Step 6: Communicate Early and Often

Communicating fully and correctly might be the single most important thing you can do to give your self-selection the best possible chance of success.

Self-selection is a new and seemingly risky process to many people, and while their first reaction can be quite positive, they can move quickly to fear and resistance: fear of something new and different, fear of what might happen, fear of being stuck with someone they don’t get along with, or fear of being stuck in a squad that they can’t change their mind about later. Fear and uncertainty aren’t something most people want to deal with in their workplace, and your communication needs to allay those fears and clear up any uncertainty.

In our example, the participants had a lot of questions, understandably so because not only were we asking them to choose who they wanted to work with on a daily basis, but we were also asking them in essence who they wanted their new work family to be! By engaging with our coworkers early we surfaced these questions before the event, and we were able to individually answer them and follow up.

In fact, we were actually bombarded with emails, meeting invites, and questions from all angles after we started communicating about squadification. In the early stages we fielded a lot of what-if questions. What if someone gets picked on during the event? What if no one wants to join one particular squad or work with one particular developer? (Every company has one and we were no different.)

We were fairly confident from our trial that these things wouldn’t happen at all, but regardless, we were also able to answer that we would be carefully facilitating the session, so no bullying would be allowed. For example, if no one wanted to join one of our squads, this would actually be incredibly useful information that would feed into any future prioritization and tell us that we were probably trying to establish a squad that shouldn’t be established.

We recommend the following steps in your approach to communication:

• Talk to as many people as possible, right through the process.

• Actively listen to their concerns and acknowledge and record them.

• Be patient with participants as they work through their fears.

• Record any concerns and the what-if scenarios so that they can be addressed.

• Paint a very honest picture about the worst-case scenario, which is never as bad as people think.

• Talk to staff members individually and present to groups.

• Be clear about why you’re doing this and emphasize that you’re placing trust in employees to solve the problem.

For our biggest self-selection event we started talking to managers first, in particular with those we knew shared our confidence that employees could be trusted to solve a complex puzzle. That allowed us to speak next to the ones who suggested that self-selection would never work, but by then we had already gathered wider support.

From the supporters we were able to confirm the process and details. For the dissenters we could have robust discussions to iron out any fears, assumptions, or requests.

With the first batch of folks on our side, we started actively communicating with the wider organization and likely participants. Here’s the very first email we sent to everyone several weeks before the squadification event:

We soon followed up with a more detailed email where we explained that squadification would be done by self-selection and why we had chosen to do so. We reminded everyone about their successful self-selection on ShipIt Day and that we believed that every day should be like ShipIt Day.

We were, of course, not advocating for twenty-four-hour sprints but believed that the best results would come about if people could choose what to work on and who to work with. We also let everyone know that it would be a facilitated process where we would make sure that nothing got out of hand.

Next we presented to the whole company on the principles of self-selection. We outlined the problems we were aiming to solve, what the intended approach was, and why we thought self-selection was the best option. We gave the staff as much information as we could to make sure everyone knew what to expect at the event.

We really tried to make this presentation as inspiring as we could because we wanted to make sure the employees were aware how much of a privilege it was to be trusted with the company’s structure. We made sure to express our confidence in their ability to come up with a great solution—after all, they had already proved they could during ShipIt Day.

The last two weeks before the event we spent answering questions and discussing people’s hopes and fears.

Sandy remembers:

It felt like we were running a PR campaign. In fact, we probably were running a PR campaign: emails, all-company meetings, one-on-one meetings, and conversations at lunch and on the way to the bathroom (even in the bathroom!). We put strong focus on conveying this in these conversations: “We don’t think we have the answers. We think you do. We can provide the environment and the facilitation techniques but we’re asking you to solve the puzzle.” Ultimately, just saying to people “Look, we trust you to do this” seemed to be the tipping point.