Practical Teaming: So What, and What Next?

So What?

This is the sixth and final blog post in a series which has shared learning about developing a culture of ’Teaming’: Aim High, Feel Safe, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast.

Meaningful measurement of impact for this kind of co-created, emergent development work is notoriously difficult. The qualitative and quantitative data we collected from this work provide a flavour of how the lived experience of some colleagues improved following the work on creating a culture of Teaming. It illustrates that this kind of practical development work, grounded in real teams working intensively together on real issues is the prime way to achieve a positive difference.

In the NHS, the annual staff engagement survey undertaken across all UK health services is often used as a proxy measure for the cultural health of an organisation. During the period of this work, the scores on this survey showed positive improvements in all cultural dimensions of the staff survey for the services involved. However, this data is merely correlational, and it would not make sense to attribute changes to the development work we undertook.

We have done quite a lot of experimenting with evaluating and capturing impact data on this kind of work. We have interesting data - both qualitative and quantitative - which indicate how the work described in this blog series made a difference. I’m really happy to share thoughts and pool ideas about this - feel free to drop me a line.

What Next?

Since this work ended, in partnership with other client organisations, we have refined the Aim High, Feel Safe, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast framework, on the basis of on-going learning, insights and feedback from the hundreds of colleagues we work with. You can download this framework here.

The impact of Covid19 has left many of us feeling more uncertain about the future, and emotionally less steady than before. In such a demanding humanly-draining context, it will be more critical than ever to support each other in our teams and workplaces.

I believe finding practical ways of creating a culture of Teaming - both face-to-face and virtually - is therefore both pragmatic and important work.

Does it feel important to you?

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