 I was on the flight over and I don't know if you've ever had a talker who sits beside you on a plane but I had one and this was a 10 hour flight so you can imagine how excited I was as an introvert to be stuck in the middle seat besides somebody who was a talker but you know as you as you do on these flights he started out by asking me questions oh what do you do where do you work that kind of stuff and I said oh you know like I'm in this this ecosystem called WordPress and what do I do I'm starting this new thing it's all about like people and culture and how we kind of are looking at that and I'm going to a conference to do a presentation because oh that's very cool turns out he's the I guess like senior guy in a university in Florida and he's got 50 people under him and they're based all around the US now he says that going remote was one of the hardest things that they've done as a company and he had a lot to say about going remote and honestly listening to him was like seeing all of those horror stories that you hear about senior executives who said who promised to their their teams that they would be able to go remote and then wants to bring them all back he was telling me about how he's got like five employees that he doesn't even know what they do all day you know like are they even working I don't even know I mean I can tell when this person's working so I need to bring them all back so that that they can you know be working and that kind of stuff and you know I'm sitting there obviously stuck listening to him talk about this and reminding myself through that experience of why I want to do this kind of stuff and talk about this kind of stuff I've got a couple of goals for today and and these are the things that I hope to accomplish in my talk things I hope you take away but I really want you to leave curious about your own teams experience I want you to leave with permission to be more invested in your teams experience and my real hope is that at this time next year our teams are happier healthier and performing better than ever because you're more curious about your teams experience and you're more invested in your teams experience you might be wondering why why why should I even care about this you know WordPress is a really interesting ecosystem because a lot of the time you can start at any point right anyone can do anything in WordPress if you have an idea of something to create or something to fix on WordPress you can start something and all of a sudden you you can make money from it not only can you make money you can build a team around it right and maybe that's a story of a lot of you you started out you you built a project or you did it for free and gave it away and then all of a sudden you realize I know people really like this so you created a premium version and then with the premium version you realized oh no now I got a higher support staff and then once you had support staff you realize now you've got a higher marketing staff and then from your marketing staff you realized now you needed more developers and engineers and all of a sudden you as this developer who just had this idea to fix something or to make something cool are now responsible for this whole big team right it's crazy and as I look at WordPress and where we are we're 20 years old now you know many of us are have been doing this for a little while some of us have been lucky enough to sell sell off to greener pastures but this whole idea of of building a team is maybe not something that you got into WordPress for but you find yourself in the position of needing to think about it so we're going to talk through something that's kind of why I did this because the reality is that financial success doesn't really equal team success right we've got a really great use case to look at that's outside of our ecosystem has anybody here been following what's been going on with the the little bluebird and it's a recent takeover by someone and what the experience has been like there are stories all over the Internet of what it's like to work in that space now after a new leader came in and now you might argue you know their their ad revenue is down but in terms of of just revenue and financial success and team size they've done it they've made it right but just because they're generating revenue doesn't necessarily mean their team is happy healthy or that their culture is even sustainable what got us here is not going to get us there I think that's that's basically what I'm I'm thinking about today you know as as you are a leader in your team as you're you're looking at all these things you know like what got you to where you are now is not going to help you get to where you need to go we want the next 20 years of WordPress to be amazing we need companies that are willing to stick it out for the next 20 years and be around that long I was reading some stuff on Shopify recently and Shopify has this really interesting slogan if you will that they want to build a 100 year company can you imagine building a 100 year company there aren't many of those around but imagine WordPress full of 100 year companies right like what would you need to do as a team as a culture and your structure in order to make that possible the future of WordPress isn't just about our ability to create great products right it's actually a lot more than that it's about our ability to create great teams that's kind of my my thinking on it and so how can we ensure that as our companies grow and succeed our teams do too that's the question that was really going around in my head when I decided to kick off this whole thing called team WP and and the real issue was as I started to look at this I did what you know most I'm a marketer by trade so I did what most marketers do I tried to find some data and see if there was anything out there that could help me understand what teams are going through in WordPress and it turns out we just don't know enough there's like no data about WordPress and what our employees and our companies are experiencing or feeling or going through so I said all right well let's have a go let's see if we can figure that out so I launched something in February or April I guess called the team experience index the team experience index was something that I wanted to give to WordPress the idea was that if I could give team leaders team managers some data based insights on what their employees are experiencing you would have some inspiration and some clear understanding of what comes next for you as you invest in your team so oh this slide yeah so here's some some information on on what we did so we put it out there we had around 293 responses come in and 50 plus companies participated in it and the survey completion rate was about 20.5% so I don't know if you've ever taken a survey but this one was like 70 questions long you're welcome and it it took people some time to fill out much time but when you tell somebody that it's like an actual five minutes they think one minute but no this was like a real five minutes like you had to actually think about things but it was good so thank you to everyone who participated and filled it out here's a little bit of information about it we had some demographic questions that we asked these were completely optional so you did not have to fill it out one of the really big things about collecting information like this is when you're asking people for feedback especially about their employee experience anonymity and confidentiality is really really important you're never gonna get an honest answer from someone if they're worried that it's gonna come back to them or if they're gonna get found out so we worked really hard to make sure that everything was anonymized everything was randomized and we will never disclose any individual response but we will show you sort of the aggregate of what's going on but we did ask some demographic questions to invite some people to share a little bit about where they're based or or how they how they represent and this is the results one of the things that's really cool here I don't know if you can see is the the male the female in self disclosure we had 65 percent female and 33 percent male so an over abundance of women were willing to tell us that that they were filling this out which I thought was really cool and really brave because and because I don't know if you know this but it's really risky for people especially women and and people from historically underrepresented groups to share feedback and do this kind of thing because they're the ones most at risk of having something happen and not be able to recover as quickly so I was really excited about that so thank you to everyone who was brave enough to disclose that and here's a breakdown as well of where people were from so about 55 percent were from North America Europe was 16 percent Asia was 22 percent and then the rest of the world was around 7 percent a little bit of information about who filled this in as well so we had around 20 percent were from product companies so that's plugins themes things like that 34 percent are what I call logistics or hosting companies and 47 percent were from agencies and service providers as far as company size goes it was pretty good split but you can see the two big ones were the 11 to 29 category and the 300 plus category not everyone who filled it in in the 300 plus category by the way was from a hosting company there were a lot of agency people in there as well yeah so there's that and then the breakdown as well of who they were by company role so senior leader team manager and team member I thought this was really cool actually to see like senior leaders and team managers were as willing to fill in the survey as team members when when you're asking for feedback sometimes it's the the team I was like I am ready to you know tell you how it is and this is the result so I developed this framework it's called the open team framework and it has eight different areas that we measure in so transparent leadership authentic purpose candid communication empowered ownership collaborative decision-making continuous learning and inclusive culture and so the global open team score and so this is the average across all eight areas is 89 that's pretty high and worthy I think of a round of applause for the WordPress community and to give you a little sense of how this data I hope is used I ran I worked with a team called barn to plugins and what we are able to do is plot their scores against the open team benchmark and show them where they're doing well compared to the community or compared to like the the global sort of like ecosystem and also where they have opportunities and so this was their score which was also amazing so big huge round of applause to barn to because like that's a great culture score so now I want to talk through each of the eight areas that we took a look at and I've given quick little definitions here of what we mean by each of these just to give you a sense the transparent leadership is trustworthy ethical and communicative leadership it emphasizes the importance of open honest communication accountability and active engagement from company leaders and when you do that you foster sense of trust and collaboration across the entire organization so these are the questions that were on the survey that were geared toward this so the the transparent leadership score overall was 86% positive 6% neutral 8% negative and this is what we do for each question for those if you didn't take the survey that's fine I'll tell you how it works we basically ask people questions or gave them statements what we call Likert statements and we ask them to rate their agreement with the statement from strongly disagree disagree neutral agree and strongly agree and we waited it based on the the response so that's how we got these scores here so there's things in here like our company leaders have communicated a vision that motivates me really high scores for our company leaders are honest and ethical in their business practices so here's some strengths of transparent leadership and some opportunities I think in for WordPress companies 92% agree that leaders are honest and ethical good that's probably something you want in your leaders I can ask company leaders any reasonable question and get a straight answer I don't know if you've ever worked in an environment where you're afraid to talk to your boss you're afraid to talk to your boss's boss but one of the things that's really exciting to see in WordPress is that we are approachable right senior leaders managers are approachable and our teams feel that way I will say that senior leaders didn't fill out a bunch of these questions intentionally because we didn't want to you know skew the results in their favor and 91% agreed that the leaders here demonstrate that people are important to the company success so that's really cool opportunities 80% agreed that our company effectively directs resources funding people in effort to our company goals might not be surprising maybe it is to me what that says is just that there are people who think that you know maybe they're they're overworked or that they they have these company goals that they're working toward but they don't have they're just stretched too thin to be able to accomplish them our company leaders have communicated a vision that motivates me was at 81 percent and I think I have some ideas on this one but I think this one really is is our distributed nature and and the way that a lot of us are in remote teams means we don't get as much face time with our leadership team and the leadership teams of our companies are probably talking vision and talking strategy and have clarity on purpose and mission but they they haven't maybe communicated that or or haven't communicated it enough to their teams and then finally here 83% agreed that company leadership here keeps people informed about what is happening so yeah there you go so I think that there's an opportunity here for team leaders and and executives or senior leaders to actually be more engaged with their team as far as like telling them what's going on when I was at Envato this was something they did really well so we would have an all-hands for the entire company every two weeks which is really cool and then like every quarter or so they would actually get up and they would share like how the company was going what was going on financially and how they were progressing toward goals they're using tools to help with that but you can imagine a team of like 600 people all getting together and being able to see that and then ask questions at the end it was it was pretty powerful and pretty good at helping people stay connected to the core of what the the company was all about authentic purpose is really about aligning the company's mission vision and values with its day-to-day operation so maybe you've heard the story about the janitor at NASA who when he gets asked what does he do says I'm putting a man on the moon right he had real clarity about the purpose of what he was doing and why he was there and even though his job was to maybe sweep and and empty the rubbish bins he was helping to put a person on the moon and I think that's great and so that's what authentic purpose is all about and so we look at a number of things here in this space and again pretty pretty decent scores for the WordPress ecosystem I rarely think about looking for a job elsewhere right I see myself working here in two years time my work has special meaning this is not just a job I have a feeling in WordPress this probably ranks a little bit higher than maybe in the rest of the world and in the rest of tech because we are a community we're very passionate people we've got this this project that we all contribute to that we love and are passionate about and I think that that bleeds into that sense of purpose that we all have I'm proud to tell others I work here I would recommend our company is a great place to work here's a few of the the strengths I know how my work contributes to our company goals 96% that's fantastic the products and services our company provides are as good as or better than our main competitors teams you have faith in your projects you have faith in your your your work and that's awesome I'm proud to tell others I work here that's pretty cool if you're developing an employer brand or you're about to recruit or hire get your people to do it get your people to tell their stories about what's going on how exciting is that they're probably pretty excited to tell people what's going on opportunities 86% said I rarely think about looking for a job elsewhere when I look at what we accomplish I feel a sense of pride I see myself working here in two years time so these are kind of there's a bit of a flag here maybe for us to take a look at it's not that bad when you consider that the spread is 87% to 94% between strengths and opportunities but just something to consider and think through is that you know we all have our eyes open and doors open to new opportunities and things when I look at what we accomplish I feel a sense of pride I wouldn't consider that low but I would consider that people's inner critique maybe going I pushed that out just three bugs I wish I would have got rid of those before it went live but here we are all right candid communication this one's fun anybody here ever had or wanted to give feedback to somebody or wanted to have a conversation that maybe wasn't all you know like rainbows and lollipops it's really important to do that no matter who you are in the company bottom to the top having candid conversations in a space that's safe can be really great for your culture and help you get past some challenges as well 90% here there's open and honest two-way communication in our team this is a psychologically safe space safe place to work when it is clear that someone is not delivering in their role we do something about it that one's interesting I don't know if you can see that on the score there I'll bring it up here but 78% agreed with that so when you look at some of the other scores we've had even in the opportunity space there's an opportunity here for us to have to have a think about this 97% agreed there is open and honest two-way communication in our team that's great I mean if you're remote you're gonna have to get on a call at some point and talk to folks I can voice a contrary opinion without fear of negative consequences yeah so you can disagree that's great perspectives like mine are included in decision making one of the things you may not notice as we're going through this is diversity equity inclusion and belonging questions are not segregated to one specific principle of the open team framework we spread them all throughout each one particularly because DEI and B is not a program it's it's just how we all should be working and so we've tried to spread those out and provide some insights here and this is one of those questions where perspectives like mine are included I think that's really cool to see such a high score especially when you consider those who self-identified as women are 5565% of the people that filled out the survey so that's really great 89% agreed I am happy with my current role relative to what was described to me and 91% said this is a psychologically safe space safe place to work now it's in the opportunity category only because it was in the bottom three but this category in particular did quite well so yeah moving on if you got questions and we're gonna curate space at the end for questions but if you have an insight or something that you see I don't mind if you yell it out either it's pretty cool let's have a fun fun chat here empowered ownership focuses on creating an environment that supports autonomy encourages innovation and promotes accountability at all levels now depending on whether your team is distributed or you have a hybrid model or you're all based in one location empowered ownership looks a little bit different I find that with teams that are fully distributed the sense of empowered ownership is probably a lot higher and the amount of trust that you have your teams is significantly higher as well as it has to be and we see that in some of the scores here as well so we have enough autonomy to perform our jobs effectively things like that so 90% was the total here and here's some of the strengths we have enough autonomy I have access to the things I need to do my job well and I know what I need to do to be successful in my role 83% agreed the information I need to do my job effectively is readily available we act on promising new or innovative ideas we hold ourselves accountable and our team members accountable for results so again those are toward the bottom but this whole category as a whole you all did very well collaborative decision making emphasizes the value of diverse perspectives and encourages employees to contribute their ideas insights and expertise to drive better outcomes so 88% here 7% neutral and 5% negative questions like other teams collaborate with us to get the job done you can count on people to cooperate some of the strengths were that you can count on people to cooperate that's cool have ever been part of a team where that wasn't the case where you maybe had had some negative experiences I've been there so to see that overwhelmingly at least with the survey group that they thought that things were that they could count on the team that was really cool and they could they felt part of a team I think that's a belonging question right I feel included I feel part of it especially in remote and distributed environments that sense of belonging you have to work really hard on because you might not ever meet people I worked for a company a little while ago for about a year and a half and I never met anyone in person until after I finished there which is kind of crazy right but that's that's how it can go sometimes it was also COVID so nobody was meeting anyone opportunities here are 79% agree that administrative tasks that don't have a specific owner are fairly divided this is this is an interesting one this is one of the lower scores in the entire survey and what it tells me is that the people that do good work get the work and sometimes that means that people that don't do get work have less work and it puts a lot of burden on those people that are good at doing things and so maybe something to consider is partnering people up together and assigning things that way and taking some of the load off of your best workers 82% agreed other teams collaborate with us to get the job done I don't know if this is conflict between support and marketing or support and engineering or engineering and marketing but I can see all of those things happening maybe you've had a situation where engineering's just done the pull requests and merged everything into into you know the the public stream and it's about to go live and so they just do it and they don't tell marketing until the day it's going live and marketing's like wait you just launched a whole new dot release of this project and you expect me to have a whole marketing campaign set up and ready to go for that excuse me and then you have support coming in and going documentation did anybody document anything what am I supposed to do is anyone tested this yet right so there's opportunity here for us to maybe have a think about the way our teams do things and the way we roll things out my team leader does a good job of assigning and coordinating people that's an interesting one 84% agreed so I think this one probably can be taken alongside the administrative tasks are fairly divided that maybe there's some opportunity here for us to to think through that as as team leaders continuous learning this is one of my favorite ones because the whole idea of continuous learning is is it's two things it's offering resources and opportunities for skill development or career progression but it's also a way of just approaching work right I really prefer saying what did we learn out of something that maybe didn't hit our goals rather than hey that was a failure or that didn't work the whole idea of failure is not a word I ever like to use in anything I prefer the whole concept of learning right and I'm a big fan and proponent of hypothesis driven design and development because when you start with a hypothesis no matter what the result you learn something right and all you're doing in hypothesis is trying to think of what you might what you might get out of it yeah so continuous learning good job folks you're doing some really cool stuff here I have access to the things I need to do my job management recognizes honest mistakes as part of doing business and my team leader or someone in management has shown a genuine interest in my career goals so some strengths management recognizes honest mistakes as part of doing business great no one wants to be you know made redundant or let go because of something that happened that was a genuine mistake I love seeing maybe you've seen those things where it's like somebody at KFC gets access to something and upload some code and it's wrong right and then the whole world sees it and then you see the developer threat of everyone you know celebrating and encouraging them and saying all the things I love that right that's a continuous learning opportunity I have access to the things I need to do my job well and day to day decisions demonstrate that quality and improvement are top priorities 85% said my team leader or someone in management has shown a genuine interest in my career goals there's a lot of pressure on team managers in particular to be responsible for a lot more this is one that I hope every team manager takes seriously that you have a responsibility to your team to do everything you can to help them grow and not just in their efficiency or productivity but in the things that they're interested in right maybe you've got somebody in support who's interested in marketing finding opportunities for them to jump over and maybe do a couple of weeks there or do a project or work on something can be a really great way to expand their skill set expose them to a new role and build some of that cross team cross functional I don't know growth or or or skill set so that some somebody goes down sick for example you have somebody who can fill in the gap 88% agreed I'm given opportunities to develop skills relevant to my interests and 89% this is a great company for me to make a contribution to my development so again opportunities here for us inclusive culture so this is yeah a safe and supportive space where all employees feel welcome heard and respected regardless of their background perspectives or experience I always find it hard to talk about inclusive culture because I am a 40 year old married white male and I'm literally the least inclusive I'm the poster boy for for you know what tech is I guess and and so for me though when I think of inclusive culture and how it relates to me the thing that I come down to is can I bring my authentic self to work can I talk about how much I love k-pop and k-dramas with my team can I share my love of knitting right and all the projects I'm working on in my team and you know let them be as equally sassy and bring themselves to it and all in all this is something that everyone here is doing pretty darn good on 93% one of the higher scores that we had throughout the entire survey 96% agreed we are genuinely supported if we choose to make use of flexible working arrangements I am able to arrange time out from work when I need to and generally I believe my workload is reasonable for my role 90% said I feel like I belong here I see myself working here in two years time my team leader cares about my well-being so even though those are red listed as opportunities they're higher than some of the strengths in other categories so all in all I think we're doing okay or or we didn't want to answer this one honestly and so we were more positive maybe than than the reality and last but not least intentional recognition which centers on creating a culture that values employee achievements provides fair compensation and celebrates success so 86% probably one of our our greatest opportunities here as well so 91% agreed we acknowledge people who deliver outstanding service people celebrate special events and care about each other I receive appropriate recognition for good work promotions go to those who best deserve them is 82 I believe my total compensation is fair in the context of the industry I had to I had to add that last part in the context of our industry because I don't know if you know this but on average word-prosalaries are like 20 to 30% less than the wider tech community so if you just left it as my total compensation is fair people might not agree generally the right people are rewarded and recognized here one more thing though so that's like the whole thing we also asked a couple questions about the word-press community and how people felt about word-press in the survey and in particular we asked how supportive team leaders and senior leaders are or how empowered people feel to participate in the community and if you see that around our open team framework we had 80s and 90s here with the word-press community we're sitting at 74% and the questions we asked were I feel good about the ways we contribute to the word-press community which had a 76 our company leaders are actively engaged in the word-press community set at 70% my team leader encourages me to participate in the word-press community 71% and we are encouraged to make a positive difference in the word-press community set at 80% we all have business goals I wonder if there's an opportunity here for us to add some community goals to our teams not just at the senior level not just at the sort of company brand level but within our individual teams around like how can the marketing team in a plug-in company of 20 to 30 people contribute to the word-press ecosystem how can that team leader actively support people who are interested in it and ask questions about it and say hey what are we doing this quarter to support word-press is there anything we can do maybe it's translating a doc or doing something like that so now what a lot when I did this presentation and I gave these results similar results to barn two at this point I was like oh that's a lot Katie had a lot of patience to sit through it so you've all had a lot of patience sitting through all the data thank you for that and by the way you'll have access to it after the talk as well but action is the foundational key to all success that's what Picasso says he's a European and because we trust Europeans we will trust Picasso and agree with him here as well we need to we can't just have the data we got to do something with it so I've got three things three takeaways that I think for our companies that we can have a look at so the first one is recognition and career progression so one of the things that can happen in word-press companies or any small company is that there doesn't feel a sense of forward momentum in a career and if we're trying to recruit new people into word-press those ambitious young Gen Zers like Tycho DeVock who did his talk yesterday and did a really great job I like how are we going to get people like that to join word-press as a career well we've got to actually show them what the path is like for them how they can grow if they think they're going to be a developer stuck as a developer for the next 40 years of their life for some that might work but for others that might not be what they want and then how do we recognize people how do we celebrate wins how do we empower people and and bring them together in a way that allows them to you know take pride more pride in the work that they do and celebrate it so that's one and I'm at zero minutes so I'm trying to speed through this last little bit here support and training for team leaders all throughout you can see some of these results our company effectively directs resources my team leader makes their expectations clear my team leader does a good job of assigning and coordinating people so we need to equip leaders with the tools to succeed and inspire so maybe investing in some comprehensive training programs encouraging regular team check-ins and promoting external inspiration so foster leadership style that's collaborative empathetic and innovative and finally communication from senior leaders as I told you a little earlier at Envato we do all we did all hands every two weeks when I was there and we did these quarterly check-ins that were fantastic I've worked at some companies where they might have won all hands a year I've worked at others where they have none and when when you don't know whether the work that you're doing is actually having the the success or is meeting the goals that senior leaders have it can be really unsettling right as as an individual and you're like are we even doing what we're supposed to be doing so senior leaders communicating regularly not just on how the company is doing but like the mission because mission and vision leak right it's a leaky bucket you got to keep pouring water into it so you got to keep reminding people of the why so I think that this is a great opportunity for our teams so that's that's pretty much it that was my goals for today I hope you leave curious about your own team's experience you leave with permission to be more invested in your team's experience and that if you can take on some of these things that you can be happier that your teams can be happier healthier and perform better than ever next year future of work is open right and all of these results are open you can at the end of this talk I'll give them to you and you can take all the questions all of the data you can run your own employee engagement surveys in your teams and see how you stack up against the the broader community as well thanks that's me thank you now that my my came off so with that we're going to start with some questions does anyone have any questions for James I see one right there thanks for coming everyone you can download the slides and everything at that link hey james it's cliff hey cliff longtime listener first-time caller uh how do you think it it might skew one way or the other from a larger versus smaller organization maybe under 10 and you know 100 um in what sense like like just all the data how is it skewed or or might it be skewed if you haven't answered that yes yeah so um the demographic breakdown of of company size uh the two largest blocks were teams that were like 15 to 30 and uh over 300 so that makes up about 50 percent of the total amount and then teams uh in between that were less than five 50 to uh 30 to 50 50 to 100 100 to 300 so um I would say the data is pretty pretty good um and that we can be confident that the results are not necessarily skewed toward larger teams or smaller teams my most recent experience uh in work was in a team of about 600 300 600 so uh when I talk I often talk more corporate speak probably then um then for smaller teams but if you are a single leader with a team um these things still apply right ask yourself the question when was the last time we actually got the whole team together and talked about our company goals and how we're tracking toward them when was the last time I celebrated a win with the team when was the last time um I promoted someone right those are all good questions that anyone can ask next question okay I guess that's it then is that really it thanks folks