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. 

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. 

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.