Customers can help guarantee the success of their collaboration software deployments with a focus on positive team building, suggests Atlassian‘s Molly Hellerman, head of strategy and programmes.
Hellerman outlines her top five top tips for teambuilding in an age of remote working and an increasingly digitised workplace.
Many people agree that teams with strong morale who work together positively can underpin business success — but it’s less recognised that this strong morale might be a cause, not an effect, of high performance.
“Negative morale typically has the opposite effect. Here are some strategies I like to use with my teams at Atlassian that I think will help yours, too. Much of this advice has come from the world of psychology research and my involvement with the Positive Coaching Alliance,” Hellerman writes.
“Number one: Emphasise learning over winning.”
One way of achieving this is by setting objectives that can contribute to a ‘win’ but that aren’t simply goals, such as sales results. For example, one objective could be speaking to a certain subset of sales contacts in a week.
Also, aim to regularly refill people’s “emotional gas tanks”, by providing positive and genuine feedback to recharge and re-motivate them.
“Plenty of research backs up the power of this positive approach. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson says that positivity builds and broadens, and makes us more open to learning and taking on new challenges,” Hellerman explains.
“Sports and performance psychologist Charlie Maher found that negativity hampers performance and distracts people from what they’re trying to do.”
Read the full blog for all five positive morale-building tips.
Hellerman is set to speak at Atlassian’s upcoming virtual event, Team Tour 2020, on 9 and 10 November around the world (10 November in EMEA – register here).
She will join Anu Bharadwaj, head of product at Atlassian Cloud, along with many other speakers.
Bharadwaj says that every conversation and strategic decision at Atlassian is focused on the teams that rely on Atlassian software to work faster, securely and collaboratively.
“Behind the curtain, we’ve been hard at work making our products more secure, more consistent, more intuitive, better integrated, better able to help teams do it all with whatever they’ve got,” she writes in a mid-year blog post on unleashing team potential in the cloud.
“Premium, Enterprise, and Free plans open the door or teams of every size and stage of life to try and standardise on our solutions.”
Atlassian has made a “slew of UI improvements”, added freebies like extended cloud migration trials that match the length of remaining server maintenance (up to 12 months), migration assistants, a cloud value calculator, app assessments, and free cloud plans targeting small teams and startups, she adds.
“We’ve launched more than 440 new apps in the cloud in the last year, including versions of some of the most popular Marketplace server apps, like Create on Transition for Jira, Elements Connect, and Jira Workflow Toolbox,” Bharadwaj says.
The company has also added encryption at rest and in transit. “Encryption bolsters our cloud platform’s ability to keep customer data safe, private, and secure by turning personal information into ‘for your eyes only’ messages intended only for the parties that need them – and no one else.”
Bharadwaj and Hellerman will speak at the upcoming Atlassian virtual Team Tour 2020 in November. Atlassian also offers a regular series of solution partner webinars – click here to see dates and topics.