My guest today is Joel Helbling from Test Double, a fully remote software consultancy. While Joel doesn’t work in the health sector, I hope you find his insights into team communication, feedback, and change are relevant. Joel shares how his team stays connected and effective without the benefit of in-person interaction, through intentional communication, feedback, and collaboration.
Today’s episode is about what the health sector can learn from a remote tech team. I’m joined by Joel Helbling from Test Double, a software consultancy. Joel shares how his team stays connected across distance, how they build feedback into everyday work, and how they support each other through uncertainty.
Hi everybody, this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked #20 in the top 100 podcasts in social sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make. If you value this show, the stories and inspiration and research, I’ve got good news: i can help your organization. Visit H-CPartners.com or connect with me on Linked.
Today’s episode is a little different—I hope you’ll think in a good way. For the first time in over 200 episodes, I’m talking with someone outside of the health sector. Joel is from Test Double, and they are a remote software consultancy. They’re dealing with a lot of the same challenges many of us face: how to keep teams connected, how to give feedback that actually helps, and how to navigate big changes like remote work and AI.
Now, I worked with Joel and his team almost three years ago to help them build a stronger feedback culture. And it’s been really great to hear how those tools are still making a difference for them. So if you’re wrestling with communication issues or trying to lead your team through change, there’s a lot here for you—and I can help your organization just like I helped Test Double. Visit Health Communication Partners dot com and click contact, or find me on linked. Here’s Joel!
I’m live Via Zoom with Joel Helbling. Joel is an engagement partner at Test Double, which offers comprehensive software and product management consulting services. Joel, welcome to the show.
Hi, Anne Marie, it’s great to be here.
I’m really glad to have you here. And I’m glad to have a chance for our listeners to learn from somebody who is not themselves in the health sector. You work at Test Double. So can you tell us a little bit about what you do as an engagement partner?
Sure. So as an engagement partner, I’m responsible for supporting all of our consultants at a particular client. There are a number of clients that I support. That support takes the form of meeting with them one-on-one coaching and mentoring and as well as any and all of the little logistical things that may come up in the course of their engagement with a client.
Well, thanks for that, Joel, and that helps us understand, you know, why are we here talking about communication at work? So you have a lot of workplace communication that’s going on. What is an issue or problem you’re facing related to interprofessional communication?
Well, I’d say probably the biggest structural challenge we have around communication is the fact that we are, and have always been, a 100% remote company. And so everybody that works with our clients actually works with the client people a lot more than they work with us by default. And so we’ve found that we need to be very deliberate in terms of our approach to communication. Because we don’t get a lot of the things that you get for free when everybody goes to the same office and works together during the day.
And we just started touching on this at an earlier episode that my brother was on, what does it mean to be an all-remote worker? The kinds of conversations that you have around the water cooler that we used to all be able to take for granted you don’t have now. You jump on a call and that’s it.
Yeah.
You don’t have the relationship necessarily that happens before a meeting. So how are you–
Well, I was gonna say it really brings home what you leave on the table with that. You become very aware of all of the things that grow up out of those incidental conversations when you meet people randomly throughout the day. So yeah, we’ve had to have a very deliberate and thoughtful approach to trying to restore some of that, those kinds of incidental communication patterns.
So tell me more, man–you’re going exactly where I was hoping I would. How are you facing this issue or problem of communication among colleagues who just don’t get to see each other’s work and talk to each other about their work as much as they would like to?
Sure. Well, luckily, all of our folks seem to love interacting and talking with each other. We do a number of things, schedule random coffee times. We have larger groups that meet together for sort of a brunch style conversation. And we schedule these things randomly just to try to stir things up. We’ve also had initiatives like what we call homerooms where the same group of people will meet together on a regular basis. And then here in the last, what’s it been a year or two, since you came and worked with us?
It’s almost three years now.
Is it? You’re kidding me!
It is! I’m not!
Yeah, so you helped us with implementing an approach to feedback. And again, for us, this was a very deliberate attempt at trying to bring more feedback into the way that we work. Which fundamentally involves getting more insight into what each other, what people were doing. That’s something that we really lack. And so I’d say that one of the big things that you helped us with was just in terms of our approach, and ways of communicating feedback, really excellent stuff. And from what I have seen and experienced, those things really stuck. And people have carried those forward into their ways of interacting and talking with each other.
Thanks so much for that Joel. That really means a lot to me. Gosh. What are learning from doing feedback the way you all do it. I mean, you definitely have these other intentional ways of communicating with each other, even though you are not the client, right? This is communicating with your colleagues. What are you all learning?
Well, one thing we’re learning is that it’s hard to do.
Mmhmm.
It’s challenging. I think at the same time, even when you were consulting and coaching with us, what we realized is there are certain kinds of feedback that we are getting all of the time. We really favor, for instance, pair programming, where you have two people working on the same bit of code at the same time in a very collaborative way. And of course, in that kind of an environment, you get immediate feedback right in the moment, very contextualized to the work at hand. So that’s great. We also submit our work in sort of small sub projects called merge requests or a pull request. And those are basically an artifact that others can look at and comment, and sometimes in some environments have to provide an approval for. And so that’s another form of feedback that’s kind of built into the work. But I think especially as regards questions like how am I doing in my career? Am I on the right track? Are there things that I should be thinking about in terms of the way that I want to grow? Those don’t come up as naturally in the course of day-to-day work, so
The big ones.
Those are some of the things, yeah, that we focus on.
So what are your next steps with folks? Because you’re in an industry that’s going through some enormous change right now with AI.
True.
Do you want to tell or do you want to give people advice if they’re in the same situation or similar situation? Working remotely and not really having the opportunities to grapple with the big questions, the heavy questions: How am I doing? Where do I go next? What does all this change mean for me?
Sure. I think that for us, the challenge has been ensuring that we’ve moved beyond being just a consultancy that deploys individuals out to various different clients to operate as individuals, essentially sole operators, and making the shift to deploying as a concerted team. And that means we have to have better awareness of what other people in the same engagement are thinking about and seeing. And we have to find ways to solve problems together and /or how to communicate problems that we’re seeing with the client. And so one of the things that we’re doing lately is shifting to kind of moving this feedback group idea that you worked with us about, closer to the work that we’re doing as consultants. So we envision having small groups of people at a particular client as closely related to the same workstream as it’s possible. That’ll vary, you know, because we have a wide variety of engagements, different numbers of people. Sometimes everybody working on one team, sometimes people scattered across the whole engagement. But the idea is for folks to be able to meet together on a regular basis, talk about the work and the things that they’re encountering in the course of their work. And kind of share ideas and solicit feedback on the approaches that they’re taking. And you mentioned AI. I think that that is an example of the kind of tumultuous change on the horizon within our industry, certainly.
Hmm.
You have AI company CEOs out there prognosticating that by the end of the year, all code will be written by AI. So there’s a range of rather troubling, exciting statements!
Right. There must be. I mean, gosh, how does it to be in an environment like this? And how are you helping your colleagues?
Sure, well, that again is where collaboration and working together comes into it. I think we have a very vibrant community around AI coding tools, for example. Where people are conducting experiments and sharing them and helping each other improve the results that they’re getting. So we’re really trying to lean into feedback as a means to help our people to weather sort of career–I don’t wanna say threatening ’cause I think there’s as much opportunity there as there is a threat, honestly–but very significant developments within our industry and we’re seeking to do that in a collaborative way that leverages feedback.
Joel Helbling from Test Double. Thank you so much for coming to the show today.
My pleasure. Thank you, Anne Marie.
Thanks again to Joel Helbling from Test Double. I helped Joel and his colleagues design a feedback system that still shapes how they work and grow together today. If you’re facing similar challenges—supporting staff through change, building stronger feedback practices, or creating a more connected culture—I’d love to help your team the way I helped his. Visit health communication partners dot com and click on contact.
