Meggie Ladlow

creative development

Culture Workshop

NOTE: This is a copy of a blog post on the United Engineering blog, which is now defunct. It was originally posted on Medium.

The culture and values of an organization or team are tremendously important. They inform how (and whether) a team functions and govern interactions amongst team members and outsiders.

While there are innumerable writings on why culture and values are important, as well as how to change them, it’s difficult to find tactical information about how to enumerate the culture of an organization or group.

As the engineering team at United Income has grown and team members have changed, we realized that we’d never been explicit about communicating our values and how they inform our team culture. In early 2019, as we began planning to grow the team, we thought it would be useful to make our culture and values more explicit. Unfortunately, we weren’t sure where to start.

We did know for one thing that part of our culture is our innovation sprints. Each quarter, we stop our normal work for a week to focus on fun projects that may only be tangentially related to the company. For our second innovation sprint of 2019, we decided to spend some time as a team reflecting on our values and culture. Two engineers designed and facilitated a half-day workshop, but we relied on participation from the entire team to complete this work.

Culture vs Values

We have a lot of fun at United Income — whether in our innovation sprints, our team lunches, or around our cold brew, nitro coffee. While this contributes to our culture, we felt it was foundational to differentiate key terms.

We developed the following illustration to help people think about culture and how it comes into existence.

In this image, culture is an amorphous blob given shape by the people in our organization, the values of those people, the values of the organization, and, to a lesser extent, our events, perks, and rituals. The analogy illustrates both what culture it is and how it forms. It also illustrates how culture can change over time, especially as new people with new values are added to a group.

We also like this analogy because it sets valuable guardrails for our discussion. Culture is emergent and fluid; we can’t strictly define it or force it into some perfect ideation. But, by focusing on what we can define, we have the ability to shape it into something we find desirable.

That’s why we focused on values.

Team Buy-In

Our team had been around since 2016 and a strong culture had already developed, reinforced by largely unspoken values. While there are always areas to improve, we generally like those values and we believe they serve us well. We have minimal churn in our engineering team, we get a lot of work done, and we enjoy working together.

Values are often defined from the top of an organization, but our team wanted to give voice to our existing values. We needed a transparent and collaborative process to extract and define what would become our spoken values.

Involving the whole team was important to us for three reasons.

  1. We value the diverse perspectives of our team and wanted to hear opinions from everyone.
  2. We wanted the whole team to feel a sense of ownership over the values.
  3. We wanted to make sure that everyone on the team understood what each value means in the context of the United Income Engineering team.

This last point warrants some extra examination. Typically, the cultural values of a team are expressed as either a single word or a pithy phrase — “ownership” or perhaps “we have each other’s backs”. These short expressions of a value are useful to those who have an existing understanding of how that value is expressed in the organization. If two people on a team have a different idea of how a value is to be expressed, the end result is confusion and contradiction, which we hoped to avoid.

Process

We designed a half-day workshop that brought together our whole engineering team to engage in a structured discussion on culture. We scheduled a breakfast meeting to accommodate a remote team member in Germany (our main offices are in Washington, D.C.) and enticed everybody to show up on time with our traditional Innovation Sprint breakfast — McDonalds.

To get the team thinking about culture and values, we passed out a printed worksheet the day before the workshop. We let the team know that we weren’t going to collect it, but encouraged everyone to think about the questions. We asked:

During our meeting, we explained why we were thinking about culture and values now, outlined our definition of culture and values, and briefly discussed the established company values. After this presentation, we moved into interactive sessions. First, we took a deep-dive into some case studies from other companies. We followed the case studies by asking small groups to brainstorm potential values for our team.

We believe that the success of the workshop relied on a high degree of interactivity in the small groups. Each group led their own discussion, took their own notes, and presented their own findings to the larger group. In order to ensure groups stayed on topic and didn’t go too far over their allotted times, we paired each group with a facilitator from engineering leadership. We briefed the facilitators the day before the workshop to avoid lecturing and to let the group come to its own conclusions.

Case Studies

While planning the workshop, we researched dozens of other companies and their values. As facilitators, we identified a set of companies that we felt represented different takes on values. We used these as case studies to explore how we might think of our own values.

We focused the discussion on the following topics:

As a full group, we started by examining one company’s values to model smaller group discussions. We chose our example because it was particularly verbose and strongly opinionated, lending itself well to a discussion.

After modeling the discussion, we split the team into three moderated groups for individual case studies. When we re-joined, one member from each smaller group presented the group’s summary of the case study.

Values

After the case studies, we broke up into different small groups and each group brainstormed a list of 5–10 values. We wanted a combination of values they would like to see, as well as values they currently see evidenced in our culture.

Again, each group selected a presenter to explain their values and provide enough context that other groups could understand them. There were a lot of commonalities among the groups. This isn’t surprising — as a small team, we began this exercise with the understanding that we share a lot of values. Some of the values are part of our culture currently, but there were a number of important values that groups felt are not clearly visible in our culture.

Synthesis

After the workshop, we sat down to take the lists of proposed values from the groups, pull out similar values, and flesh out what those values look like for our team. We initially pulled out five values that were common to each group.

We also discussed these values one on one with each member of the team. During these discussions, we fleshed out what each value encompasses. We also considered adding a new value, which seemed to pop up as an underlying theme for several of our original five. Each team member added additional depth and color to our understanding of the five values we selected.

After discussing the values with the team individually, we created a written paragraph for each value. In our writeups, we attempted to answer the following questions:

We put the write ups in a GitHub repository so we could collect comments and invite some discussion. We chose GitHub because we wanted a record of the discussion, as well as any resulting clarification.

Reflections

Overall, we were satisfied with this process for refining and expressing our values. We came to a clear understanding of the values, and were able to identify whether some values shared among many team members were not well-reflected in our current culture.

We had a number of additional reflections that we didn’t feel fit anywhere else in this writeup, so they’re all in a rough jumble in this appendix.

Facilitation

Part of the reason we felt the workshop was successful was the high level of engagement in both the small and large group discussions. We think it’s important that every member of the team speaks during the workshop.

Further Action

While we haven’t gotten to this yet, we’d like to revisit these values once or twice a year and make sure they still ring true. We’d also like to provide an anonymized library of stories demonstrating the values, and perhaps even of stories where we failed to live up to our values.

Time Allotted

We originally planned for a two and a half hour meeting for the workshop. The team was very engaged in the discussions, so we decided to extend the meeting an additional half hour. Even at that point, we were still having fruitful conversations and likely could have used additional time. While we attempted to keep discussions on topic, we often misjudged how engaged the team would be and adjusted our facilitation accordingly. We think having designated facilitators was vital, but we imagine that every team will require a different amount of time for a similar workshop, so our duration numbers are really just a rough estimate.

Reference Material

We selected the following company’s value blog posts to use as source material for our workshop. Each of these write ups have very different style and presentation, as well as slightly different values. We are fortunate to live in a time when the internet is full of examples, so we do recommend doing your own survey of source material if you are interested in running such a workshop.