How a People-First Approach Will Help Your Pod Succeed

You’ve reached the stage of exploring the option of utilizing the pod structure or maybe you’ve already started it. You’ve reviewed the different guides talking about processes, structure and efficiency. Everything sounds just perfect but you feel like something is missing… Indeed, there is an additional variable which is often forgotten when working with pods.

Here at MinuteMedia, we’ve identified one of the key elements people often overlook as being the human aspect and its important social implications. In our view, this is one of the gateways to the successful creation of a pod.

In this post, we’ll be sharing our experience when it comes to transitioning to pods. We’ll be giving you actionable items and clear ideas which, if implemented, will allow you to solidify your team’s structure and set you up for long term success.

Square one

“People feel more secure when they know that they have others around them who share their goals and care about their progress.”

- Psychology Today

Structural Change

Let’s start with some basics. A pod is a group of individuals with complementary skills who share a business goal. When changing the org structure from working within professional groups to pods, people start spending less time with their professional group and more time with their pod members. As a result, their sense of belonging changes.

Seating Arrangements

This sense of belonging increases when pod members sit together, as we have decided to do at MinuteMedia. If you think this decision was taken lightly, you are seriously mistaken. Moving to pods is one thing, but changing seating arrangements is a whole different animal. This topic raised an array of objections all around.

So how did it start? The first pod to make the move was mine. The benefits were clear for everyone to see and this very quickly became the permanent setup.
What made me do it? Besides generating instant enthusiasm from the team members who were now eager to see me work with them permanently, I realized what a heavy price I was paying for being away from the individuals who were actually working on our shared goal. This was something no amount of extra communication could have solved.

Shared Goal

While the team always had targets they needed to achieve, transitioning to a pod and working full time with the team members increased the level of ownership dramatically, because suddenly all of the team felt there is one same purpose, one shared goal.

To some extent, everyone wanted to see the level of effort provided by the other teammates.
Not being around hadn’t contributed to my perceived commitment. Moreover, it had also damaged my ability to respond to the team’s needs and enable them to move fast.

The positive impact of switching to pods wasn’t limited to professional aspects. The social aspect kicked in, enabling more than just instant answers, but also establishing connection and trust.

However, creating the right team chemistry requires caring and investing time in building relationships. Let’s take a closer look at the actions items.

Glueing it all together

Strengthening the team dynamics will require using your intuition. You might find yourself a little insecure throughout this process, but it’s only natural. Firstly, I would recommend you start sending invites for team lunches more often. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but lunchtime is a great opportunity to connect. How will you know it’s working? When the team starts eating together without your involvement.

The next step is for pros, helping the team create a list of shared values. You might get cynical here, but please bear with me… This isn’t about having a nice looking poster to hang on the wall. This is about showing your team members you acknowledge and care about them… by leading by example.
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Here is how we did it: we asked each team member to come up with three values which matter most to them — writing a sentence explaining what each of the values mean to them by describing how they would like us to behave. Through this process, everyone was able to learn about what is important to one another. As one of my pod mates put it: “each one of us is a snowflake”, same but different.

Ideally, the team will agree on 5–6 shared values (see our example above). Exposing what matters to your team, their Dos and Don’ts, will improve the communication. More than that, people will become more attentive to each other. Can it get any better than this? Yes it can. Now comes the best part…

Ramping up collaboration

Once the team has built some level of confidence and trust in each other, it’s time to take it to the next level. Each person brings their own area of expertise to the pod. Yet, by leveraging the wider area of contribution a person could have, everyone wins. How can it be done? By shifting to a co-creation mode. Let me explain this from a product manager’s perspective.

When tackling a new initiative, I don’t share the complete spec, but rather get everyone involved throughout the process. This enables people to input their feedback and thoughts at an early stage. This has proven to shorten the cycle from ideation to execution. More than that, it is also a statement. No one on the team is smarter than another, and the best decisions are made together.

Equally, this has affected the process on another front: the retro meeting. While some previous retro meetings could have put a scene from Vikings to shame, we have experienced a shift from finger pointing to voluntarily taking responsibility.

What’s more, is that we started looking deeper into systematically improving as a team. Identifying weaknesses and setting them as goals while asking the team to provide candid feedback enables us to grow.

Some last words

What was described in this post is our team’s path. Since each team consists of different individuals, it’s clear there is no secret recipe to this one. Yet, I’m confident one of the key ingredients for successful teamwork and achieving actual results is the ability to truly see your people. This will kickstart a dynamic which will improve everyone both on professional and personal levels.

An important note: this post only covers internal team dynamics. However, I do believe for the pod structure to succeed within the organization, external team dynamics should be taken into consideration as well. These include the sync between the different pods and the relationships within the professional team. This, however, is a subject for a separate blog post.