A new approach to employee learning and collaboration across teams and time zones is already driving innovation.
Long before the pandemic ushered in a new era of remote work, SecondMuse has been innovating ways for employees to collaborate with colleagues across time zones on programs we run around the world. We were early adopters of tools like Slack, Miro and Zoom and even authored a guide to humanizing virtual spaces based on lessons we learned running remote events for hundreds of far-flung participants.
But when it came to collaborating across our distinct teams, each focused on different programs or aspects of the work we do, we knew we had room to grow. As an organization dedicated to solving challenges by bringing people together, we’ve always seen a clear need for our own employees to engage with colleagues beyond their direct teams. We brought them together through Global Think and Drinks, our recurring all-hands call, and a 2M Fest dedicated to celebrating each other and having fun. But we wanted our colleagues working on everything from advancing climate tech innovation in New York state to enhancing youth mental wellbeing in digital spaces to meet more regularly to share tools and resources, workshop ideas and gain a clearer sense of how their programs complement each other — and advance SecondMuse’s larger ambition of accelerating more inclusive and resilient economies.
So when employees emphasized their desire last year for more cross-team collaboration, we immediately began working on a solution that would work for a remote workforce spread out across nearly 20 time zones.
The result, after months of design and deliberation, is the SecondMuse Practice Lab. The cohort-based learning model is designed to enhance collaboration across teams and to leverage our colleagues’ diverse expertise to tackle common challenges and strengthen the tools and approaches we use across our organization.
Empowering Employees to Shape the Systems in Which They Work
Beyond fostering cross-team collaboration, the Lab — designed and run by our own staff — offered our employees the agency to examine and change the system that resulted in them feeling a sense of disconnection from other parts of our organization in the first place.
“A lot of the changes that we need to see are at the systems level,” says Melina Chan, our Coaching and Development Manager, who led the Lab alongside Kate Key, our Director of Practice and Organizational Development. “Often there is so much of the change that happens that sits with the individual and is carried forward in their own journeys that contributes to the systems changes that we are seeking. It makes Systems Change both art and science. It makes systems change mystifying for traditional business approaches to evaluate.”
In response, the Practice Lab embraced a non-traditional format that empowered employees to change the system from within and contribute to their own professional growth as well as the improvement of their immediate teams, programs and the wider organization.
Since launching last November, the Lab has already resulted in all SecondMuse program teams across North America adopting new approaches to team engagement, aligning around the use of tech platforms, and focusing more on resource sharing. It has also strengthened connections among Lab participants and is fostering a stronger culture of continuous improvement and mutual support. For other organizations looking to change systems, experiment with new ideas and to gather insights across time zones that can be trialled and eventually formalized, the Practice Lab can serve as an inspiring model.

A Cohort Model That Nurtures Relationships Across Time Zones
Kate explains that one of the key design principles of the Lab was that it would run for an extended period of time so that participants could “go deep in exploring a particular thread,” which she describes as a “foundational pillar of systems change work.”
She and Melina organized the Lab around monthly two-and-a-half-hour sessions for seven months. They limited the group size to 10 participants, from both SecondMuse corporate services (like human resources and communications) and our business unit teams that are directly involved in developing and executing programs and solutions for our clients. This decision was based on our aspiration to share culture, learning and approaches across these distinct parts of the organization and to counter their tendency to become siloed. It was also based on our analysis of SecondMuse programs that showed a clear link between programmatic success and the use of more intimate cohort-based approaches to achieving our program goals.
“This cohort experience allowed people who normally don’t work together to be in a relationship together and be connected in a way that was conducive to systems level exploration,” Kate says.
Our pilot cohort included colleagues from 10 teams spanning six programs and four corporate service functions. Held on Zoom, each of the Lab’s seven live sessions were scheduled to accommodate as many participants as possible and to enable those who couldn’t attend to watch recorded sessions and contribute feedback, on their own time, via tools like Slack and Miro. Kate and Melina also dedicated time during the first meeting to allowing the group to decide how they wanted to navigate the practicalities of being spread across time zones, and landed on a process involving asynchronous
sharing and written reflection between scheduled sessions.
The structure of the Lab adhered to the SecondMuse Practice framework, which we use across all of our programs and client work. The framework first guides participants through a kickoff session dedicated to aligning on goals and developing “community agreements” that set expectations for the group. It’s followed by a discovery phase aimed at identifying common challenges participants face within a common system, and then designing and implementing solutions. The process wraps up with a retrospective involving reflection, appreciation and the harvesting of learnings and insights.
Outcomes of Our Pilot Practice Lab
At the inaugural lab, participants in our first cohort wound up focusing on ways of being and doing. They engaged in rich conversation about everything from equity and boundaries to community engagement. They also identified common challenges related to their management of diverse and geographically disparate communities, each with a distinct context and access to resources.
Despite these differences, the Lab enabled them to align around a desire to cultivate a shared culture and purpose. It also gave them the space to develop common resources, frameworks and techniques they could use and share with their colleagues to foster a more unified culture and approach to working on unique, but related challenges.
Beyond leaving with more tools to use in their day-to-day work, they also left as part of a supportive community of peers they can now lean on to workshop problems and improve the work we do at SecondMuse. Importantly, they also left with more hands-on experience facilitating cohorts and leading systems change initiatives — critical skills for an organization fully focused on improving the economic and social systems that shape our world.
While SecondMuse is still extrapolating learnings from the Lab, the spirit of collaboration it fostered has already resulted in a number of outcomes that are beginning to change our systems and refining the way we work.
Our team in North America for example, has adopted some of the methods the cohort developed to facilitate collaborative workshops and calls, and has tweaked its community agreements to align with those created during the Lab. Colleagues across programs are now taking a more intentional approach sharing tools and resources, including a compendium of facilitation activities we tested and compiled during the Practice Lab, and a practical guide to our asynchronous approach to working across time zones.
Participants overwhelmingly agreed that the practice had a positive influence on their professional practices. One said that a key takeaway “is a commitment to listening better to others’ voices,“ while another said that they left “empowered to advocate” for themselves and others.
Over the next few months, SecondMuse will continue to apply learnings from the Lab to the way we engage with each other, and the way we foster enrichment and connection across our programs — from Headstream, our youth mental wellbeing program that is gearing up for its 2025 Learning Lab in February, to our next global Space Apps Collective Global Summit in March.
As our teams carry out this and other critical work, they will now have a more tightly-knit community of colleagues to lean on for resources, expertise and support that is already strengthening our team and enabling us to work more effectively around the world.