New ideas and tools for improving workplace communication are highlighted in blog posts, infographics and magazine headlines every day, but communication processes are only effective if workers are comfortable sharing the information their colleagues need.
For the engineering team at Nintex, aptly-named updates called “two tens” — which take under ten minutes to write and two minutes to read — are helping to bridge the communication gap and make employees feel more secure in the process.
“‘Two tens’ reinforce and promote a culture of psychological safety by actively asking teams to share learnings, failures and successes,” said Nicholas Benjamin, the process platform’s senior vice president of engineering,
Psychological safety is a shared belief within a team that the work environment supports risk-taking, experimentation and asking questions — exactly the circumstances that make good communication possible.
According to Amy Edmonson, a scholar and author who has researched workplace psychological safety for over 20 years, “Team psychological safety should facilitate learning behavior in work teams because it alleviates excessive concern about others’ reactions to actions that have the potential for embarrassment or threat.”
At Nintex, “two tens” have been key to building an open and safe communication environment. “People from all levels in the engineering organization model this through their contributions, by calling out things that have gone well in addition to sharing learnings from mistakes or even asking for support for ongoing issues and challenges,” Benjamin said.
Built In Seattle sat down with Benjamin to hear more about how their engineering team has communicated effectively in a remote-first environment while fostering an authentic, collaborative team culture.
Nintex’s no-code workflow automation platform streamlines business processes for companies around the world.
What’s one key communication habit you’ve developed and encouraged among your team?
Our “two ten” updates are hyper-focused and communicate only what’s key for other teams to know. They do not share a list of to-dos or what was completed in the last Sprint, and they don’t overlap with our other communication or governance tools. The goal is to have an effective, low-ego and low-friction means to share valuable information across the engineering organization. The updates are shared by all teams via Slack at a cadence that suits the individual team, sometimes following a team’s delivery iteration, or a bit less frequently, like monthly.
Commonly, teams will share information that may help others moving forward or what they learned during the last period that would have been useful to know earlier. We encourage team members to share what they are most proud of or excited about as well as the challenges ahead and where they need support. We encourage teams to “copy with pride,” which is an opportunity for others to learn about something they should take note of.
The goal is to have an effective, low-ego and low-friction means to share valuable information.”
What effect has this habit had on the team culture and the way your team works and collaborates?
“Two tens” helped in several ways as we transitioned to a remote-first working model, triggered by Covid-19. The asynchronous nature of this communication tool has been an efficient way to scale intra-team communication as we’ve expanded into different geographies and time-zones.
This opened valuable communication pathways between teams that perhaps didn’t exist previously — particularly for teams operating in incompatible time zones or in relative isolation. Teams have also found it a hyper-effective way to source help or support. I’ve been amazed by the number and types of issues that have been efficiently solved by a swarm of collaborators following a team’s call for help via a “two ten,” which often generates several active discussions in Slack.
What advice do you have for other engineering managers who are looking to create healthy communication habits among their teams?
Throughout my career, two lessons have served me well when tailoring or introducing new communication habits to an organization.
Firstly, the communication tool must be authentic and compatible with the team or company culture. While you can borrow from previous roles or other companies and cross-apply them, they must be cohesive and fit with the culture you have or are trying to build. Sometimes people try to introduce a novel communication approach they read about on a blog or used in another company to see it rejected like a human body might do a foreign object – simply because it wasn’t tailored or appropriate for the target culture. Indeed, I’ve made this mistake myself. And actually, more than once!
Secondly, be prepared to adapt or even completely replace communication habits that have served you well as your organization expands. As with most things, communication habits, tools and techniques need to adapt as an organization grows, particularly if expansion is across geographical boundaries and time-zones. Things that worked well when an engineering organization has three teams in one location may not be as successful when it has 30 teams across five different locations.
