I believe great teams are defined by the people.
Craft grew quickly over two years, doubling in team size. Part of that healthy growth led to some growing pains that we wanted to address together. An initiative was born to refine how we work together.
I partnered with one of the Craft partners and a design director to work with the team to assess where we were and co-create how we wanted to be moving forward. We started with a survey to identify where there was misalignment, frustration, and stressors. Then we embarked on a journey…
We decided to apply our human-centered design process to ourselves by splitting the team into working groups to define a vision for the future state of Craft.
The prompt was simple, “Imagine you are starting a research and design agency from scratch. How would you organize it? What values would you hold dear? How would you ensure the culture was lived fully on a daily basis?”
We brought the teams back together to poke holes in the visions they created, answering the questions, “How does Craft vary from the vision you defined? Why does it vary? In what ways would you change the ways we work together to better meet your vision?”
Then we had the teams iterate on their visions and share them across the full team, including proposed changes to our ways of working based on their efforts. We ended up with an understanding of what is working well that we didn’t want to disrupt through growth and 6 opportunity areas moving forward that became working groups for individuals on the team with a passion for a given area to progress.
We also learned through the process that we had a lot of unwritten rules. We did an exercise to write the unwritten and then rewrite the ones that no longer served us collectively (or were perhaps not how we really wanted to show up). This effort resulted in us revising our Craft philosophy to better match the way we wanted to approach working together & clarify our stance on key issues.
This initiative did not only allow us to define clear, impactful working groups to tackle important opportunity areas for the agency but it also helped us build more trust across the team, break down barriers between individuals who hadn’t had a chance to work together as well, and establish a shared vision moving forward.
It’s hard to capture the feel of a truly human-centered workplace and not have it sound self aggrandizing, but I’m really proud of the culture we built. Prior to being acquired, we had a 100% retention rate, in no small part to efforts like these and the willingness of the partners to let the team define their needs and have the autonomy to make sure they’re met.