Making feelings more objective
Last week, we had our quarterly team review, where we reflect on the quarter that has just passed (for us, Q3), and look ahead at the quarter in front of us (Q4).
Our quarterly reviews are my most favorite team meetings that we have. We come together as a team to hit pause on the day-to-day and unpack the wins, challenges, and lessons learned of the previous quarter. We do a 360 review, talk about where the business is financially, get aligned on the vision for the quarter ahead, and decide on the initiatives that will bring that vision to life. We’ve started to schedule our quarterly reviews right after my Break Weeks so that I have time to reflect as a leader and bring clarity and energy to the discussion.
One of the best components of our reviews is the portion where we rate 1-10 how we feel about each of these five categories: trust, relationships, communication, teamwork, and happiness at work. These are the benchmarks we’ve decided on to measure how it feels to work together. And because feelings can be really hard to measure, we’ve learned that it helps so much to relate how we’re feeling using something more objective, like numbers. During this part of the review, we each share aloud our score for each category on a scale of 1-10, and then we average the scores in each category to find our team average. After that, we determine the two categories where we scored lowest and we talk about why.
In Q3, our two lowest scores were communication and relationships.
We gave communication an average score of 8.8, and the main reasons we landed on were 1) a couple people felt out of the loop on some things, and 2) we missed an opportunity to communicate clearly on a big project. We identified ways we could have collaborated better and are going to try our solution in our upcoming initiatives for this quarter.
Our average relationship score was a 9. What was holding us back from giving it a 10? We chalked it up to a common challenge for any remote team: We rarely have the opportunity to chat with each other in a really casual, watercooler-type setting. When we see each other (on Zoom), there’s usually a work-related agenda involved. We talked about some potential solutions, but we all agreed that this score may never be a full 10 because we don’t get to work in person together every day.
There really are no bad scores here. The idea is to get a benchmark so that you have something to compare from quarter to quarter. What you want to be looking for is the scores that are improving and the scores that are lowering, and why.
For example, at this time last year, our average score for relationships was just 7.6—for two straight quarters. It was at the height of pandemic uncertainty, and we were in all-hands-on-deck mode. We recognized that we had been meeting less often so that we could focus more on business survival. And when we did meet, our personal check-ins were short and surface-level at a time when we needed those deeper connection points more than ever. During that review, we made a commitment to prioritize our relationships. And now, here we are a year later, realizing we’ve gone from a 7.6 to a 9.
That’s the power of checking in quarterly. We get to see our progress. We get to see the opportunities we have to be better.
The point I want to make here is that culture ebbs and flows. It’s so important to stay in tune with how people are feeling so that you know where you need to focus in order to keep your culture strong. And look at what happens when you do: If we hadn’t created the space to talk about our relationships in 2020, for example, those relationships may have continued to suffer and we might not be where we are now. And while our scores this quarter were relatively high, we’re aware that we have to work to maintain these averages. There will very likely be a time in the future when these scores dip again, and when they do, we will talk about it, get to the root of why, and focus on how to elevate them . . . together.
Hope this inspires you to start a similar conversation with those you work alongside. It’s a game-changer.
Big hugs,
Kristen
PS: Hope you’ll join us for this week’s LIVE on Wednesday, 10/13, at 11 a.m. ET! No guest this week—just yours truly giving updates and some real talk! You can register here: https://bit.ly/3kWe2kT
