The People Team has spent a bunch of time defining our 2014 goals. As part of that process we reviewed our team’s core tenets – the guardrails that help us make decisions. While we agreed that all of our tenets continue to have meaning and importance, based on our learnings (and missteps) in 2013, earning the trust (being seen as trusted partners) of the people we are here to support emerged as a top priority for us for 2014.

Removing Roadblocks

To become a trusted partner, one of the first things we did during our planning session was to think about structure, process and systems. These are the things that, when running well, enable people to DO the work they are here to do. People-people tend to think in terms of how people feel about what they’re doing so this is a shift for us. What we know, from our own experience and through feedback, is that it’s hard to feel good about what we’re doing when there are roadblocks in the way.

Removing roadblocks to productivity (getting rid of the things that stop us from doing our best work) is a place where our team believes we can have the greatest impact this year.  As such,  this is where we’ll focus the bulk of our energy.

The purpose of this post is to share our approach to the “removing roadblocks to productivity” project/goal. While we’ve contained our plan to 2014, we are clear new roadblocks pop up all the time. We expect this process to become a rolling exercise rather than a point in time (we’ll be thinking about this as we move through.)  We’ll update this blog with progress in addition to our project wiki/roadmap.

Here’s are plan for now:

Phase one – Data Collection [March – April]

During the month of March, we’ll conduct a very short survey (3-5 questions) about perceived roadblocks to productivity, to better understand the ubiquity of various issues.

Phase two – Analysis [April]

Once the data has been collected, we’ll review it with a small group of internal stakeholders, looking for themes and areas where we can make the most impact. We will share the results internally.  Where we see a need to  uncover deeper insights and understand a spectrum of viable alternatives, we’ll consider follow up focus groups.

Phase three – Roadmap

From there we’ll develop our roadmap, It will be published to the People wiki here with clear call to action and participation opportunities.

If you have questions, please ping us on IRC #peoplepeople.