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The Dev Health OS

Team Health

This section is an expert contribution from Dr. Leah Weiss.

Dr. Leah Weiss is a researcher, speaker, professor, consultant, author, and co-founder of Skylyte, a company that specializes in using the latest neuroscience and behavior change to empower high-performing leaders and managers to prevent burnout for themselves and their teams.

Although the primary focus of the Developer Health OS is centered on what we can do as individuals to create a healthier and more sustainable working environment, it’s important to understand the role that our teams and organizations play in shaping this environment. To start, let’s break down the underlying causes of burnout at the individual, team, and organizational level:

Individual Causes

  • Personal predispositions and character, such as perfectionism, and positive affect
  • Personal situations, such as the stress we experience, the support networks we have created for ourselves, or the type of job we are in
  • Personal coping and regulation mechanisms, such as how well we are able to self-regulate our emotions and process them

Team-Level Causes

  • Underlying team structures, such as the size of the team and the resources made accessible to them
  • How the team works together, including communication and collaboration tools, distribution of work, and respecting each other’s boundaries between work and personal life
  • Environment created within the team, such as psychological safety (i.e., the degree to which people feel safe communicating openly and taking risks) and a sense of community

Organizational Causes

  • Level of transparency in the organization, such as how readily leadership shares salient information with employees
  • Organizational structures, such as vacation time, general benefits, and role clarity Now let’s double-click on team-level causes and factors. Teams, and the managers who lead them, hold a unique ability to shape our experience of work—so much so that the impact of direct managers and teams accounts for up to 75% of employee turnover. Despite the bleak picture painted by that statistic, it also demonstrates the potential for our teams and managers to act as a positive force for wellbeing and resilience. Research by Skylyte, a startup that helps managers and teams prevent burnout and build resilience, has found four key pillars that highly resilient teams have in common.

The Four Key Pillars of Highly Resilient Teams

  • Team-Awareness: The degree to which your team’s members know themselves (their strengths, triggers, etc.) and the degree to which they know this about their peers (and act on it).
  • Structured R&R: The extent to which your team creates guardrails between rest and work and sticks to them.
  • Autonomy: The degree to which your team allows individuals to work autonomously and flexibly without sacrificing the ability to collaborate or support one another.
  • Community: The extent to which you feel a sense of connection, belonging, and safety within your team.

Team-Awareness

Team-awareness is the foundation of all healthy teams. Think about the best and most enjoyable team you’ve been a part of – whether it’s a work team or a sports team you played on as a kid. What made that team so great? Whether or not you realized it at the time, odds are that the answer includes your knowledge and awareness of each other’s abilities, needs, and preferences.

Without a strong awareness of how your teammates work and operate, working effectively as a team is almost impossible. That’s not exactly a groundbreaking claim, but how can we actually measure and define team-awareness in order to improve it? A good place to start is by asking yourself the following questions about your team:

  • As a team, do we know how our personal strengths/weaknesses impact the group?
  • As a team, are we aware of each others’ needs and triggers?
  • As a team, are we aware of each of our members’ values and our collective values?
  • As a team, do we know our sense of purpose and how it relates to each of the team members?

Most importantly, the true benefits of team-awareness come not just from knowing this information, but using it to inform the way in which you work and interact with your team.

Structured R&R

“How can I take a break? There’s just way too much work that has got to get done.” This is a feeling that all of us have experienced at some point in our careers, yet a strong body of research shows that overworking is counter-productive.

By making rest and recuperation a structured component of your work schedule – just like any professional athlete would – you not only protect yourself against chronic stress and burnout, you actually become more productive.

But balancing work with rest is a team effort. To adequately structure rest and recuperation into their work, a team has to:

  • Honor boundaries that separate work from personal life
  • Distribute work thoughtfully across the team, being mindful of the type of work that gives each team member energy
  • Prioritize tasks ruthlessly, and say “no” / push deadlines out when needed
  • Proactively plan vacation time with input from teammates to help each other set up a realistic plan so you can actually stay logged off and recharge when the time comes

For remote workers who have no physical boundaries between “work” and “home,” it’s even more important to actively create guardrails that help to separate work from personal life. One tangible way to do this is to create an after-work “transition ritual” that you complete when you’re finished with work for the day. When used effectively, transition rituals are a simple yet powerful way to tell your brain, “We’re done with work for today.”

What makes an effective transition ritual? A transition ritual should be a low-lift (i.e., it doesn’t require too much energy or motivation), restorative activity that you can repeat each day when you’re done with work. Listening to a favorite playlist after work? Go for it! Washing down a cheese pizza with a bottle of wine after clocking out each day? Probably not the best transition ritual (sorry to be the bearer of bad news). Other examples of an effective transition ritual include:

  • Gratitude journaling
  • Gardening
  • Listening to/reading fantasy novels
  • Yoga

Autonomy

Nobody likes being micromanaged. And micromanagement doesn’t just suck for the person on the receiving end, it also has a significant negative impact on a wide range of business outcomes, including overall productivity, employee morale, and turnover rates.

This is not to say that individuals on a team should be free to do whatever they want without consequence; in a healthy work environment, autonomy is a two-way street. If we expect to be given the autonomy to define our own processes and organize our own time, then in return, it’s our responsibility to communicate effectively and be aware of how our work fits into the rest of the team’s work.

So, what does autonomy look like for a healthy and productive team? There’s no single correct answer, but generally speaking, teams with sufficient autonomy can truthfully say that:

  • Individuals on our team have input on what gets prioritized.
  • Individuals on our team have a say in terms of how to complete those priorities.
  • Individuals on our team have some autonomy in terms of how we organize our time.
  • Individuals on our team receive a balance of support and flexibility to make the right decisions and execute as needed.

Community

Have you ever been part of a team at work that just didn’t seem to “click” despite being made up of talented and experienced individuals? Or watched a sports team that consistently underperformed even though they had plenty of star talent? If so, you probably have a good idea of how important community or “chemistry” can be to a team’s success.

While it’s easy to see how community can impact a team’s performance, purposefully building that sense of community isn’t always so straightforward. By breaking down the concept of community at work into more concrete components, this potentially daunting task becomes much more manageable. For example, the following checklist can be used to evaluate key components of a strong community:

  • On our team, we have robust psychological safety and belonging, along with regular practice spaces. We each have at least one “diving buddy,” or person who is a close/trusted “friend” in the group.
  • On our team, we have open collaboration & communication. There is compassion for the struggles one another is experiencing and the type of support that they value.
  • On our team, we feel supported by others even when it is costly to them.
  • On our team, we understand how each person’s work fits in with the rest of the team’s/organization’s, leading to a clear sense of contribution to a larger mission/goal.

In particular, compassion and psychological safety are especially essential for building a strong sense of community in your team. Psychological safety is defined by Amy C. Edmondson, PhD, as:

“A climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves. More specifically, when people have psychological safety at work, they feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution. They are confident that they can speak up and won’t be humiliated, ignored, or blamed. They know they can ask questions when they are unsure about something. They tend to trust and respect their colleagues.”

To learn more about creating a psychologically safe environment at work, watch Dr. Emdondson’s TED talk here.