Some feedback from my past coworkers ❤️
Creating a sense of belonging at work is probably the #1 most important thing to me. Throughout my design career, I’ve come to really value having a sense of psychological safety with my team, to feel like I can be open and vulnerable with them, and have realized that that’s the environment where I can do my best work. I think this comes from understanding each other as entire human beings, not just co-workers.
That being said, each team is so different and each member of the team is a unique person, so this is always an ongoing experiment for me where I’ll try new things and see what sticks. I felt these were important to share because I think it shows a bit more about what I value and who I am.
Here’s a few things I’ve tried in my past work:
☕️ Learning to make eggnog:
🤘Learning sign language:
I worked with an incredible content designer named Angelique Little to design a workshop around “Thinking like a designer” as well as “Presenting like a designer”. We recruited volunteers across the design org at Dropbox to help mentor students. I think it’s really important to get kids excited about design early on, so they can really understand all the different things they can do after school. We ran this workshop 3 times while I was there, but it was an ongoing presentation that we’d adapt to fit the needs of our audience, so it took a few different forms.
At Dropbox, we have an annual hack week. In 2022, I worked with the CX team to identify opportunities within product education, and designed a brief set of principles to follow of things we’ve learned across the org about educating users.
When working on a new design for quick previews, I realized a lot of other designers were working on something adjacent or really related to this work, so I set up a workshop to collect use cases in an effort to reduce duplicate work and to create a design that could be consistent across different design products at Dropbox.
Set up discussions and communities to gather energy around new ideas
I left hack week feeling so inspired about the opportunities we have in creating a more consistent user education experience, so I wanted to gather people and create energy around different ideas in the education space, so that we could carry that knowledge across the org. I grew this Slack channel to 67 members within just a week, and posted regularly to maintain engagement.
Remembered birthdays, sent small treats to celebrate team members
This was just for fun. I love making people feel special, so it was important to me to take some time to celebrate them, even if it’s something as simple as a birthday.
Shared “design” learnings across the team whenever I could
One example of this was in early 2023, when the entire design team got together to share ideas around improving our craft bar and raising our quality standards. Following this, I wrote a presentation to share those Craft initiative insights with the engineering members of my team, because I thought more than just our design team would benefit from what was discussed.
Another example was when I participated in a storytelling workshop, and figured sharing some key takeaways and methods could help us all up-level how we share ideas and give presentations.
