For years, the people at Merkle’s delivery center in Bulgaria had worked as a distributed company. They met their clients every day, on video: developers, testers, team leads, product owners, all in direct contact with the people they built for.
The work was good. The meetings around it weren’t always. Cameras stayed off in client calls. People joined at the very last second. Conversations ran over each other. In a service business where teams speak with clients daily, those habits aren’t a detail. They are part of the service.
An initiative, not a training
The delivery center wanted to improve the quality of its client service. The first idea was the usual one: a one- or two-day training for a group of people, to change how they show up with clients.
We suggested treating it as what it was: an initiative the whole organization had to carry out. A habit that a whole team holds can’t be fixed by training a few of its members, who then go back to a room where nothing else has changed. So instead of one group for two days, the proposal was every team in the subsidiary, over six months, in short sessions that would make one idea hard to miss: strong connections with clients and colleagues take deliberate effort, and that effort is made of specific things people do or don’t do.
Two numbers shaped the plan. The first was reach: the aim was 80% of the subsidiary, because a shared norm needs most of the people who are supposed to share it. The second was the point where peers take over: once roughly one in four people in a group adopt a new behavior, research on social conventions shows, change stops being driven by the program and starts being driven by the people.
What every team went through
The program ran for six months: a series of one-hour sessions, each team together, with no trainer and no facilitator in the room. Every session took one idea and put it to work in the situations the teams actually lived in. Among them:
Dutton’s high-quality connections in remote settings
Jane Dutton’s research on what turns an interaction into a connection that energizes people: respectful engagement, helping others do their work well, and trust. Applied to virtual meetings: cameras, late joins, screens full of notifications, a one-word goodbye in the chat, silence when a colleague asks for feedback.
Leech’s politeness maxims as virtual meeting etiquette
Geoffrey Leech’s six maxims of politeness, from tact to sympathy, held up against the usual rules for virtual meetings. Teams used them to write their own meeting etiquette: which rule serves which maxim, and why.
Benne and Sheats’ dysfunctional roles in meetings
The eight roles that derail a meeting, from the dominator to the blocker, and the ground rules that handle each one: “everyone speaks before anyone speaks twice”, “suggest an alternative when you disagree”.
The RATER model of service quality
Service seen from the client’s side: whether clients can rely on you, whether you can do the job, how you come across, whether you care, and how quickly you respond. Teams took real client complaints and decided which of the five each one actually hits, and how hard.
Every hour ran the same way:
- Each person answers on their own first, without seeing the others.
- The team sees where it differs, and has to agree on one answer.
- The team commits to practices for its own meetings.
Inside a session, a question looks like this:
You are in a virtual meeting with your team. Several of your coworkers have their cameras on, but you choose to keep yours off. Which part of building a high-quality connection, in Dutton’s model, will be most affected?
- Task enabling
- TrustGeorgi
- Respectful engagementAnaBorisElena
“You answer individually, then defend your position as a team,” said Stefan Karakolev, a QA engineer. “You see how everyone thinks, and sometimes you change your mind.” Others in the teams put it this way:
“One hour, everyone in the room, challenging each other’s thinking, and leaving with shared clarity. It works for every level, every role.”
Dessislava KrastevaQA Team Lead“Without a facilitator, something unexpected happens: everyone becomes one. The whole group becomes more active, more accountable.”
Ivan VasilevQA Technical Lead“Real-life cases melt down communication barriers. Every session adds something concrete: a new way to grow professionally and work better together.”
Daniela ArabovaQA Engineer“The group self-organizes without a lecturer. Everyone speaks up, defends their thinking, and the alignment emerges from the conversation itself.”
Mira MalchevaSolution Strategist
At the end, each team agreed on its own practices for meeting clients. Not as a policy from above, but as a commitment made together:
- Before Cameras off in client calls, joining at the last second, talking over each other.
- After Cameras on, joining a minute early, muting when not speaking, raising a hand instead of talking over.
Then something unexpected happened
The goal had been awareness. What happened was a change in behavior.
87% of the subsidiary took part, above the 80% target, and the sessions scored 9.1 out of 10. The number that surprised us was the third: 93% of participants said they saw their colleagues behave differently in virtual meetings.
So we went and asked. We interviewed people whose habits had changed, and asked them why. Most of them couldn’t really say. They just did things differently now.
“Not using my camera could be perceived as disinterest or disrespect, affecting the trust within the team. Now, if I need to keep it off, I will make sure to explain why.”
For us, the reason became clear quickly. It wasn’t the theory, and it wasn’t a rule. It was that everyone else in the room now knew what a camera that stays off means. The whole team had worked through the same situations and reached the same conclusions together, so the old habit no longer went unnoticed. Nobody had to enforce anything. The shared understanding did.
“The sessions made it personal, and the team commitment made it stick.”
As head of the delivery center, he could see it too: the practices were “happening now, consistently, across teams.”
Back to the camera
The first idea had been a training. What Merkle carried out was an initiative: every team asking itself the same questions, and answering them together.
The cameras that come on in client calls today aren’t a policy. They are a team member who knows that a black screen says something, and that everyone else knows it too.
What we learned
Merkle was the first time we saw behavior change spread through a whole organization without anyone enforcing it. Five principles came out of it, and ExecuteOS works the way it does today because of them.
1Reach the whole team, not a few of its members
A habit lives in a team. Two days of training for a few people sends them back to rooms where nothing has changed; reaching most of the organization at once changes what is normal for everyone. That is what made the difference at Merkle.
In ExecuteOS: the same sessions for every team that has to act on a priority, at the same time.
2Let shared understanding do the enforcing
The people who changed couldn’t say why. Once a whole team has worked through what a behavior means and agreed on it together, the behavior is visible to all of them, and commitments made in front of colleagues are kept.
In ExecuteOS: sessions end in commitments each person signs or declines, on record.
3Put leaders in the same sessions as their teams
Teams watch their leaders. When leaders work through the same questions as their people, the topic reads as a priority, and the change as everyone’s.
In ExecuteOS: leaders take the same check and the same sessions as their teams.
4Start from the reason, said by the leader who owns it
Sessions go furthest when people know why now: what a habit costs with clients, and who is asking for the change.
In ExecuteOS: every program starts from the priority behind it, in the leader’s own words.
5Plan the reinforcement before the first session
Habits drift, slowly but steadily. Six months of sessions made the new habits normal at Merkle; keeping them normal is a job of its own.
In ExecuteOS: a check again after the sessions, and the sessions brought back where a change starts to slip.