In my last piece about effective teaming we talked about three principles for building healthy and effective teams:

Take turns Watch out for each other Get out and explore

These principles (and the theory behind them) are a driving force behind a new tool we’re building at Kumu called Compass.

Compass analyzes Slack data to provide insights about the deep structure of your team. For teams who use Slack for a significant portion of their communication, Compass is a great way to uncover signals on how well your team is doing with each of these three principles.

Principle #1: Take turns

In its research, Google found that one of the key characteristics of effective teams was psychological safety, a climate in which team members feel safe to be themselves. A common trait among teams that have this characteristic is that each team member talks in roughly the same proportion. This is often referred to as “conversational turn-taking.” By analyzing Slack data, Compass can highlight how often people communicate relative to their teammates and in which channels. This gives us a sense of whether or not each voice is present in conversation.

Stats and Profiles

On the Stats page within Compass, you can quickly get a sense for how much each team member is posting compared to other members of the team.

You can sort by the number of messages to see if the distribution of posting is pretty even across the team or heavily focused around a couple individuals.

In each team member’s Profile, you can see a quick snapshot of where they are posting and compare that with the other members of their team. You can also see how much they mention other people versus how much they are mentioned.

Network view

In the network view, you’re able to select between People and Channels views. Within the People view, the size of each is scaled by how many messages they send. The width of the connections depicts the amount of communication between those two individuals. If you switch to the Channels view and find a channel you’re interested in, you can see which team members are posting in that channel more than others by looking at the size of people and channels and the width of the connections. It’s important here to ask which members of the team are also missing from that view, meaning they haven’t posted in that channel at all within the time period and filters selected.