356 – What’s the state of teams in the WordPress space?

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast, you have reached episode number 356 entitled, what's the state of teams in the WordPress space? It was published on Thursday, the 11th of January, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined by our guest James Giroux in a few minutes time.

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Okay. What have we got for you today? While, as I said at the top, we've got an episode with James Giroux. It's all about the state of teams in the WordPress space. Well, what does that mean? Well, James is the founder of TeamWP and they've carried out a very extensive survey called the Team Experience Index. And it's a survey trying to gather information all about teams in the WordPress space. What they do well, what they don't think they do well and how they can improve.

Honestly, the detail that James has gone into is pretty incredible. So if you work in a WordPress team, or you're thinking of starting one or joining one, and you've got an intuition that there might be processes, thoughts, ideas, ways of improving. Well, this survey will point you in the direction of ideas and things that you may wish to adopt within your team or company. Really interesting and pretty much unlike any other episode, we've done.

I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by James Giroux. Hello, James. How are you doing?

[00:03:42] James Giroux: I'm doing very well. Great to be here with you again, Nathan.

[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. It's always good to point out when guests have gone above and beyond. It's silly o'clock where James lives. So I really appreciate the fact that you've, got up early and you're making the effort to talk to me. We're going to talk today a little bit about a project, which we've spoken about in the past.

It's called Team WP. before we get stuck into that, James, just. Very quickly, give us a brief bio. Tell us who you are and how long you've been working with WordPress.

[00:04:13] James Giroux: So I've been in the WordPress ecosystem now for, oh gosh, 12 to 15 years. Something crazy like that. I've. I've been all around. I've worked in a big marketplace companies like Envato. I've worked in hosting companies, and large, product companies like Gravity Forms and Stellar WP. And now I find myself in the unenviable position, maybe of being a entrepreneur, again, a founder of, Team WP.

Team WP is really. Trying to help bring, I guess the best way to describe it like modern HR or modern ways of working into, WordPress product companies where maybe they don't have access to the kind of, HR resourcing that, other larger companies might have access to. So that's where it started from.

Definitely,

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: there? Was it a sort of gap that you saw? Did you notice that certain companies, perhaps smaller companies that didn't have the time and the money to invest in those kinds of thought processes? Cause it takes time, right? You can't just come up with good procedures by chance.

You have to sit down and work it out and maybe use the experience of. People's previous jobs and things like that. Where, did the inspiration come from? Did you see the need fairly glaringly out in the community?

[00:05:39] James Giroux: you don't have to go far to see where, the tools are missing. I think that's probably the best way to describe it is, yeah, the longer you're, working, the longer you're doing things, the bigger your proverbial toolbox gets, right? you figure out. How to communicate, or how to lead, or how to navigate things, in, different ways using different approaches.

And, I've, been very lucky in that the experiences that I've had, and the opportunities I've been in have, involved a lot of extra training. And, but being in the community and hanging out with folks, you just see things around like ways of working or team norms or, like just how we approach problem solving, how we approach dealing with conflict and, culture and things like that.

It, there was just a lot of opportunity for, maybe different. Approaches or different styles of, having those conversations that were quite well known out in the rest of the tech ecosystem, but maybe not as well known in WordPress. And I found that kind of a head scratcher. And so I thought, here's maybe an opportunity to just bring in some of my own experiences and not saying that I've got it all figured out either, but.

having done this for a while now, maybe I can bring in some of those experiences to, to help support other teams to do things better because we want WordPress to grow. We want it to be sustainable. We want companies to last for the longterm and not feel like they, hit a wall, especially developer founders who are.

maybe like more interested in the tech, than the team and, being able to offload some of that team thinking, or provide some answers there, I think is where I'm hoping to go with Team WP.

[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's really interesting. So if you are a freelancer or you're just beginning something, if you're in the WordPress space, pay attention because they, James has got some, data basically that he's going to talk about today, because when you launch this initiative, we've spoken in the past about it.

and you at that point were in the process of gathering up some data. You have something called the team experience index, which is an annual survey, which you're going to be conducting measuring team experience within our ecosystem, the WordPress ecosystem. you've done that. You've got, I believe I'm right in saying you've now done that for the first time, hopefully the first of many, and you're on the podcast really today to, tell us what the data has told you.

Have I got that right?

[00:08:27] James Giroux: Absolutely correct. Yep.

[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So I could break it down. James has been very helpful in that he's, we share some show notes when we do these podcasts and James has broken everything down for me to see. I suspect a lot of that will get copy and pasted into the show notes. So if you're listening to this, I don't know you're out for a run or you're driving your car and you want to have a mnemonic for something, just go to the show notes, look for this episode, search for James Giroux.

It'll be there so you can see all of these, but let's, spell it out. What did your survey? Intend to find out and let's get into what it did find out.

[00:09:03] James Giroux: Yeah, so we, conducted the team experience index, which, for anybody who's, ever been in a company, you might know this also as an employee engagement survey. The whole idea is to survey or ask questions to people who work in, WordPress teams about what it's like to work there. What we have done is we have applied a lens to it, a framework that I've developed at TeamWP called the Open Team Framework.

And the Open Team Framework basically is eight different principles around culture, ways of working, like how we approach things and it's just more of a helpful guide for being able to categorize things and develop measures that are easy for people to grab and onto. so the eight are transparent leadership, authentic purpose, candid communication, empowered ownership, collaborative decision making, continuous learning, inclusive culture and intentional recognition.

so we've. We basically ask questions in each of those areas to try to get a better understanding of how people are feeling about those things. And then, also some demographic information as well just to get a sense of who's actually participating in the survey. Now what those, questions do is they provide us with a temperature check, for lack of a better term, of how people are feeling in that moment about their environment.

good example of a question would be, our company leaders have communicated a vision that motivates me. So that's a, a question, or a Likert statement is what it's called. And we ask people to tell us how much they agree with that statement. And that helps us to develop a score.

We take all the scores from all of these statements that are there. And we have what we call the open team score, which is the average of all of those together. So that's a little bit of that. do you want me to go into more Nathan? I can keep going.

[00:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: around that. Firstly, I think all of those eight points, the, mostly two or three words and they all make sense except the last one to my, it doesn't I just don't get it straight off the bat. So could you just explain that last one? What is intentional recognition?

Like I say, I think the others are all self explanatory. What's that last one?

[00:11:32] James Giroux: in a lot of, Larger workplaces. One area of focus for HR is in the concepts or the area of reward and recognition. Recognition, in particular, is something that springs up across the board. It doesn't matter what company you're in, as being an area of need, right? Where people don't feel like... The work they do is recognized in a way that is rewarding for them, right?

Or, validating for them. So when we were coming up, or when I was coming up with the framework, intentional recognition, I wanted to capture that idea of recognition, that idea of reward, but I wanted to wrap it in this idea that it's not something that just happens. It's something you have to be.

Intentional about. It's something you have to build systemically or systematically into the way that you work with your teams. So that's where the

[00:12:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:12:35] James Giroux: intentional recognition came from.

[00:12:37] Nathan Wrigley: perfect. Thank you. Okay. So that was the only wrinkle everything else. Like I said, we'll be in the show notes. There's an explanation of each of those, but that's really helpful. Okay. So my first question around the survey is you obviously got some responses because you have some data.

Did you get enough responses? Let's just put it that way. Did you get enough responses to, to feel confident that the data that you're going to present to us is in fact a decent measure? obviously if you had two replies to that form, we would question it. But if you had 10, 000, we would be, over the moon.

That would be amazing. You don't need to go into the numbers, but are you, broadly, were you happy with that? Would you like that much again next time? Or you, yeah, it would be better to have more.

[00:13:20] James Giroux: I think that's a great question. Bit loaded. and I can go into, I think happened one with anything like this. It's about visibility, right? And where people are able to find it to fill it in. and how many companies are getting on board. So this first crack at it, I think, is a reflection of.

who was present in the places where it was being promoted and that honestly primarily was through, social media. So if you are active in social media, chances are you would have seen something about this if you listen to a podcast. so there's a level of engagement with the WordPress community that you wouldn't need to have in order to do that.

because of that. We're dealing with generally more engaged WordPress folks than less engaged

[00:14:19] Nathan Wrigley: an interesting observation. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Great. Sorry. I interrupted. Carry

on.

[00:14:23] James Giroux: No, that's great. And so the score and the scores and the demographic even reflects that. And so I suspect as we go forward, the benefits that teams get, even just from knowing that this exists, hopefully in the future will lead to more diversity in terms of who is encouraged to fill it out. We have some other little things that are cool too.

So we run a paid version of the Team Experience Index called Culture Compass. And that's, something that any team can just do on their own for their own private, data. And, what's really cool is any question that, that team fills in that is a question from the Team Experience Index, we feed that data in.

So the, score, the scores in general will become this kind of like living thing over time so that as, new data is entered, old data is removed. and so that score just continues to evolve over time, which will be really cool to see.

[00:15:26] Nathan Wrigley: That's a really interesting observation about the, yeah, the, nature of the people who are contributing first time around. I guess time will tell as, time goes on, you get more and more data and as, as with every piece of data, the, more history it has, I guess the more people come to trust it and so on.

[00:15:44] James Giroux: from

[00:15:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. Really nice. all right, let's dig into it. You've got, you got next to those eight, areas, you have a score. And in, in, every case, it's a double digit score. So we might see Transparent Leadership, 86, Authentic Purpose, 87. I guess we need to explain what that number actually means.

Is that something out of a hundred? What does it, what do those numbers actually represent?

[00:16:13] James Giroux: how we get those scores is we ask. A series of questions. So each of those kind of top level scores is based on the averages of the combined, scores of all of the, sub questions. for example, I think with, Transparent Leadership, there's actually, ten different questions, or statements that are given, and the scores range from, 80% to 92%, and so the, final score of 86% is the, net positive score, or the average positive score of all of those questions.

That's what we mean by that. is, you can choose to answer, strongly disagree, neutral, agree, or strongly agree. and what we do is we take the net positive or the positive, the neutral and the negative. And we have different, numbers around that percentages and that's what that score is.

[00:17:18] Nathan Wrigley: Got it. So the maximum that we could possibly expect would be 100, the minimum would be zero, and so anything, in the sort of 70s, I'm thinking about exams, if you go sit at an exam at school or something, when you get into the 90s. You're feeling pretty happy about yourself at that point, because 90% in any kind of test really does represent pretty significant coverage of the, things that you've been asked about.

And okay, let me just go through the results and given what I've just said, 80s and 90s. Feels like we're in a good space. This is what we've got. Transparent leadership, 86. Authentic purpose, 87. Candid communication, 90. Empowered ownership, 90. Collaborative decision making, 88. Continuous learning, 90. Wow.

Inclusive culture, 93. Boy, that's really hit it out of the park, isn't it? Intentional recognition, 86. Now that data from the outside, just staring at it. It's screaming at me, everything's great. Is that the right conclusion to draw?

[00:18:24] James Giroux: because this is what we want, 86, 87, 96.

Now that what you've and it's a red flag not because, there's anything wrong with the results, but it's a reflection of the highly engaged group that is filling this out.

So I suspect that if we were able to draw from teams, and where maybe they weren't on social or they weren't active necessarily in the WordPress community, but we're WordPress, just professionals, that score would go down a little bit more or would be more reflective and that's okay.

but what this shows us is that those people who were able to find it, are feeling. Particularly good about it. and I, so I would just say with a grain of salt, that the results are, maybe skewed to, those who are already pretty excited about WordPress. and that's cool too.

[00:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so the, smallest score, if that's the right word, I don't really know, is Transparent Leadership

and the highest one that we've got is Inclusive Culture 93. So given the grain of salt that you've just mentioned, and given that there may be some caveats about the nature of the people who were able to take this, time around, this first time around, what are the conclusions that you are beginning to tease out?

Obviously, you've drawn the conclusion that you... potentially like a different cohort or a bigger cohort of people filling it out next time. But aside from that, what are the conclusions that you're beginning to draw this first time around?

[00:20:12] James Giroux: Yeah. I think, the thing that comes through is, and, when you have, when we do these, kinds of services, we. We intentionally add in, questions in different spots that ask the same question, but, or are looking for the same kind of answer, but just asked a different way. each of these principles are not siloed.

They're, dependent on, codependent on each other. And so there's crossover as well between them. So when we look at, some of the responses, we're looking for where, are the strengths in, each of these particular areas and where are the opportunities for growth.

[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:20:56] James Giroux: with each section, even though, we talked about transparent leadership having 86%, being the lowest positive score, if you actually look in the results, the question, there is a question in here, that had the score of 80%, and it was the lowest in the entire bucket.

and that was our company effectively directs resources, funding people and effort toward company goals. So what, that indicates to us is that, the leadership is either not accurately explaining how they make decisions around where, effort is going. So when we talk about effort, we talk about like where they're directing people to work specifically in.

So maybe it's not as clear. or, they're not explaining how that, impact is, being seen in, the company as well. that's which, when you look at that, you go, Oh yeah, transparent leadership, that makes sense. And so we can, take that and go, okay, if we want to see that score grow, transparent leadership as a whole grow here are three or four things or one or two things that, that any company could do to actually elevate that within their team.

[00:22:11] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. Yeah. I think what we should do is unpack each of those Eight areas, one at a time, because obviously behind it, as you've just described, there's a bunch of questions. I don't see those questions, but you've got the data there. So if we, take them one at a time, you can explain a little bit about how this came out.

So you maybe did just do the transparent leadership one, but let's cover it anyway, just in case we missed any of the bits and the pieces. So transparent leadership came out as 86 and the things that you've written in the show notes, I'll just read them out and then you can elaborate, possible recommendations would be share regular updates on company progress, communicate a clear and motivating vision and be transparent about resource allocation.

Now you just covered that one, but is there anything you wanted to add to what you've written there?

[00:23:03] James Giroux: I think this is one that is that comes out a lot, even in just conversations I have with teams and people that are working in WordPress. Anytime I do a, like a social media post on this, it gets a lot of traction. People want to know what is going on. I can tell you stories about how. I used to have this when I was at Envato and I was at Gravity Forms.

Anytime you're working with, especially like third party developers, like maybe you've got an ecosystem where you've got a core product and, you've got people that are curious about it. Even in WordPress, we have this, right? We all get excited and amped up to hear Matt's state of the word when we talk about WordPress because we have this desire to know where things are going so that we can.

accurately position ourselves to be ready to either capitalize or survive whatever the impending change or, thing is going to be. And so consider that in your own company, in your own team as well, that people are curious, to know what's going on. So they can feel that sense of like positioning of how they fit into that.

So one of the things, yeah, we, sharing regular updates on company progress is just, are we going where we think we're going? you consider how many teams right now in the ecosystem are going through layoff rounds or, having to let staff go. And that conversation becomes easier.

If people are in the know about how things are going business wise, right? Like people get clear about it, clear eyed. yeah, that's, what I would say on transparent leadership. But it's not just about communicating all the things all the time, right? You want to be, strategic about it. but being, consistent, I think, is, part of it as well.

[00:24:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And now that I give it some thought, it isn't really any surprise that one of all eight got the, least score because it's the thing that you do, isn't it? you're at the water cooler and you're talking about things and typically the, disgruntled conversations usually are about leadership.

you're concerned about the way that your boss is behaving towards you or the, I don't know, the, way that you haven't been communicated about you. You've been moved from one team to another and you never knew about it. Or as you just said, job security at the moment is a real thing.

And if you just don't have any insight, any window into how the company is more broadly doing, then you're going to be worried on that level. And I suppose that. That feeds into that. Yeah, that's really interesting. Okay. So next one, slightly higher, but still second lowest is authentic purpose. I'll just read what you said.

Authentic purpose came out as an 87. and the suggestions or the recommendations I should say are ensure team members understand how their work contributes to the company goals and foster a sense of pride in the company's accomplishments. So I'll hand it over to you.

[00:26:09] James Giroux: Yeah, this one is interesting because it speaks to that, internal side of it a bit. And it's a little bit more ethereal, right? When you, consider that we're, talking a lot about work, and the work that they do. some of the questions we ask in this space are things like, my work has special meaning.

This is not just a job. and. And, that did really well. It actually scored 92%. but then, it's also including things like, I rarely think about work, looking for a job elsewhere. and, or I see myself working here in two years time. So it speaks to, that sense of, motivation, but also like I know how my work contributes to our company goals, or I would recommend our company is a great place to work.

working here motivates me to go beyond what I would normally do, in a similar role elsewhere. So these types of questions that are really about like looking at the, outcome, if you will, of some kind of vision that's been shared with them or, understanding of how they fit.

into, the company's mission. And it's, one of those things where the, larger a team gets, the harder it is for everyone to feel connected. To that vision, and if you combine it, talk about how none of these are siloed, principles, but if you connect it as well with transparent leadership, your team's not proactively or your leadership's not proactively communicating, what the vision is or what you're working toward, it can be hard to feel like your work is connected to that.

We all need that. I think in today's day and age, we're beyond the point where we just show up at work, clock in and clock out. we wanna feel connected to some kind of purpose. It's probably why we work in WordPress as well.

[00:28:12] Nathan Wrigley: Mm.

[00:28:13] James Giroux: so without having that meaning, we're, missing a big piece of that motivating, I don't know, thing to, to, move us forward.

[00:28:25] Nathan Wrigley: I do know what you mean. I think there's a nice virtuous cycle between transparent leadership and authentic purpose. There's a good degree of overlap there, isn't there? In the, if, the leadership is transparent about how the company's doing and what have you, then the, team can have a sense of what their purpose is and what the wider goals of the company are.

So those two. Seem to fit really nicely together, right at the top of the list. Okay. We're going up in score now. The third one is candid communication. Got a full 90. and your recommendations from the data that you've got is foster open, honest, two way communication and create a psychologically safe place to work.

So again, I'll just hand it over.

[00:29:07] James Giroux: So this is interesting. So a lot of the scores were really high. And I would say that this is probably a function of who filled out the survey a little bit and also, the distributed nature of a lot of WordPress teams. forces us to be more, proactive at communicating because we don't have the water cooler the same way.

We don't have those passive communication approaches where you can just rub shoulders with, folks as you're going in the door, greeting people as you go in every. and I think it's really important for us to have that, And in that are conversations that are positive and conversations that are negative. And even though we scored really high on some things, like there's open and honest two way communication in our team, scored a 97, I want to counter that with the lowest score in this group, which was, when it is clear that someone is not delivering in their role, we do something about it, which actually only got a 78%.

So quite a big divide there, it's still relatively high, all things considered, but in the context of these scores, quite low compared to, some of the others that we're seeing, which leads me to believe that maybe we're not as good at providing, constructive feedback or we're, or, heading off somebody who's maybe not doing the best or not performing where they need to go to be at.

And we also ask questions around, inclusivity in, these types of things as well, right? Like, when we think of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, around things like, perspectives like mine are included in decision making, which got a 90, which, again, I think is reflective of who filled this in.

Coincidentally, just as a bit of a demographic, point, 28% of those who responded to the survey, identified as being from a historically underrepresented group, which I think is really cool. The number of women, or people who identify as female. It's also significantly higher. It was like 65% of those who like, you didn't have to say whether you were from a historically underrepresented group or, disclosure gender.

But if you chose to, the results show that 65% were, women. Which I thought was really cool. but also probably overly representative of, things like social media fields and marketing fields where. people are present on, on Twitter more and, in those roles, compared to developers, which tend to, to skew more mail.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really interesting. I'll tell you something, James, and I hope that this goes down well. I'm obviously chatting to you about this, and you've explained this to me before, but this whole thing is starting to make way more sense to me now. We're three points in, and I am really getting an insight into what you're trying to do here.

Great. I'm really enjoying this. because now you're explaining these little subsections. I can see the overlap. I am getting a real understanding of what you're trying to do here. And, if you're listening to this and you've been half paying attention, maybe stop, rewind, listen to it again, because this is fabulous.

Thoroughly enjoying this and get a real understanding of what you're doing. So firstly, bravo for doing it and let's move on. Number four, empowered ownership. again, quite a nice score, 90. the recommendations out of that were ensure team members have the resources they need, Oh yeah, the resources they need.

Act on innovative ideas and hold everyone accountable for results. Once again, over to you.

[00:33:17] James Giroux: I think the big thing is making sure we're clear about what empowered ownership means. so really this is, interestingly enough, I, saw a tweet from somebody in the WordPress ecosystem who's a CEO talking about, how, they ran all of the different things that they do, in their job through, Chatbot or ChatGPT.

and we're told that they needed to like... hire five different folks to take over a bunch of the work or they had five different roles that they could define out of It and I thought that was really interesting and I also talked to a lot of overloaded leaders who just feel like they have to make all the decisions about everything all the time and empowered ownership is really all about Figuring out how to distribute that decision making throughout your team and throughout your organization and letting go of some of those big things and equipping your team to be able to make decisions and own those decisions.

both, the consequences and the, celebrations from it, as possible, right? that's just what it is. we have enough autonomy to perform our jobs effectively that scored super huge because of course, we're all remote for the most part in WordPress. So you have to be able to have to give that autonomy away.

but coincidentally, we're also, Maybe not equipping with all of the information to me. This is a leadership training thing, right? Like the information I need to do my job effectively is readily available, was the lowest scoring 83%. so there's opportunity there for us to just do better at, especially in middle management of equipping our teams with all of the things they need in order to be able to do their job effectively.

And, so there's a communication opportunity there.

[00:35:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's really interesting. That one. I know personally, I find it very hard to delegate, decision making, but I also know that the most, and I'm doing air quotes here, the, most successful people I know are stupendously good at giving responsibility over to other people and saying, that's yours.

You run with it and then report back and, and yeah, so that's really interesting. Okay. Thank

[00:35:37] James Giroux: I found, early on, there's this, question again, a tool that I've used to help me in delegating. It's what are the things on my plate this week that only I can do? What are the things that anyone can do? And if there are things that I'm doing that anyone can do, and I've got a team under me that, that can be doing this, what can I be doing to equip them to do that and own that?

And is there something here that only they can do right. Or that I can give away to them where, I'm fine with that. and also thinking to yourself, how do I de-risk this? I love that word de-risk. It's probably a corporate buzzword, but if I want. To give something away or I want to delegate a decision, but I'm worried about the outcome that they're not going to produce the results that I would expect or they're not going to do it at the level that I want as a manager, right?

Or as a leader, my role is to do everything I can to equip them. So that is de risk that the chances of them, not doing it the way I want or not being successful or lower. And that's one of my primary responsibilities as a leader. So getting into that headspace, I think for a lot of folks is part of that transition from a, it's gonna sound awful, but from a doer to a leader, a doer to a manager.

[00:37:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And again, another virtuous cycle. You imagine the more that you can delegate those things, the more time you get in your life to concentrate on the other things in the, in the company that need addressing that we've talked about in points one, two, and three. so yeah, again, I can, I'm starting to make connections with all of the underlying stuff you're doing here.

This is really interesting. number five. Leave. 88, a bit lower than some of the others, but, nevertheless, collaborative decision making. So this, the recommendation is foster a sense of team unity, ensure tasks are fairly divided, nice, and promote collaboration. Once again, over to you.

[00:37:38] James Giroux: So this I think dovetails really well into empowered ownership, right? if we talk about delegating work and, equipping our teams to be able to do these kinds of things, the counterbalance to that is collaborative decision making. So helping your team know when to surface things that need maybe broader input, for, decisions.

and, but it's, two sided, right? Management involves people in decisions that affect their jobs or work environment was one of the statements that we had on here. It scored, 88, which is the same as, the overall score. I am appropriately involved in decisions that affect my work, scored a 90%.

the lowest one was administrative tasks that don't have a specific owner. Fairly divided. That's scored the lowest at 79. And interestingly, this is actually add, what I call a DEI or an inclusivity question, because often what happens is people with the, least amount of power right in the dynamic of a team are given.

the load of, tasks that don't have an owner and, and that's coming through here as well. So we can see that, there's work to do, in order to make sure that just because somebody is, somebody whose voice is maybe not as strong as others, that we are not just assuming and dumping all of the extra work on them, right?

But that we are looking for, equitable distribution.

[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Number six really resonates with me. I always get bored quickly and I always want to know what's the next thing that I can learn. That's, I don't know why that is, but that's just a feature of my life. So this is continuous learning. it got a 90. And the recommendations are encourage learning and growth.

See Misa, see mistakes as opportunities for improvement and show interest in team members' career goals. As I said, for me, if my job was the same week in, week out and there was no hope that it was ever going to be different, oh, crikey. The, interest evaporated within minutes of me starting the job. yeah.

Over to you.

[00:39:58] James Giroux: Continue. This is one of my favorite ones because I think it's one that has the most opportunity to transform a company from the ground up. When we approach, everything we do with this continuous learning mindset, it totally changes the way that we engage with each other. it, moves us from a, a failure model to an experimentation model because we change the framing of our questions, right?

So for a marketing campaign, if we don't achieve the results, maybe that we expect rather than that campaign being a failure, it's an opportunity to learn what did we do in this campaign or what did we learn coming out of this campaign that we want to apply to the next one, right? Which I think is a. much healthier way to approach work. and when we apply that continuous learning mindset, not just to the work that we do, but who we are and our, sort of approach to personal growth or, career growth, I think, and development, I think that's really exciting. So yeah, developing that. that idea that mistakes aren't, are not just failures, but they're opportunities for improvement. but that we're also looking at, like, how are we developing skills to in, in ourselves in order to be able to improve on that? Oh, like I did this campaign, but I didn't really understand. Twitter all that much or the Twitter, like ads, dashboard.

And so if I knew more about that, would be really helpful. Okay, let's go and learn more about that so that we can do better next time. all of that kind of stuff

[00:41:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I also think we're in such a fast moving industry, what was applicable three years ago, broadly speaking is out the window. So the opportunity to learn and have that as part of your job description to continue learning and be given those opportunities and the time and the resources and, have somebody in the company taking interest in what you're doing and what you're learning and how it can.

Affect the company's bottom line. Yeah, really interesting. Okay. Next one, biggest score, inclusive culture came out with a 93. Very impressive. the recommendation is support flexible working arrangements, ensure workloads are reasonable and foster a sense of belonging once more over to you.

[00:42:29] James Giroux: So I want to be clear, like when we, talk about inclusive culture, we're not talking specifically about D E I B like initiatives. that's a, That's a part of it, but it's really about this idea of being able to, create an environment at work where we're promoting creativity, collaboration, innovation, right?

Creating a safe, and supportive space where everyone feels welcome, heard, and respected, regardless of their background, perspectives, and experiences. it's not the same thing as, what we might come to think of as inclusion or, that, but it's inclusive of that. apologize for using the same word a lot, but it's, we ask questions like, I can be myself around here.

I feel like I belong here. We are genuinely supported if we choose to make use of flexible working arrangements. my team leader cares about my well being. People look forward to coming to work here. So it's a bit more, that sense of Yeah, I'm accepted for who I am, and I'm allowed to bring my authentic self to work and be who I am.

And, that's just allowed. And, that's great, right? And it's, it makes it easy for me to just get on with things and be myself,

[00:43:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Last of the, the, eight points is intent, intentional recognition. That was the one that I queried at the beginning. So the recommendation is acknowledge outstanding service, ensure promotions go to those who deserve them. Oh, that's a good one. and provide fair compensation. Okay. So for the last time, over to you.

[00:44:20] James Giroux: The compensation one is always going to be an interesting one, because, the, and, so you, you have to, everyone wants to get paid more, right? I think that's pretty, pretty true. but, the way we ask the question or the way we present the question is I believe my total compensation is fair in the context of our industry.

and it got 83, so not too bad actually, all things considered. We're also looking at things like, we acknowledge people who deliver outstanding service here, and that's scored a 91. I receive appropriate recognition for good work. My job performance is evaluated fairly. but also, I believe there are good career opportunities for me here.

One of the things that often happens in smaller teams is that the job you have is the job you will always have. And that sense of forward momentum in your career doesn't exist because, first of all, teams don't have the systems in place to facilitate that. But also there's not a lot of, like upward momentum if you're, An engineer on the team, maybe the only position to go is up to the lead engineer, the engineering manager.

And if that position is filled by the founder, for example, that role will never become available. being able to develop. ways to recognize, people and to actually create career pathways for them. Keeping also in mind things like continuous learning, those pathways become really important and we want to recognize people also in ways that are, Appropriate for them.

My I use this example a lot. My wife is hates getting public praise So if you want to encourage her you take her aside and you just say hey what you did There was really awesome. Well done and with no one around and that is all she needs But if you bring her up front right or you do like a public slack message or something like that for her Oh, it's the worst thing.

So we have to find within our teams, the approach to recognition that works individually for each one. And, and also make sure that we're compensating people, right? So if somebody is doing a good job, Pay them for it, right? and in your own budgeting, like if you're a senior leader or you're in charge of these kinds of things, plan for not just the role somebody has today, but the role they're going to grow into in the next two, three, four years and, financially plan for that.

Hey, we want to pay this person this, or we hope to get them to, from a junior to a mid to a senior in the next two to three years. And here's the pathway to get them there.

[00:47:09] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, absolutely fascinating. So we've been through all the eight different points. You have distilled those into three top level recommendations, but as we've gone into everything in depth, I think I'll copy and paste those into the show notes. So if you're interested in that, head to the website and you can look at them there.

But, before we finish it off, I'm just wondering, you've written down next steps. So in terms of TeamWP and the ongoing nature of this survey, Just tell us where you're going next, what's happening in the future. Hopefully.

[00:47:42] James Giroux: Yeah, I want to get these results out there. big campaign coming up to just publicize these results. I would love to see teams, whether they're using, team WP or not to ask these questions or, build these into their own. Habits and rituals within their team. These are all good questions that any team can ask at any time, but, and these results will be open and public.

So if you're looking to compare how your team is doing to, the, global WordPress, ecosystem, then, I think this is a great resource to do that. Obviously, if you're looking for support and help, love for you to come and hang out with us at team WP, start a conversation and see where it goes.

But, What I would love is for teams to be able to have data for themselves. That they can then make informed decisions about where they want to invest their time. I use Barn 2 as a great example. We did this with Barn 2. And they identified, transparent leadership as an area of opportunity for them.

Not because they weren't doing, great things, but because their team wanted to spend more time in connecting together. And they wanted to invest time together. And so that became, an action item, for them to support the growth of their people and their culture to go out and do these things.

And Katie, Katie Keith, you can see her on Twitter. She is always talking about, yeah, we did our next, big. All team gathering and, we played this game or we did this thing and it's just really cool to see how they're very proactively taking the results of their own engagement survey and applying that to, the way that they're working together and seeing positive results from that.

So I'd love to see that happen all around the

[00:49:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Honestly, I've had a real epiphany during this recording. It really has. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have firmly found their way into the right place. So firstly, if you've listened to this and you've got something out of it, bravo, great. If you didn't quite get it, honestly, go back, listen to it again.

It may very well be worthwhile. And also, why not just share this episode around with the people in your organization? If you're a leader, you could share it with your. Employees. If you're an employee, you could, dare I say it, share it with your leadership team. And you never know, in the future you may be able to do what Barn2 did and implement ideas and strategies from this.

Because there's a whole bunch of stuff in there that it's unlikely you're gonna think of all of these independently. And so having... Having TeamWP, having your back, is really great. So you mentioned that we can go to your website. that's great. We can find that. We can Google it. But also, the URL is, fairly straightforward.

It's teamwp. co. Where else could we find you specifically, James? Be that an email address or a social platform?

[00:50:46] James Giroux: Yeah, I'm on Twitter, sharing photos of my kids and I fishing, but also talking about leadership and, a lot of this kind of stuff. So it's just my, name at James Giroux, James, J A M E S G I R O U X for those of you curious about how to spell my French Canadian last name.

[00:51:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:51:06] James Giroux: There it is.

[00:51:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Perfect. a really interesting topic. As I said, I've got a lot out of this. It was really interesting to delve deeper. James, thank you so much for being on the podcast today and very best of luck with Team WP.

[00:51:20] James Giroux: Thank you so much, Nathan. Thank you everyone.

[00:51:22] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Fascinating chatting to James today about the subject of teams and the state of teams in the WordPress space. I'm pretty sure that if you listen to that podcast carefully, you'll realize that James is pretty serious about this endeavor he's gone into, as you heard, lots and lots of detail.

You can obviously contact him. You can find links on our show notes page. Head to WP Builds.com and search for episode number 356. And all of the links, including James' comprehensive show notes are included there.

The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro the home of a managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more by heading to go.me forward slash WP Builds. And we do thank GoDaddy Pro for their unwavering support of the WP Builds podcast.

Okay, we'll be back next week. It'll be a chat with David Waumsley and myself. Now I know that I said that David Waumsley was leaving the podcast. But if you listened back, you'll have noticed that I've started a new podcast with him. It's called the no script show. And we're hijacking the WP Builds podcast for several weeks to give you an indication of what that is all about. Give you a bit of a clue, it's all about web development, but not WordPress web development. The site for that is noscript.show.

Also, don't forget that we do absolutely loads each and every week. Head over to WP Builds.com forward slash schedule. And you'll be able to see the times that we're doing things so that you can join us live. We've got things like this week and WordPress, we've got our speed it up show with Sabrina's Zeidan, and we've also got a Gato GraphQL webinar, and there's probably going to be loads of those in the new year as well.

Okay.

That truly is all that I've got for you this week. I'm going to fade into some cheesy music, and say, stay safe. Bye-bye for now.