5 ideas to encourage/help your team to collaborate, innovate, keep learning, have fun and solve real world issues.
Tags: development, teams, techie, inclusion
Published: 2020-06-06 10:22:58

---
title: 5 ideas to encourage/help your team to collaborate, innovate, keep learning, have fun and solve real world issues.
published: true
description: Some ideas to help the team 
tags: #development #teams #techie #inclusion
cover_image: https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/juandavidhermoso.es/workplace-1245776_1920.jpg
---
These days I thought how can We encourage the team to collaborate more, share knowledge, improve processes 
and make your team mates make the work more **enjoyable** etc.
The culture of a company is built by the people working on it. 
Whether the teams are inclusive and diversity friendly depends on the company policies, of course, 
but at the end of the day, it depends on the people working on it.
So Prior to the 5 ideas I'm gonna share, there are a lot you can do 
to make the team inclusive and diverse.
And that's fair more important than any of the tips I'm gonna just share.
Among other things, because diverse and inclusive teams build better products, are more innovative, 
and have happier members.
So please, focus on inclusion and diversity first.

There are tons of ways to **help your team to collaborate, innovate, keep learning, and enjoy the work**, but I think it's important to come up with specific actions in order to make them happen.
So these are just some ideas for you to try, improve them or adapt it to your own company and check if they work for your own specific context.

### 1. Make a demo of your PR's: 
 PR's (Pull Requests) are absolutely 
 essential. There's a lot said about them, so there's no need to 
 tell more.
 But behind the code, there are **business needs (that is, by the 
 way, at the end of the day, why We are building software 
 solutions)**: New feature, bug fixes or a feature change. 
 Building a demo, deploying to a dev environment and making a 
 quick call to show how the change works to the team can help a 
 lot.
 Benefits:
  * Team members keep up to date to latests changes.
  * Find edge cases or bugs. (Prior to send it to QA)
  * Ensure you didn't miss something you didn't know about the 
    business. Specially for big or multi-brand apps.

### 2. Present something once per week / month to the rest of the team:
 Basically, knowledge sharing. Present something to the rest of 
 the team.
  *  Not mandatory, but scheduled in the team's calendar. 
 Otherwise, it won't happen.
  *  Some ideas: A new technology, refactor ideas for the 
  project, new features of the framework(s) / technology(ies) / 
  language(s) your company / project is using. Or just showing a  
  * 45 min. as much to avoid making it boring
  * Content is what really matters. Not the beauty of the slides. 
   So invest preparation time in rich and clear content, not in 
  fancy slides.

### 3. Ask (other) teams members which manual tasks can be automated:
 You could ask to your user support, sales, copy-writing, QA or 
 design teams members what manual (annoying) process they do 
 every day.
 Or maybe you can find for them a tool.
 
  Benefits:
   * Increase innovation in certain areas of the company
   * Make your team members in other areas happier and more 
    productive
   * Reduce chances of errors. Manual tasks can lead to errors.
   * The development team can learn more about how the company works and the business needs.

 ⚠️  ⚠️  ⚠️ 
    However, be careful:
 * Maybe it's not worth to automate a 2 min task.
 * If you build a software solution / script / whatever, some team will have to maintain it. 
 * You have to write clear and accessible documentation and 
      let the rest of the team know about it.

### 4. Have a (your communication app) channel for articles/courses/talks sharing and have channels for different technologies:
  Have channel in (your team communication app) will help sharing knowledge. 
Also, having channels for different technologies can help to make it easy to find and read information.
Like frontend and backend channels, or Java and Javascript channels, or Angular and React channels, etc.
It depends on your company.

### 5. Encourage your team members to attend (tech) conferences, meetups, talks, etc.
It clearly depends on everyone. Rest on weekends or after work, and take care of your family and friends it's so important. 
So respect your team members if they don't want to attend tech conferences.
But you can encourage yout team to attend (tech/comic/ some other fun thing) conferences, meetups, events, talks in your city or even outside it. It can be a great experience. You all can learn, networking with other developers or communities, or just have fun together for one or two days.

### Conclusion
I just tried to share some ideas based on my experience as web developer. I hope they help you in your own team and company.