Team building in lockdown

In March 2019, I was one week into my new role as team lead for one of 3 core content teams, who are responsible for maintaining and developing key content on GOV.UK.

The country went into Covid lockdown.

My challenge was both to get the trust of the team and to build the team, without the benefit of face-to-face meetings and relationship building.

What I did

It was essential to get this team working collaboratively - not least so that the new staff we hired during lockdown felt part of a team.

Some of the actions I took included:

Delegating work so that our senior content designers took on a more strategic role - for example, the task of prioritising department work requests.
Implementing a new stakeholder management model, to challenge and upskill all team members and get them working together on formal stakeholder relationship building.
Working with the other content leads and delivery managers to develop written content strategies, so that all staff were clear on what needed to be delivered.
Introducing regular team planning meetings, to help us collectively agree our priorities and deliverables.
Working with the delivery manager to offer monthly retros, to give the team a chance to air concerns, and for us - as the management team - to address them.
Working with the delivery manager to organise a virtual ‘away day’, which was a combination of social and work-related tasks.
Introducing bi-weekly virtual team meetings that focused on skill-sharing and continuous learning.
Setting up monitoring dashboards, to understand the throughput and the productivity levels of the team.
Prioritising team health - reinforcing the message that everyone's health was paramount and that if people struggled, they should take the time they needed to regroup and come back refreshed.

The results

In my first 3 months, when I suggested changes to ways of working, I was routinely told that ‘this was not the way we do things’. After 3 months, the team were no longer saying this and the new format for team meetings, for example, was actively welcomed.
New members of the team, who joined in lockdown, reported that they felt supported and part of the team.
Productivity remained high.