote work maturity.
List out your norming objectives.
Consider a co-located iteration zero that achieves these objectives
Develop sensible defaults that make your iteration zero efficient.
A prescriptive, but predictable rhythm can help build a team’s remote work maturity
As a bonus, let me reiterate some advice from the post I referenced at the start. If your team’s remote work maturity is low, then you’ll benefit from starting with a predictable rhythm of deep work and synchronous hours. Your team will learn to focus when their minds are freshest; you’ll all build your “deep work muscles”; and it’ll be easy to organise meetings when you need them. And when everyone’s honed their remote working superpowers, you can move to a more flexible schedule.