Founded in 2014, Sendle is an Australian-based courier company primarily serving small to medium businesses and online retailers. As Australia's first fully carbon-neutral shipping service, the company enables customers to ship their products sustainably and with the peace of mind of knowing they aren't harming the planet.
The Challenge
When Sendle’s Product Engineering team leaders first approached Dr Ehssan Sakhaee from Inspirational Management Australia (IMA), they were on the verge of scaling. However, with product engineers spread across four countries and multiple time zones, it had become essential for team leaders to provide an environment where their people could feel safe, connected, supported and fulfilled in their roles. Cultivating a team of this nature requires strong support structures to build an environment of trust and mutual respect. Most importantly, it demands that team members have a deep sense of care and trust in each other. The challenge was to achieve this with a global team.
The Solution
Dr Sakhaee conducted a user-centric needs analysis to understand the existing team dynamics and impending scaling. He then adopted a holistic approach to fill the gaps and meet the requirements of both team leaders and team members. He designed a workshop tailored to Sendle's Product Engineering team covering topics on self-awareness, self-management, motivation, mindfulness and effective communication. These areas were identified as crucial components to building an autonomous, related and competent team with the capacity to continue to learn, grow, share and have fun.
The workshop was accompanied by a pre-work self-assessment of the targeted qualities through IMA's personal and leadership development online platform. The self-assessment process raised essential concepts such as Authentic Functioning, Character Strengths, Perspective Taking, Ethics, Work Motivation, Life Satisfaction, Mindset, Resilience, Conflict Management and Communication. The process helped Dr Sakhaee gauge the breadth of each individual's personal, interpersonal and leadership skills. These proved to be important metrics to measure an individual's current state and how they could optimise the skill sets that would enhance their effectiveness and wellbeing at work and beyond. The tool also provided graphical data of assessment results to participants with meaningful information to help them understand how they can develop further.
The Outcome
After presenting the workshop to more than 20 Engineers and Product Designers at an annual in-person team meetup in Sydney, Australia, Dr Sakhaee received a 100% satisfaction rating from participants on the anonymous post-workshop survey. Team leaders reported significantly improved team engagement and overall effectiveness, and team members reported higher satisfaction levels at work. In fact, the workshop was credited with helping the Product Engineering team achieve a 100% engagement and satisfaction rating during subsequent company-wide Pulse Surveys.
According to then Sendle's Engineering Coach, Sonya Corcoran, the workshop continues to be regarded as one of the best learning experiences for the professionals who attended. Most importantly, the positive outcomes have been ongoing. The entire team continues to leverage their learnings on the topics covered in their professional careers and personal lives.
If you’d like to take your engineering teams’ effectiveness to the next level and believe your people would benefit from Dr Sakhaee’s detailed needs analysis and tailored, holistic approach to people development, you can contact him.
