Continuous improvement

Continuous Improvement

It’s critical to your team’s success that these great intentions don’t wither on the vine. Make sure to turn these activities into practices by creating a practice habit.

Guiding principles for leaders:

Communicate openly and transparently: Encourage team members to share their perspectives, ask questions, and provide feedback. Use tools like chat, video calls, or shared documents to stay connected and informed. When decisions are made, do so openly so the whole team can quickly get up to date with he change in direction and reasoning. This will help the team to integrate the core concepts more seamlessly into their work and produce the desired results more efficiently.
Celebrate successes and learn from failures: Acknowledge and celebrate your team's achievements and use failures as opportunities to learn and improve your shared understanding. Even when you may think the team knows they have been successful, or understands what the takeaway was from a particular situation, in a distributed world, you will see much greater returns from reiterating in various formats and really explicitly. Call out a successful launch in the next team meeting, send a thank you card to a team member who went above and beyond, and most importantly, make sure the team stays connected to the great feedback you are getting from customers and stakeholders.

Developing a shared understanding is critical to building a high-performing team in today's fast-paced, rapidly pivoting, remote work environment. By fostering open communication, alignment, and a shared sense of purpose, you can create a team that is resilient, innovative, and motivated to achieve its goals.

If you would like guidance on how to improve your facilitation skills, or walk through the entire team shaping practice path end to end, with examples and common challenges, try one of the Atlassian University courses below.

Complete the course
How to shape effective teams

Complete the course
How to run effective meetings

Coming soon!

We know that before you can motivate and align your team with your strategy, you need to have build that strategy! For those of you that are starting from the ground up in developing strategy in a distributed working environment, or who are looking for practices that will help you to deliver a more robust and inspiring strategy, we are excited to be working on a Strategic guidance practice path- launching soon!

The first step is the Vision creation Play - which you can get started with today.

Practices to continue with your team:

Beyond the scheduled revisits of the Plays mentioned above to check that they are still working for the team, the Atlassian Team Playbook has a suite of Plays centered on developing a shared understanding for your team. Everything from deepening your understanding of your customer with Customer Journey Mapping, through to the basics of how to run a Stand-Up and a Change Management Kick-Off in times of huge shift. Great work is truly dependent on getting the best out of the great humans that you have in your team.

To specifically track the health and performance of your team, try these Plays:

Run a Team Health Monitor Play

Run a Retrospective Play with your team

Most importantly, these are great foundational frameworks to get you started, but we know that teams come in all shapes and sizes, and we hope that you are experimenting and developing your own teamwork practices that you will share with the world!

If you have feedback or want to share success stories, we want to hear from you! Join us in the Teamwork Lab community!

Network of Teams

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Continuous improvement