Playbook for Live Pulse Facilitators

Leading to Success

Congratulations on your journey to popularize people and context oriented approach to organizational design!


Neelix.IO is your partner in enabling:

  • critical-thinking
  • smart transparency
  • real benefits for decision-making that focuses on Performance and People  equally!

Typical Facilitation Process

What to consider

The objective is to facilitate experience sharing that goes beyond kudos or complaints. We provide an avenue to critical-thinking aligned to the Growth Mindset principles.



Live Pulse approach can be facilitated by one of three, or a combination of methods:

Typical Considerations

  1. Ensure strong support from leadership
  2. Discover what rituals already work within the team(s)
  3. Discover which themes (soft and business process specific) matter most to the grassroots in each team and to the leader
  4. Choose which of three methods gel best with what already works
  5. Consider if, when and how additional methods might be of use
  6. Configure Neelix space for Phase 1
  7. Introduce the why, the concept and the process to the team
  8. Support the team through the trial until they become self-sufficient

Activity 1: Discover What Works Well

People are diverse and teams may operate in unique enough circumstances.

Easiest way to introduce Neelix is to leverage what already works. Existing rituals may require some updates.

Typical rituals that already take place:

  • Daily team sync-ups, huddles, stand-ups.
  • Periodic team conversations
  • Periodic surveys
  • Management communications


Suggestion

Given these conversations are for the purpose of efficient alignment on business specific matters, it is best to avoid new chores. However, these syncups often carry very valuable information about how people work within and across teams. People need to learn how they can safely and asynchronously affect joint effectiveness and accountability.


Facilitated demonstration:

  • A facilitator or “people and culture” champion can add value by observing how huddles work and reflect on what they see working well within a given team (or across teams). This reflection should be captured in “Team Journal” in Neelix on the day or at the end of the week. This should be an ongoing activity even after the Trial. During the Trial these reflections help with filling up the data lake with interesting observations for both the Team(s) and the Leader - thus fueling their interest.

Feedback flow champions can attend huddles ad hoc. Examples of what has been observed and reflected in other organizations:

  • “The standup is really a status reporting reading with little discussion about the impediments and how to align better”
  • “The standup is dominated by one person - the flow creates passiveness for others”
  • “There are repeated delays and same issues cause impact every day - a purposeful conversation may be needed to break the cycle”

Learning outcomes:

  • When facilitator is able to capture the day-to-day experience into a Team Journal:
  • People learn how they can speak up in timely manner
  • People learn that some challenges can be voiced with better Psychological Safety (via anonymous and humor assisted reflection in Neelix)
  • People learn that their opinions can transcend any politics and affect business decisions in a more direct way

Suggestion

Teams have periodic conversations in varying formats:

  • “Agile” retrospective
  • Updates led by the leader (virtual calls or town halls)
  • Informal social get together (end of week, etc)

A common experience:

  • It is easy for retrospective conversation to become a ritualised chore
  • Both formal and information conversation often contain important perspectives that are stress-tested by people, but this information is watered-down or eventually lost due to their conversational nature that is out of sync with decision-making processes

Facilitated demonstration:

  • If a team is accustomed to the ritual of Retrospective meetings, then suggest using Neelix Retrospective board that is compiled from posts to the “Team Journal” or inserted directly to the retrospective board
  • If a team is accustomed only to informal conversations, introduce a gamified “post a reflection on behalf of the team” activity that replaces capturing of minutes or asking someone to “speak to the management”; A nominated champion (typically team lead, scrum master or people and culture lead can do this)

Learning outcomes:

  • People will learn that the “talk fest” can be complemented with harder and more actionable data-points, thus making it easier for the senior leader to do something with the information
  • People will learn that joint conversations that are based on the ongoing posts from the “Team Journal” are more accurate and avoid finger-pointing
  • People will see a more engaged, productive and thankful senior leader because their job of figuring out how to improve the environment becomes easier 

Suggestion

Organizations are accustomed to using surveys as a method of understanding how people feel and what is on their mind. The traditional approach of pre-defining questions creates a “paint by colours” exercise that over-simplifies the feedback loop, creates bias and impacts psychological safety.


Facilitator can demonstrate few alternatives:

  • Abandon traditional internal surveys and mentor people on using “Team Journal”
  • Or, switch to using “Snap Health Check” module within Neelix in order to reduce bias and provide greater freedom of expression, whilst making it easier to process survey results
  • Methods can be combined

Learning outcomes:

  • People will learn that they can reflect on things in own words and with greater safety
  • The people and culture champion within the organization will learn that quality of feedback is much higher and that analysing information is much easier

Activity 2: Discover Themes

All posts in Neelix are measurable and contextual:

  • "Measurable" means people specify the degree of positive or a challenging sentiment when creating a critical-thinking reflection
  • "Contextual" means people can (should) add tags / themes to their posts


Tips:

  • Ai assistant is able to process all data even if tags / themes are missing. However, the real-time, interactive infographics will not be as useful if people do not add context.
  • It is best to start with fewer themes and add more as feedback loop matures


Examples of themes:

Theme (Tag Name) Explanation
End of month process This is a specific business process for the team that looks after accounting
CI Pipeline This is a specific process within software engineering
Planning This a business process that normally impacts all teams, even if planning is done completely externally (by senior manager, etc)
Our Service This is a generic theme that people can use to relay their perspective on what is being done well or not so well in relation to how external customer perceive what they get form the company
Collaboration This is a generic theme relating to internal culture
Ways of Working This is a generic theme relating to internal operating model
Strategy This is a generic theme that employees can use to relay their perspective on management decisions and general company direction
Clients / Sales This is a generic theme that all employees can use to capture useful learning and opportunities that can affect business strategy, product offering, operating model

How Themes and Other Reflection Details are Used:

Explanation of the the Live Pulse posts created by employees - themes, psychological safety, commentary

Activity 3: Configure Neelix Space

Steps:

  • Create new space
  • Go to Settings (click on the "Arrow" button within the main toolbar)
Shortcut to settings - Neelix Platform
  • Configure Themes
  • Configure Activities - Optional (list of projects, initiatives, activities within the business)
  • Update space details
  • Default reminder / description for the team explaining the "why" and "how" their feedback will affect decision-making - set space Description and Slogan
  • Update default settings for Team Journal reflections - tooltip template that provides an example to follow when creating a critical-thinking post
Customize feedback loop to the context of your team - Neelix Platform

Activity 4: Activate Integration with Daily Tools

Available integrations:

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