4 mindful team practices in the workplace
4 mindful team practices in the workplace
What does mindfulness have to do with performance in the workplace?
Scientific research has shown that when individual employees train in mindfulness, they are more effective at work due to reduced stress & anxiety, greater capacity for creativity and problem-solving, and improved focus. Mindful individual employees are also generally more satisfied with their jobs and suffer less burnouts.
However, the real win for organisations is when entire teams engage in “team mindfulness” or “collective awareness”. Teams who are mindful have team practices based on high levels of trust, empathy, and self-awareness. It turns out mindful teams are also high performing. This is because these teams are able more aware, communicate more effectively, strive for continuous improvement and prove highly resilient and adaptive in a changing business environment.
As a Scrum Master/ Agile Coach, I would like to share four team practices that I have used to develop more mindful, high performing teams.
Practice #1
Awareness
Mindful, high performing teams are present and have a deeper understanding of their own needs and tasks in the team, but are also aware of others' perspectives.
Team Canvas - When I take on a new Scrum Team, I use Team Canvas to align the Product Owner and team members on the team vision (the purpose, goals and tasks of the team). I revisit the team canvas after several sprints to reconfirm or change the team vision.
My User Manual- This template is a great way to establish trust in a team by clarifying preferred ways of working for team members in an open conversation.
Practice #2
Effective communication
Mindful, high performing teams communicate in a way that is direct but non-judgemental; the team addresses conflict as it arises instead of letting it fester.
Establish a healthy meeting culture - In my experience with coaching teams, there's nothing that weighs down a team's performance more than countless meetings. Together with your team, do a "meeting audit": look at all your meetings on the calendar, set an intention for each meeting and eliminate meetings where the goal and end-result is not clear. It helps to have a checklist for the meeting audit: I like Microsoft's Intentional Meetings Checklist.
When conflict arises, avoid blame & criticism. Disagreements and conflict will inevitably come up in teams. However, you can teach teams how to face conflict head-on with tools such as COIN feedback method or the German WWW feedback method (Wahrnehmung, Wirkung, Wunsch).
Practice #3
Continuous improvement
Mindful, high performing teams strive to improve their way of working.
Run regular team retrospectives - In Scrum, the retrospective is an important event that happens after each work iteration to examine not only the results, but how the team worked together. Even if you do not practice Scrum, you can do retrospectives with your team after key milestones. My "go-to" website for retrospective ideas is Retromat (and two of my favourite retrospectives are the Sailboat and Starfish).
Practice #4
Resilience
Mindful, high performing teams are able to change and adapt.
Set aside dedicated time for problem solving - Part of the Scrum Master's job is to remove impediments for the team. However, some impediments are recurrent and cannot be solved quickly. Although we would like to just "get on" with our work, I recommend setting aside dedicated time to discuss and solve complex problems. Help the team collect data, avoid impulsive judgements and find the root cause for problems with the 5 Whys.
Do you have additional team practices for mindful, high performing teams? Please share in the original article posted on LinkedIn ▸ I'd love to connect with you!