InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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What Engineers and Companies Can Do to Increase Social Impact
Engineers in the tech industry have the means for social impact through their network, skills, and experience. Companies can create impact by making business practices socially-minded. Inclusive training considers the circumstances and backgrounds of individuals, with minimum entry barriers to ensure broad participation, including ethnicity, gender, neurodiversity, and socio-economic background.
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Leading in Hybrid and Remote Environments: Skills to Develop and Tools That Can Help
Leading in hybrid and remote environments requires that managers develop new skills like coaching, facilitation, and being able to do difficult conversations remotely. With digital tools, we can include less dominant and more reflective people to get wider reflections from different brains and personalities. This can result in more diverse and inclusive working environments.
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Learnings from Measuring Psychological Safety
Asking people how they feel about taking certain types of risks can give insight into the level of psychological safety and help uncover issues. Discussing the answers can strengthen the level of safety of more mature teams and help less mature teams to understand how they could improve.
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How the Hybrid and Remote Working Revolution Impacts Maintaining Mental Health
Whether working remotely or in a hybrid environment, the way in which we work with one another is changing, and can impact mental health and well-being. Personality characteristics can influence how we respond to remote or hybrid working environments. Organizations can foster psychological safety by focusing on culture, transparency, clarity, learning from failure, and supportive leadership.
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Creating Environments High in Psychological Safety with a Combined Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach
Leadership is critical for making psychological safety happen, but they need to lead by example and show that it’s safe for people to take interpersonal risks. Complementing leadership with team workshops in communication skills can enable people to speak up and feel safe to fail.
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Creating Great Psychologically Safe Teams with Sandy Mamoli
Sandy Mamoli, author and coach at Nomad8, recently appeared on the No Nonsense Agile Podcast to discuss her experience in creating safe, high-performing and self-selected teams. Keith Ferrazzi, author of Competing in the New World of Work, also recently wrote about his experience with using empowering social contracts to cultivate great teams. Both emphasized safety and candour.
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Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives
Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.
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Helping Teams Deliver with a Quality Practices Assessment Model
The quality practices assessment model explores quality aspects that help teams to deliver in an agile way. The model covers both social and technical aspects of quality; it is used to assess the quality of the team’s processes and also touches on product quality. With an assessment, teams can look at where their practices lie within the quality aspects and decide on what they want to improve.
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Learnings from Applying Psychological Safety across Teams
Applying ideas from psychological safety can enable people to speak up in teams about what they don't know, don't understand, or mistakes they have made. Trust and creating safe spaces are essential, but more is needed. People need to feel that they will not be punished or embarrassed if they take interpersonal risks.
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Effective Retrospectives Require Skilled Facilitators
Retrospective facilitators can develop their facilitation skills by self-study and training, and by doing retrospectives. Better retrospective facilitation can lead to higher effectiveness of change and impact the progress of an organization.
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How We Can Use Data to Improve System Quality
To understand how systems are being used, we can collect metrics and identify trends over time. The data and insights gained can be used to improve system quality by improving software design or testing patterns.
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The Myth of Product Mindset: It's What You Do, Not How You Think
Companies nowadays are looking for ways to cultivate a product mindset. While the idea of cultivating a “product mindset” allows us to focus primarily on ourselves, actually transforming our organizations often means changing our behavior to focus on our customers and how we work together to serve them.
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Kent Beck: Software Design is an Exercise in Human Relationships
In the closing keynote at QCon SF, Kent Beck spoke about how software design is an exercise in human relationships, why iterative and incremental development is the most cost effective way to build software, and how the overall cost of a software system is directly related to the cost of coupling and decoupling and the jackpot changes which result in cascaded coupling.
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Building High-Trust and High-Performing Teams at Shopify in a Remote World
Jesse McGinnis spoke at QCon San Francisco on building high-trust and high-performing teams at Shopify in a remote world. He started by pointing out his talk on high-trust teams in a remote world.
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Motivating Employees and Making Work More Fun
Progressive workplaces focus on purpose and value, having networks of teams supported by leaders with distributed decision-making. Employees get freedom and trust, and access to information through radical transparency that enables them to experiment and adapt the organization. In such workplaces, people can develop their talents and work on tasks they like to do, and have more fun.