CityFibre - How to build a successful digital workplace

When a stakeholder at CityFibre wants an update on the progress of a software development initiative, they often send off an email asking for a briefing.

Instead of spending value time responding to the email to address the questions, and probably organising a couple of meetings with key stakeholders to explain more, the original sender of the email is invited into the Software Development’s team on Microsoft Teams.

There they will find every aspect of what they need to know, all organised within Teams channels, along with all files, recordings of past meetings, all current and previous roadmaps, links to Jira and anything else the team has been involved in, linked as a tab to the channel.

If the new team member wants to join a meeting, they can do so from the channel, or use recordings to catch up on previous meetings.

“I could spend an hour on an email going back to that one person and not even scratch the surface with all the information they’re wanting to know about something,” said Emma Fisher, Lead Product Owner, Agile Software Delivery Team at CityFibre, which builds Full Fibre infrastructure across the UK.

“If a business stakeholder wants to know something about the work that’s progressing on one of our teams, 99.9% of the time the answer would be; ‘Come visit the Teams channel, get involved, we’ll tag you in some posts, we’ll let you know where to find some of the information, come to those meetings that happen within those Teams channels’.

“Instead of half an hour meeting with person A, another half an hour meeting with person B and hour on an email for person C. We’ll invite them all to the channel and from there they are able to self-serve all information, and get involved with open conversations in channel.”

Data in SWOOP Analytics’ 2022 M365 Benchmarking identified CityFibre’s Software Development team as one of the top performing large-size departments – with 50 or more team members. There are about 160 people working in CityFibre’s Software Delivery team, with about 100 fulltime CityFibre employees and another 60 contractors who are invited into Teams as guests with full access.

In ranking departments in SWOOP’s analysis, all seven of SWOOP’s Collaboration Habits - Email Liberated, Asynchronous Collaborator, Chat Liberated, File Sharer, Community Contributor, Screen Sharer and Camera Confident – are combined to give an overall collaboration score for every member of the department, which is then compared with the 3,773 departments benchmarked in the 2022 report.

How to turn a successful physical workspace into a digital workspace

Using Microsoft Teams as a hub to work out loud wasn’t something that happened overnight.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Software Delivery team at CityFibre was already a highly collaborative team. The team practiced open collaboration with daily conversations and offices were set up to capitalise the flow of information. Desks were positioned around large screens so all build notifications from the Software Development team could be broadcast for all to see, and successes and failures could receive immediate feedback. This injected energy into the office, and was a catalyst for collaboration. Stakeholders were invited to come and see the team in action.

CityFibre’s Software Delivery team in action in the office.

Then the pandemic hit and sent everyone to work from home. Suddenly, the team had to figure out how to make the successful physical workspace into a successful digital workplace.

Mike Bywater, Associate Director, Software Development, CityFibre.

Mike Bywater, Associate Director at CityFibre and head of the Software Development team, said it wasn’t just about using Microsoft Teams channels to chat, but using Teams as a hub for all work, and a way to digitally replicate their collaborative way of working.

“It was things like having useful information in tabs in channels that would have been the equivalent to on-the-screen in the office,” he said

“It’s having files and artefacts in those channels so when we’re working on these things it’s driving people to use these as an open workspace. And every channel has a purpose.”

In order to replicate the large screen in the office with the constant build notification updates, a Teams channel was created and every deployment was added for all to see, providing fast feedback for everyone in the team. Mike said while he values face-to-face work, using Teams for the build notifications is here to stay, regardless of what the future of work might look like.

A screenshot of the Software Development team’s notifications on Teams.

“In the office you can just pat somebody on the back and start talking about it, but this is the standard way of doing it now so that we can operate remotely, and our stakeholders can see what we’re doing,” Mike said.

“Making them (notifications) available through Teams so everybody inside and outside the squad can get access to it, we wouldn’t change that, it’s a great transition that we’ve made”

“It’s a better place to access it, even if you’re in the office. The screens are still great to have them there because they look cool and it can catch your eye. Still, the primary place where I go and check things now would be Teams over those screens.”

One the keys to making Teams a hub for the Software Development team is to keep Teams open for all to see.

“When you send an email, you have to think about everybody you want send it to and often it is forwarded on to others,” Mike said.

“If you just make the conversation completely open, then anybody who is interested, wants to ask a question, they can just join the conversation in our public channel and find the information.”

Don’t rob yourself of knowledge

“Every day we’re not contributing to this bank of digital information, we’re robbing our future selves.”

This comment from John Holzman, Associate Director, Digital Collaboration at CityFibre, sums up the need for digital collaboration across every organisation.

When digital collaboration is done right, it means knowledge is shared, problems are solved and more efficient work practices are benefiting every employee, as well as customers and suppliers.

John Holzman, Associate Director, Digital Collaboration, CityFibre.

When digital collaboration isn’t working, knowledge dies and problems can become toxic.

John’s purpose at CityFibre is to make it a place where all employees work out loud to share knowledge and solve problems, just as the Software Development team is doing.

Since the start of the pandemic, CityFibre has had meteoric growth from 600 to 2,000 employees; from partnering with one Internet Service Provider (ISP) to now more than 35; building in 12 regions to now more than 60 across the UK, and working with dozens more building and design partners.

While most employees at CityFibre are using digital tools, primarily on the M365 suite, there remains a huge divide across the organisation as to how they’re being used, with the Software Development team the showcase best practice team, as proved by SWOOP’s data analysis, but plenty of other departments sit at the bottom of the SWOOP benchmarking rankings.

“A realistic assessment of how we collaborate is that we’re hanging on to old practices even though we have new tools available to us,” John said.

It’s for this reason John’s new role was created at CityFibre – to get people collaborating openly on digital tools across the organisation.

One of the first things on John’s wish list is to make Microsoft Teams teams public, like Mike and Emma’s team, rather than defaulting to private. CityFibre began using Teams at the start of the pandemic and became great at using meetings and chat. Chat was a quick and easy solution for solving one problem, but fails to help anyone not involved in the private chat.

“I try to make the argument to folks that every time you’re talking about business content in chat, you’re losing the opportunity of building information assets for the company,” John said.

“I want the default (for Teams teams) to be public. The reason for that is it promotes the intentional, active, early worry-free sharing of bad information. A problem surfaced quickly is valuable and productive; a problem hidden and held in private is toxic.  I want us to thank the bearer of bad news, not slap the person on the virtual wrist.”

Join lots of teams but know how to turn off notifications

Mike agrees with John’s policy of making every team on Teams open, or public. The trick to making this work though is to turn off notifications for the teams you don’t work with closely. This way you can search for any particular topic across any team.

“You want to be in more teams rather than less,” Mike said.

“That’s counter intuitive but it’s about being members of many teams and being across many topics and tuning your notifications to be able to dip into things when you’ve got a particular thing you’re looking for.”

The term “working out loud” has been met with some apprehension at CityFibre, so John has coined the phrase “open digital collaboration” to describe the culture he wants his colleagues to embrace.

Finding collaboration champions within CityFibre to model best practice behaviours

John arrived at CityFibre in mid 2020, a few months after Teams had been rolled out at the start of the pandemic. He came to CityFibre from real estate management consulting and managed services firm RealFoundations, a world leader in digital collaboration.

It didn’t take him long to realise how much lost knowledge was occurring across the entire organisation by working heavily in chat, rather than in Microsoft Teams channels, where every team member can access the information.

“We have developed a chat addiction without knowing it’s an addiction and without understanding it’s a problem,” John said.

“It was quickly clear that we had the right tool kit, but we were mis-using the tool kit that was right under our noses. I started to talk about it, just quietly at first, and then with a little more vim and vigor.”

At the time, John was working in CityFibre’s IT department and Mike was keen to learn more about John’s approach to working out loud.

“The minute I said to him; ‘There’s a better way to do this, we should set up channels we should be able to work out loud’. And he got it, he went to town with this team,” John said.

Mike explained that while the Software Development team was already working openly and collaboratively, which lent itself to an easier transition to remote work, John’s ideas helped structure work in the right way.

“John has come in and helped us expand our virtual working practices,” Mike said.

“The pandemic has forced us to really embrace these tools and practices. And so we’ve been better able to deal with things like our overseas colleagues in Ukraine - a situation that would have been far harder had happened in a pre-Teams era.”

Online behaviour changes = real-life behaviour changes

It’s not just digital collaboration tools that have changed at CityFibre, but the way the tools have led to real-life behaviour changes. Mike and Emma see people mimic the behaviours of working out loud to form ideas together as a team, receive feedback from the early stages, and remain fluid to develop the best outcome rather than come to a team with a finished product that may not meet the requirements because there’s been no input along the way.

“It does change you as people,” Mike said of working out loud.

“You get it in real life - people are raising ideas sooner and wanting to lay it out in front of everybody. There’s a mentality shift that comes with all of this.

“They drive each other - the better tooling and then you see changes in the way you think about collaborating on ideas. With the stakeholders, it’s not just about getting them to accept that the tooling is good, but also accept that it’s good to share ideas sooner.”

That’s not an easy shift for many people.

“There’s almost a bravery in working out loud,” Mike said.

“The tooling is great, the conversation is great but that can be quite easy to start with, but then it gets a bit harder when you start thinking; ‘Oh, everybody can see what I’m saying’, so you’ve got to be a little bit more confident in what you’re saying and a little bit more professional sometimes.

“It takes real bravery to put your ideas out there and start collaborating over a document.”