Staff Retreat 2014 – Vaughan Park
One of our regular routines as a studio is to take a day out of production once a year and head away to a scenic location to reflect on the year just gone and the year ahead. Previous locations have included Waitawheta tramway in Waihi, Piha Beach, Azzuro Groves on Waiheke Island, and this year we visited Vaughan Park in Long Bay.
I really enjoy taking the time to put down the tools and just spend some time together as a staff. It’s refreshing to get outside of the office together! I also really enjoy talking about “the bigger picture” with the whole team and really having a good discussion about how we are doing.
At our retreat this year, we focussed on three main topics: A retrospective from our last milestone build (Oct 2013-Jan 2014), Accountability and Flexibility, and then Studio Values.
Retrospective
Our retrospective was conducted using the analogy of a boat. The “wind in our sails” was things pushing us towards our goal and the “sea anchors” were things that were slowing us down or impeding us from reaching our goals. I found this way of doing retrospectives really useful! HT to Wayne Grant!
What was encouraging for me was that the team had a lot of good things to say about the last milestone and had a lot of good comments about our studio culture and other team members (in a positive way!) I was also impressed with the maturity and professionalism that team members discussed the ‘impediments’ to our progress. There was definite sense of wanting the studio and the products to succeed, and I could tell that any critiques were coming out of this desire.
Accountability / Flexibility
The second key discussion (which also arose out of the retrospective) was the idea of balancing Flexibility with Accountability. Put another way, how can we empower our staff with flexibility in terms of work hours, work locations, work styles whilst still maintaining productivity and accountability for delivering a product on time?
This was a really good discussion which seemed to get everyone on the same page. We came up with the plan of creating self managed teams (read more on that here) and also creating some core “collaborative hours” that we require everyone to be in the studio, in the recognition that we are creating a product that requires a high level of collaboration. (For those who are interested, we set 0930-1530 as our “collaborative hours”). We also decided to try and schedule all our internal meetings on mondays, wednesdays, and fridays (with the exception of daily scrum meetings) to enable people to really get things done on tuesdays and thursdays. Finally, we talked about people ‘owning’ their tasks that they set for themselves during sprint planning! If it’s not done by the end of the sprint, people will work on the weekend to get it finished. In theory, this will help us all start to set more realistic estimates at the start of the week and not take too much onto our plates!
Values
At one of our earlier staff retreats, we spent a large part of the day talking about what values 2ndcity Studios would be shaped by. At this latest retreat, we put these values up on the whiteboard and conducted a ’straw-poll’ as to whether the current staff thought these values were accurate and how much they saw them expressed in what we do.
The 7 values were:
We are a …
- Flexible Studio
- Creative Studio
- Fun Studio
- Relational Studio
- Missional Studio
- Productive Studio
- Learning Studio
Since setting these values, we have had many more people join the studio team and a few leave, and so it was very interesting to see how the current contingent saw these values. It became clear that we are doing really well in being a Flexible, Creative and Fun studio; we are doing okay in being a Relational, Learning, and Productive studio; and we need to perhaps “up our game” in terms of being a Missional studio.
We also decided we should add an eighth value to the list – Quality. We want to value good quality products!
All in all, it was a very productive day with some great topics covered and some good discussions had. As well as being set in a very picturesque location!
I really believe in this kind of rhythm – taking time out of the machine to stop, reflect, and think at a bigger perspective.
There are some things I would do differently though. At this retreat, I had done a lot of pre-thinking and so came prepared – however one thing I found was that handing out sheets of paper with my thinking on it basically predetermined the conversation, and this it didn’t feel as democratic as I wanted it to. The challenge for me is working out how to convey my pre-thinking (since strategic thinking is something I do a lot of and am quite skilled at) in a way that still allows discussion and some democratic team buy in.
Another challenge I didn’t plan for was the size of the team greatly affects the process of discussion. I think next time we need to think up different formats rather than everyone sitting around in a circle – perhaps breaking into small groups, each equipped with some butchers paper and felts would have been a better way to get more discussion and simultaneously more team cohesion.
Until next time,
Keep producing
