Building our Team - Stories

I write this article based on the insight of the conversation that I have with my team in their monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak to each one of them and after the conversation, I write one insight. I share them in our team group chat. This article is a compilation of a full week's takeaway. You can read more about the reason for it in the article Restart.

What is the appraisal cycle here and when to expect the pay hike?

There are two types of appraisal cycles, one for the junior members of programming (fresher till 2nd year) and the testing team (fresher till 1 year). The second one is for the senior members and the rest of the teams like operation and business development. The first type of appraisal cycle is of 6 months. These are the calendar months so every June and every December you will be eligible for the cycle. The revised pay will be given to you in the following months July and January respectively. You will have a self-scoring system where there are points out of 100 to achieve at each role these points vary. Your percentage of pay hike will depend once you cross 80 points and 95 points for 3 consecutive months every 6 months. This applies to everyone who is a part of the point systems. Currently, apart from the operations team rest of the team have some version of the point system. The pay hike % is defined clearly so that you know exactly what you will get by when.

The people who have a yearly cycle will get the pay hike in the December cycle. This change in the appraisal cycle has only been introduced this year. So the team member who are with us since early last year and are waiting for a pay hike please reach out to me or Gautam. The reason to standardize the cycle across the company is that it makes it easier to remember the cycle to whom it applies and to budget for it accordingly.?

Currently, Rahul and Priyanka are in the last year of the 6 month appraisal cycle.?

Shruti, Neha, Indrajeet and Mayur are eligible for their 6-month appraisal cycle.?

For people who have joined recently this month, your cycle will be in the Month of December?

Apart from this if anyone of you has been promised or mentioned about 6-month cycle at the time of joining please contact me or Gautam

It was suggested that Can we apply data science at 73bit to tell the story about our culture and achieve the 2X revenue target?

It was from the point of curiosity that Our vision is to help every sustainability analyst find insights into data science. Why can't we use data science to meet our near term target of building the culture of Team First and hitting the target of 2X revenue? Thus putting us in a position to experiment more with providing value to the clients using the same data science principle we use in-house. Surprisingly it helps align to one of my favourite ideas of product development.?“Scratch your own itch,” Solve the problem we are facing so that we can see what the solution looks like and how it feels to us. Share it with others and see if they are happy to pay for it.?

The interesting part about this idea was that each pillar of Team first in our culture https://73bit.com/Culture will have a story attached to it. Also, the data we collect in the ticketing system including the time logs will help us map those data into multiple stories and pin down actions that produce high revenue. It also helps us as a team to look at the same data with multiple lenses namely revenue, customer delight, waste, team play, leverage, automation etc. It also gives the ability to dive deep into each pillar of the team first and live it better in our daily work.?

Here are a few that I can think of after our call

1. The team always comes before a single individual - A story of how someone lived for the team and put the team's interest ahead of their own?
2. A genius asks for help from colleagues in a smarter way - Kind of questions that are considered a smarter way to ask for help and more important type of questions that's not how we ask for help.?
3. Celebrating small progress anytime over chasing perfection - Story of how small progress helped clear doubts way in advance with the client and avoided additional work
4. The team's outcome heavily depends on collaboration rather than competition - Story of how the unconventional collaboration within the team produced a radical outcome.
5. Shared Learning within and with clients will always be our superpower - A story of a particular lesson we learned in our Friday learning that was implemented for a client requirement and got a compliment from the client.?
6. Clear Communication means you have clear thinking - An example of how a ticket was executed without getting onto a chat or a call and was executed smoothly.?
7. Asking good quality questions keeps our curiosity alive - It could be as simple as making a list of good questions asked by our team.?

While writing this it made me think that the story that is linked directly with clients makes a lot of impact on the outcome of 73bit

Based on the 7th pillar of Team First - Asking good quality questions keeps our curiosity alive. What are good quality questions?

It makes me think and here is my rationale to answer it and for all of us to measure it. Let me break the question into 2 features because everyone agrees on what is a question

1. Good question
2. Good quality question

A good question is something that brings a change in the things we are working on, thinking or planning. It results in a change in your actions of our daily tasks and activity. If it doesn't bring any change to our team that doesn't make it a good question. It is a question and no question is a silly question. With our experience, we have concluded on a few bad questions. we will come to it in the end.

A good quality question cannot be measured in the beginning. We have to wait till the end of our action and see what results in it produces for our client and does the outcome makes us achieve our target. This target can be intangible like the delighted client, spark in the eyes of the client, email of appreciation, client's board and their customer acknowledgement or it can be tangible like increasing our client enrollment of participation, saving 20 hours a month for a client, increasing clients value, saving money for our clients, helping them to raise more funding or 73bit getting more business, increase in revenue etc.

This may lead to a follow-up question how can we learn the skills of asking good quality questions? I got an answer to it. It's very simple and can be learned step by step.?

1. Start asking the question
2. Measure if they are good questions by doing the litmus test of when your question brings a change
3. Once you see the good question in action increase your daily count of a good question
4. Rinse and Repeat the cycle.
5. As you keep measuring and improving your will start asking much deeper good questions
6. Once you master asking good questions - The litmus test here is your peer's and leaders' feedback
7. You will often hear your leaders and peer telling you meetings that's a good question or that's interesting or oh I didn't think of that
8. You are now a master of asking a good question
9. Now you have to apply the same formula and start measuring outcomes.
10. Check with your leaders what is the outcome of the change your question brought
11. Label the change in terms tangible or intangible like the ease of use, improved performance, revenue, the spark in the eyes, attention to detail, good look and feel, better user experience etc.
12. You will learn to distinguish between good questions and good quality questions

Once every one of us has learned this skill and reached here it will be good enough to double our revenue. We can go to the next level from here as a team with more information and metrics to share. Just like we did in the Scrum Method.?

Now coming back to what is a bad question, here is the list of a bad question??

• Asking questions to make others do work on your behalf
• Asking questions without doing proper research
• Only to get information
• Making others think on your behalf
• Misguiding
• Out of context
• Repeating the same questions in a few days
• Asking before understanding the problem completely?

If you have a colleague share this article with them.