Project background

The XD org at Smartsheet has nearly quadrupled in size since I started. Our team was small, in fact we were only 16 total including design, research, and leadership in early 2018. Since then, we have grown rapidly as a company. Currently our team is 61 including 5 contract resources.
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When we were a small team, we were able to run processes that we simply can’t run at scale anymore. Moreover, we were almost 100% colocated, and we were a fairly tight knit team. Everybody knew everyone else. Our team culture was strong, and because of our size, was easily shaped by and representative of each team member together.
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After living through a global pandemic that has challenged the way we work, and how we organize and collaborate, as well as rapid company growth that led to a large amount of turnover, our organizational health was lower than ideal. In fact, when my own manager left, I decided to pick up where she left off, working on our team culture charter.
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This leadership case study examines how I used design methodologies to understand our team’s culture issues, and put in place a system to correct them while building a great culture to work in.

Gathering insights

The culture charter started about 5 months before I took up the mantle of leading it. In early 2021, we had already experienced fairly significant turnover, and we had just completed our first year remote from the office. The entire XD team came together and we workshopped around issues we had.

We posed the open question: “Where can we improve?”
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The leadership team ran affinitization exercises with the feedback we had recorded in the workshop, and derived about a number of different charter areas that various leaders would be responsible for. Those charters covered topics such as process and tools, career growth, cross team collaboration, and team culture among others.
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Our insights were pretty light, we knew there was a culture gap but it was not super clear exactly where our problems were in that fairly broad category. In about June of 2021, after my manager left, I took ownership of the culture charter. At that point, it was a draft document but nothing had been put into motion. I decided to do a soft reset and try to run it as if I was solving a design problem. I needed to know more about the problem at hand, and what better way to learn than a user survey and interviews.

I created a survey to send to the entire team. The survey was designed with about 10 questions, ranging from free form answers, to multiple choice, to ranking. I also asked if folks wanted to do follow up interviews and or join a “culture committee” I was forming as a small internal think tank to tackle our issues.

I shared the survey got great participation through effective team communication and good old fashioned elbow grease. Overall I managed to get over 70% team to respond. I also conducted 1:1 followup interviews with 22 members of the team, to expand on the submitted answers, and offer explanations.
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What I ended up with was a wealth of data and insights that gave me a pulse of the team's cultural health.
It is also something that can be sent out quarterly or biannually to keep the data fresh, and track the progress of any initiatives towards improving our cultural health.

Framing the problem

Every good design kickoff has some sort of framing exercise where the problems and goals are stated. I gathered my newly commissioned culture committee for the first time, to run a workshop reviewing all of the data from the survey and interviews.
I walked the team through each question, and broke down answers. We then broke out into groups and ran grouping and taxonomy exercises to properly categorize all of the responses into meaningful cohorts. These categories made up the problems that we knew we had to address.

Defining our vision

When solving any design problem, a clear and concise vision is needed to rally behind and align to. The difference here is that I was not designing a product, but rather a process. I took a strategic approach to the vision for the culture committee, instead of a tactical one.

‍The vision for the culture committee is to be a group that investigates, reports on, and solves identified culture problem areas via small problem-focused teams.

Diverge and conquer

This vision sets the culture committee up for success, by allowing each member to make the biggest individual impact possible. Instead of pointing a large number of people at the top one or two problems, creating inefficiencies, I maximized the surface area we could go after, while providing more autonomy and opportunity for individual input for the folks who wanted to be part of the committee.
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Teams of two or three could sign up to tackle an issue by going and running more through investigations, coming up with a proposal, and then executing on a solution.

Initial outcomes

The team helped me identify and triage our top issues by joining me in prioritization exercises. Of the categories we had found while framing the problem.
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Since the kick-off of the committee, we have hosted several team events, introduced new opportunities for team connection and communication, and increased the awareness to the XD leadership team (and the team at large) of the problems we want to try to solve in the coming year.
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Currently (and admittedly anecdotally), we have had a really positive reaction to the activities introduced and the things we have done to build our team culture to what we want it to be. The events that have been hosted by the culture committee have had great turnout, and the opportunities for connection have provided hundreds of new team interactions that would have otherwise not happened.

Next steps

This project is really just getting started in earnest. Our next steps will be to continue to solve the most immediate team culture issues in the small problem-focused task teams.
As we introduce and roll out solutions that try to move the needle, the committee will help me re-administer the survey, and measure how we are doing compared to the first time around.
With this repeated process, we have a self maintaining system to check on our team's cultural health, identify issues, tackle problems, and re-measure afterwards.

Culture Committee