4 Ways to Improve Your Engineering Team Health During a Transition

Changes within a company, like growth, restructuring, down-sizing, or shifting goals, can be disruptive for engineering teams. Developers often look to team leads to understand how these organizational changes will impact them. Amid transitions and uncertainty, engineering leaders can be a beacon for their teams and help maintain the culture that they’ve cultivated.

Prioritize psychological safety

A phrase often referenced in leadership is psychological safety, the idea of fostering a culture within your team where engineers are comfortable taking risks, openly expressing their concerns, and sharing ideas. Tactics for enhancing psychological safety can include:

• Leading with curiosity to find a root cause of a failure or bottleneck.
• Focusing on the work, not the engineer themselves, when identifying issues.
• Creating a safe culture free from microaggressions.
• Getting to know direct reports on an interpersonal level.

Psychological safety promotes employee satisfaction, and it also often leads to better team performance.

As Heidi Waterhouse, Principal Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly said, “The faster a team moves, the more psychologically safe they are, the more they feel like they can take risks, but also the more they feel like they can take risks, the faster they move.”

Keep an eye out for burnout

Burnout is present across all industries, especially after the work from home era upended the way we work and challenged us to reevaluate our priorities.

Understandably, feelings of burnout are not something employees often want to share with team leads, and once they get to that point, it might be too late to offer solutions. Managers might need to do some exploring in order to address burnout before it becomes a problem.

Spotting and tackling undesirable trends, like engineers working on nights and weekends, allows leaders to make necessary changes before their teams experience burnout.

Use metrics to communicate the business value of your team

During board meetings and stakeholder conversations, engineering leaders act as advocates for engineering teams. It’s important for developers to know that their team leaders are championing their work and communicating their impact with stakeholders.

With metrics, engineering leaders can make a business case for their teams by demonstrating trends in numbers to stakeholders. For example, using revenue-specific metrics can directly demonstrate efficiency.

Objective data also helps leaders advocate for new talent or tools, because they can clearly demonstrate how those resources will help the company meet its goals.

Address engineers’ concerns with enhanced 1-on-1s

As we mentioned above, metrics are highly useful for showcasing the impact of your engineering teams, spotting burnout in advance, and identifying when and where teams might be stuck.

Metrics can also enhance 1-on-1s, ensuring that conversations are actionable. You can bring concerning trends or units of work that need to be addressed to a meeting and work with that team member to come up with a plan for improvement. Or, you can call out and celebrate successes, such as positive trends or progress towards goals.

Part of fostering a positive culture is getting to know employees on an interpersonal level, demonstrating that you recognize their hard work, and offering collaboration and coaching when things go off track.

Taking the right steps

If your company is going through a transition, it’s important to address your engineering team directly. Pay attention to cultivating or maintaining a culture of psychological safety so they can express their concerns or take a risk by trying something new; be on the lookout for conditions that might cause burnout; be their champion when talking to stakeholders; and have more impactful 1-on-1 conversations to address issues and offer support.