When a group of people come together, a culture is formed. Working towards that culture being good, where it's open, friendly, and inviting is a challenge. I'm sure we've all been in work places, or even social situations where it feels.. awkward, difficult, like you don't want to speak. The type of situation you just can't wait to leave. I don't want to work under those circumstances, I'm sure you don't either. These are some of the things I've found push teams towards having good, positive culture.

Inclusivity

Inclusivity is the number one priority. For any group of people, regardless of the situation, if you don't feel included it doesn't feel good. When trying to facilitate good, and positive culture, your number one priority should be improving inclusivity. Everyone should feel welcome to speak their mind, express their opinion, and most importantly be wrong without fear. If you don't feel psychologically safe to make a mistake, why would you offer your opinion or thoughts?

Ask what they think the solution is

This is the easiest, lowest effort step in the right direction. Regardless of the experience you have in the domain, or situation. Hear others out, let them express what they think. Perhaps they can change your mind with a salient point you wouldn't have considered. Importantly, your teammates will feel heard.

• "How would you solve this problem?"
• "What would you do in this situation?"
• "What do you think about this approach?"

Let the team vote on decisions

Following from being inclusive, getting to decide on the direction as a team makes everyone feel included. The team, and how it operates is something everybody directly gets a choice in. As the lead, when you come across a decision which isn't critical to performance, security or other factors. Let it become a vote. Let everyone have their say. Some good examples from experience are things like: naming patterns, folder structure, and formatting. In my current team we needed to solidify a folder structure to assist in some low-cost tests to enforce patterns we'd setup. Our options were to either place files in clearly named folders, or to add a category to the file i.e feature.hooks.ts, or having a hooks folder. We could do either, and it's a low stakes situation. So we put it to a vote.

Setup a rotation for everyone to participate in

Every team has responsibilities, and it should be shared across everyone. Setting up a rotation for who leads the standup, or other meetings encourages everyone to be involved with how work gets done. Along with that, everybody gets to add their own spin or take on how a meeting is facilitated. An added bonus is that it can help bring team members who may be less engaged still remain a part of the process, and the culture.

Peer program together

Peer programming should be the backbone of every team. When it's the early days of a team coming together, as a lead I'd encourage you to spend more time upfront peer programming with your team members. It helps you in many ways assess skillsets, from problem solving to communication. Not only are you working together and solving a problem quicker than you would alone. You get to build up a rapport, and relationship. Which is crucial to form trust.

Not only should you peer program with your team members, but you should also organise, and encourage them to all peer with each other. If someone gets stuck, encourage them to ask for help in the shared team channel. Also encourage the others to offer help. I'm always pushing for developers to peer program with each other. It's just as important for them to form bonds with each other, as it is for you to form a bond with them.

You can use this to your advantage too. For example, perhaps you have a team member whose weakness is a strength of somebody else - get them to peer. Maybe you have someone who is highly motivated and engaged, and another who isn't - get them to peer. Or perhaps you're a remote team, that doesn't have many opportunities to socialise with each other, push for everyone to peer program regularly.

For remote teams

We're lucky in our industry that remote working has been an opportunity we've had for decades now. It's only become more common place, however the challenge I've seen across many companies is how to foster a solid culture given that you may never actually meet each other in person. The things I've seen work well are

• Donut meetings
  • Get paired up with people across your team, or organisation for a 10-15m chat
  • It's great when there's many people you don't regularly get to chat with
• Having a 'fun' meeting, where the focus isn't work but a shared activity
  • Games are a great way for a team to relax, and chat together
  • In my current team we have a fortnight 'mandatory' fun session, where somebody picks a web based game for us to play
• Allowing time to chat, and socialise in meetings
  • Since you're not going catch another coworker at the water cooler, meetings become that place instead

What have you found has really helped form a good, and positive culture at your workplace?