Team building in real life: communication first, process second
Being in a company for almost seven years means you have witnessed how it has transformed and matured.
Last year felt like a more stable, calm phase. Or have I just become more used to turbulent times?
Whatever it was, it ended pretty expected and unexpected at the same time. It felt exciting, and it was natural to become part of the Witted family.
We have been working together since our very beginning, so it didn’t feel like a “everything is new’’ type of thing. It felt more like: What now, how should we start working together at this point? Because we had some common projects together in the past.
When business can’t pause, communication becomes the work
The experience hit us first, without even having time to think things through. Because in our world, business needs to go on, no matter what is happening. In every situation like this (the merger), everybody expects something big to happen: What is the next move? What is going on? But to figure out how to work together in new circumstances, communication is again key.
Things are moving forward, business doesn’t have pauses.
The point is: Things are moving forward, business doesn’t have pauses. It means we need to communicate and be able to change processes pretty fast. How? By exchanging information.
Team building starts with people, not processes
Having a chance to meet people, one by one, department by department, from the Finnish side at the very beginning is a great start. That’s what we did. Mostly online, at first. We would meet weekly with colleagues from Witted, share various documents, and present our processes from both perspectives.
Later, we would try to map our processes, see where and why we are doing things differently, and figure out how to work together. After 2-3 months of this, we started planning a trip to Helsinki.
Why in-person time matters for collaboration
Like I said before, the business needed to go on, and that hit us first. I didn’t exactly go into detail about what I meant. The rest of Witted and Software Sauna work in a pretty similar way, but there are some differences, such as size, geographical location, and the outsourcing operating model. To have a chance to meet someone you’re working with is beneficial in numerous ways, but here are a few:
- It’s perfectly normal.
- Chance to better understand those same people in a cultural and social context. You simply can’t see that invisible context via Slack.
- It will facilitate your future online collaboration.
The third one, I would like to elaborate on more. Imagine you work with someone online for a long time. You recognise the name, you recognise the Slack style, but not the person. And that’s often missed.
Once you’ve met face to face, online work gets easier: less friction, more trust, better results.
When you meet face to face, you finally connect the name to a human being. After that, online collaboration gets easier for a long time ahead. Less friction, more trust, better work. It’s almost like everyone is relieved: “Now we can move on!”
Those four days in Helsinki with our colleagues highlighted this benefit. During the trip, we had the chance to:
- Reflect on our mistakes from the very short past.
→ We had those as we worked very closely in this short period. Two major projects successfully passed the onboarding phase, and Sauna consultants were joining Witted’s team on the client’s side, but if you look back, there were a couple of things to reflect on.
In our situation, we doubled up some steps in the process, lost time, and failed to recognize what is and isn’t familiar to the Croatian and Finnish teams. We thought our Finnish colleagues knew something just because we did (e.g., about the market situation), and they thought the same.
- Understand each other better through formal and informal conversations about our work and ourselves.
→ It felt good to connect a name and a face, to hear who is in charge of what, and just eat lunch together. I’ll remember the dinner organised for us; it was truly special. We had an opportunity to try traditional Finnish dishes, and I am still thinking about that ice cream flavored with spruce tips.
- Figure out how to work together in the future.
The last one was a workshop with the Customer Success and Sales teams. Pretty crowded room – lots of different opinions, ideas – you would say. But, no. That went pretty smoothly because everyone in our business shares the same values, which come from people gathered around our Finnish and Croatian teams.
But we are all humans; we can adjust and communicate. That is sometimes enough.
We agreed on a common process to follow, and we turned the less-than-ideal situations we had in the previous two projects into the core of that new process.
Imagine if someone had defined that process before? At the beginning? Yes, it would give us a more secure feeling about how we will work together, but you could flush it the next day because, in situations like this, you simply can’t know.
But we are all humans; we can adjust and communicate. That is sometimes enough. Business will always be business and numbers, but sometimes it is just enough to talk and listen, reflect, and repeat.
The Takeaway: People Over Stereotypes
Stereotypes give us some heads-up information, but you can’t rely on them as the absolute truth. It doesn’t matter where you are from, but who is on the other side. It’s about what you value together. But here is something that is not a stereotype: this is based purely on my personal experience:
“Our Finnish friends are such great hosts!”
