No, I’m not leaving my role at StellarWP. I’m just coming up on my 1 year anniversary and it has been a challenging and rewarding place to work. We just launched a brand new website redesign for LearnDash, we’re working hard on the newest version of GiveWP and launched a brand new add-on for The Events Calendar called Event Automator. 

So what’s this new thing? It’s called TeamWP and it takes what I’ve been writing about here on my blog and, I hope, turns it into a way for WordPress teams to grow their impact while creating amazing places to work. So, let’s talk about what I’m launching and then I’ll tell you a little more about the why.

The Team Experience Index

The first thing TeamWP is launching is the Team Experience Index. It’s a first-of-its-kind employee engagement survey that lets individual organizations see what their teams really think about their work while also contributing to our collective knowledge in the WordPress Community through globalized insights. 

If you’ve worked in a larger company before, one that’s big enough to have an HR team, chances are you’ve probably heard about the concept of ‘employee engagement’. It’s the hypothesis that if employees are highly engaged at work, they’re more likely to perform better, experience less burnout and stick around longer. 

Practically speaking, what this often looks like are things like perks in the workplace, innovative benefits, and doing things leadership thinks will make people happier at work. Sometimes without first checking in with the team to see if what’s being offered is what they really want. 

One of the challenges with this approach is that it relies on assumptions and what senior leadership thinks is required. Imagine, a single person or small group of people with all the decision-making authority at the highest strategic viewpoints deciding what everyone else is missing or needs, based on what they see and hear. 

How likely are they to get it right? How likely are they to have seen and heard what people are truly thinking? How likely are people to actually tell them?

That’s where the Team Experience Index comes in. It’s an anonymous, third-party administered survey that invites people to share their honest thoughts about what it’s like to work on their team without the fear of reprisal. 

The Team Experience Index provides team members, managers and senior leaders with feedback on what they’re doing right and where they can improve with data-driven actionable insights. 

Contributing to the WordPress Community

For the WordPress Community, the Team Experience Index does a few things. First, it asks questions that only apply to WordPress companies, which will be really interesting to unpack. Secondly, it publishes anonymized global insights and trends to help WordPress companies everywhere discover opportunities to improve their team culture.

One of the tag lines I’m trialling for TeamWP is “Open Work. Open Team. Open Source.” The idea is that as we get better at opening up about how we work together, open our teams to different ways of working and open our insights to others, we’ll see the entire ecosystem benefit. 

The Team Experience Index is still being built but today I’m opening it up for input, feedback and so that interested teams can sign up. I started thinking about it last summer and have been slowly (very slowly) getting it ready with the hopes of having it out in the world in time for WordCamp Asia. I’ll be at WCAsia so if you’d like to hang out, let me know and we’ll set up a time to chat. 

I’m also hoping to launch the first global insights in time for WordCamp Europe. I’m going to apply to speak at WordCamp Europe this year and my goal is to present the results of the survey there and make it available to everyone. 

Best of all, the Team Experience Index is free. Ideally, forever. 

Why? Because doing a survey once might get you started but it doesn’t motivate you to keep going. If teams can see growth and change over time, I think that will be a huge win for the WordPress ecosystem and anyone who works in a WordPress-oriented company.

Why TeamWP?

Doing something for free isn’t typically the path to great success. I’m sure there are ways to monetize this all and maybe one day, that’s a path I’ll choose. For now, my focus is on giving something back to the community that has been so good to me over the years.

So why TeamWP? I want a place where we can all have conversations about working together. Where we can explore new ideas in managing teams and who knows, maybe even help WordPress teams of all shapes and sizes find their next step in creating the future of work.

I want to talk to managers and senior leaders in WordPress about how they do team, create resources that help teams improve their ways of working and recognize teams that are really doing it well. I also don’t want to do it alone. I’m not the only one who thinks this way and I’m hoping there are others out there who would like to get involved. So, TeamWP. 😃

There’s a lot to be thankful for in the WordPress ecosystem and a lot of opportunities for teams to have commercial success. While many teams are focused on their next dot release, patch, feature launch or new project, I hope we’ll also begin to focus on the approaches we take to get there. If we do, I think we’ll see more people sticking with WordPress longer and new people excited about WordPress and able to find their fit. 

#BuildingInPublic

It wouldn’t be right to have a tagline about Open Work if I wasn’t really willing to build in the open too. I’ve been inspired by what Justin Ferriman is doing with GapScout and want to follow in his footsteps a bit. So, I’m going to be sharing what I’m working on with TeamWP, the challenges I’m facing and the opportunities I see. I hope you’ll join me on this journey.

I’ll be posting about it on Twitter, sending out email updates about it all and posting here every once in a while. 

Thanks for your support and wish me luck. 화이팅!