Memo for Team Relationships and Belonging

You are tasked to assemble a team to redesign your company’s intranet human resources page. This is the page employees land on when they click on “Human Resources” from the company’s intranet hub. All employees visit this page to access general employment forms and resources (e.g. direct deposit forms, pay scales, employee handbook) and find people (i.e. human resources staff) who can help answer their questions. Managers and supervisors also visit the page to access specific forms related to managing their staff (e.g. onboarding materials, performance improvement plan templates).
You’ve chosen the team members yourself and have worked to make sure each team member feels they are part of the decisions being made. After two months of work, your team has successfully compiled recommended changes for the new home page based on the following factors: their collective knowledge of the different audiences for the page, research they performed into how users interact with the page, and data they have compiled showing what information is most often accessed through the homepage. The team has also developed a mockup of the homepage and created a flowchart illustrating how different users can access important information and resources.
You are now at the stage in your project where you need to create and test a working prototype of the new homepage. To help with this stage, Cynthia Piedras, the head of IT applications, will join the team. You know the presence of a new team member will change the dynamics of the team, and you are also aware that your team will likely need to revise their previous work when the new member uses her own expertise to spot problems and make suggestions.
To smooth the transition of the new team member, you have decided to send an email to the entire team, including the new member, Cynthia, in anticipation of your next meeting. Although you all work at the same company, you don’t know if members of your team have had the chance to work with Cynthia before, so this may be their first introduction. Write an email that introduces Cynthia as a member of the team and that introduces the current team members to her. As you draft your email, consider what you have learned about working in teams and also what you have read about “belonging.” Attempt to make everyone feel like they belong on the team.
You may use the following information about team members in your email. Keep in mind you are not required to use all of this information; you may find some of it irrelevant to what you want to say, in which case feel free to leave it out.
Linda Boerker is a benefits coordinator who has been in the human resources department for fifteen years. You specifically chose her because she has worked in different areas within the human resources department, so is familiar with most of the materials on the intranet site. She has confided to you personally that she is concerned that the redesign be meaningful and not merely cosmetic or just change for the sake of change. To that end, she created and administered a survey to assess the needs of various site users. She didn’t get many responses from the survey, but the ones she did get helped the team focus their discussions on what users need from the site.
Joseph Pak is a recruiter who has been in the human resources department for five years. You chose him because the human resources intranet page is crucial during the process of onboarding new employees. You know Joseph and his fellow recruiters spend a lot of time fielding questions about how to access necessary documents on the intranet site. Since your company has been having trouble with delays in onboarding, it is important that the redesign makes things as efficient as possible. Because he is a superuser of the site (he has administrative privileges), he is able to run reports showing how often, and what times, and for what purposes, users interact with the homepage.
Franklin Jackson has been a manager at the company for ten years. You chose him because he has used the current homepage extensively himself and also because he has several supervisors working under him who have come to him for help using the homepage. He was a vocal advocate for this homepage redesign and you have been impressed with the ideas he has brought to the table. He also did some informal user research by asking his supervisors to perform some routine tasks on the site and making note of how they accomplished those tasks, including the number of clicks it took, how many times they had to use the Back button on their browser, and how long it took them to perform those tasks.
Antonio Mata has worked at the company for two years and was recently promoted to supervisor. You chose him for the team because he had fresh experience with using the home page, both as an employee and as a supervisor, and because he impressed you when you worked with him on a previous team. As you had hoped, the enthusiasm and attention to detail he showed on that team was an asset for this team as well. Antonio brought good ideas to the early discussions and recently took the lead creating a mockup of the homepage based on their discussions.
Cynthia Piedras has worked at the company for nine years and has been the head of IT applications that entire time. Her department created the intranet site and will lead the technical side of the redesign. You had wanted Cynthia to participate in the redesign from the earliest planning stages so she could inform the team of what is possible or not possible with the site, but she and her team were finishing up an important project at the time. That project is finally complete, which is why she is now joining the team.

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