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how do you facilitate coffee break/after work beers/etc creativity?

mmastrac 7y ago
We have a private slack channel for banter. We all get on-site 5-6 times/year where we front-load our team-building via beers/activities and get face time. We've also found that there is some informal coffee talk with people who get to our occasional video call meetings early. Other members of the team have just started doing random 1:1s with each other to replace "coffee collisions". Our culture at FS involves something called "RAEB" (the redundant array of expensive brains) and we'll often just drop half-baked ideas into slack with the expectation that nobody _has_ to evaluate it, but it may occasionally spark future work. We will also go back from time-to-time and search thru Slack history to see if there was anything that popped up that we should dig into more deeply. I think that creativity just takes on a different form in a remote team.
numbsafari 7y ago
Two things I’ve tried (neither of these are ideas original to me, just things I’ve been a part of and brought with me to multiple orgs): - office hours: this is not a meeting ... it’s just a team dialed into a hangout or other voice chat for an hour. Totally optional. Folks can talk while working, talk about work, talk about not work, whatever. Just share the virtual space for a bit. This can be really helpful for “serendipity”, building trust and depth in interpersonal communication, cross-training, and otherwise just de-tensioning if you are involved in a high-stakes activity. - BOF/hack-a-thon/quarterly on-site... basically, everyone meets somewhere in meatspace for a week (Monday PM to Friday AM). Good things to do during this time: planning, team-building, demos, tech-talks, bring in an outsider or trainer, etc. Lots of larger OSS projects do this.
- mike_h 7y ago
  Any interesting outsider / trainer experiences?
  - numbsafari 7y ago
    I’ve generally only ever had budget for internal stuff. I’ve tried to bring in leads from other teams to talk about the tech they work with (I mostly worry about backend, so, eg, have client tech leads come in). I find that kind of cross training really helpful for inter-team communication. A surprising number of “backend” engineers don’t really know much about their OS or the Unix environment (why this is... I don’t know), so having folks from Ops come in and give a quick tutorial on those sorts of things is also really helpful. I could do those things myself, but I think working with leads from other teams helps build rapport and familiarity, it also gives those folks a chance to emphasize what they think would be most helpful for them if we knew more about it. At a previous job we had good PMs who were skilled as “agile coaches”. I hate to call them that, but I think it’s probably the closest thing that would be generally understood. They would help organize and host some excellent sessions on how to make our retrospectives and planning sessions go better. I’ve also worked with sales engineers from key vendors to come in and do a hands on about new features, if I can schedule it. It’s usually low or no cost training. Making better use of tools you pay for can be huge. Ps. Would love to hear more about others experiences with outside trainers coming in for hands-on sessions.
    - mike_h 7y ago
      Hey thanks, these are great ideas and inspiration!
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  One we implemented is a Random / Water Cooler slack channel. Keep it worksafe, but otherwise anything goes. Best thread we had was on at-home storage options, how to hack synology to do [X], people sharing code for said hacks, etc. Daily chats and people bringing discussion topics on the regular really helped with team cohesiveness.
muratk 7y ago
We have a Slack channel for that. But what really works: round-based boardgames. So we play that once a week, instead of / as our weekly meeting. Leaves plenty of room to chat about the weekend, comment about bad game moves and just talk. Turned out to be fun enough that non-tech ppl are joining, too.
- insomniacity 7y ago
  What do you play? How do you visualise the state of the board? (Obviously if it's something like chess that's easy, but that's only 2-player)
  - muratk 7y ago
    There is an app for that. ;) We use BoardGameArena. They bring boardgames beautifully online. I'm paying for a pro account so I can create private games, $5/mo. Worth it. https://en.boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=carcassonne https://en.boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=carcassonne You can watch others play, if you're curious how it looks: https://en.boardgamearena.com/gameinprogress?game=1&all https://en.boardgamearena.com/gameinprogress?game=1&all
Kaze404 7y ago
This was the biggest challenge for me at my last job. I liked my teammates and when we were in-person we'd have a great time, but since outside of those we only talked about work (and we were at an incredibly stressful phase of the project) I ended up resenting them over time. It's a shame because I enjoyed their presence, but after a while hearing their voices just made me think of the sleepless nights caused by work. I quit after a while.

We have a private slack channel for banter. We all get on-site 5-6 times/year where we front-load our team-building via beers/activities and get face time. We've also found that there is some informal coffee talk with people who get to our occasional video call meetings early. Other members of the team have just started doing random 1:1s with each other to replace "coffee collisions". Our culture at FS involves something called "RAEB" (the redundant array of expensive brains) and we'll often just drop half-baked ideas into slack with the expectation that nobody _has_ to evaluate it, but it may occasionally spark future work. We will also go back from time-to-time and search thru Slack history to see if there was anything that popped up that we should dig into more deeply. I think that creativity just takes on a different form in a remote team.

numbsafari 7y ago

Two things I’ve tried (neither of these are ideas original to me, just things I’ve been a part of and brought with me to multiple orgs): - office hours: this is not a meeting ... it’s just a team dialed into a hangout or other voice chat for an hour. Totally optional. Folks can talk while working, talk about work, talk about not work, whatever. Just share the virtual space for a bit. This can be really helpful for “serendipity”, building trust and depth in interpersonal communication, cross-training, and otherwise just de-tensioning if you are involved in a high-stakes activity. - BOF/hack-a-thon/quarterly on-site... basically, everyone meets somewhere in meatspace for a week (Monday PM to Friday AM). Good things to do during this time: planning, team-building, demos, tech-talks, bring in an outsider or trainer, etc. Lots of larger OSS projects do this.

mike_h 7y ago
Any interesting outsider / trainer experiences?
- numbsafari 7y ago
  I’ve generally only ever had budget for internal stuff. I’ve tried to bring in leads from other teams to talk about the tech they work with (I mostly worry about backend, so, eg, have client tech leads come in). I find that kind of cross training really helpful for inter-team communication. A surprising number of “backend” engineers don’t really know much about their OS or the Unix environment (why this is... I don’t know), so having folks from Ops come in and give a quick tutorial on those sorts of things is also really helpful. I could do those things myself, but I think working with leads from other teams helps build rapport and familiarity, it also gives those folks a chance to emphasize what they think would be most helpful for them if we knew more about it. At a previous job we had good PMs who were skilled as “agile coaches”. I hate to call them that, but I think it’s probably the closest thing that would be generally understood. They would help organize and host some excellent sessions on how to make our retrospectives and planning sessions go better. I’ve also worked with sales engineers from key vendors to come in and do a hands on about new features, if I can schedule it. It’s usually low or no cost training. Making better use of tools you pay for can be huge. Ps. Would love to hear more about others experiences with outside trainers coming in for hands-on sessions.
  - mike_h 7y ago
    Hey thanks, these are great ideas and inspiration!
blaser-waffle 7y ago
One we implemented is a Random / Water Cooler slack channel. Keep it worksafe, but otherwise anything goes. Best thread we had was on at-home storage options, how to hack synology to do [X], people sharing code for said hacks, etc. Daily chats and people bringing discussion topics on the regular really helped with team cohesiveness.

muratk 7y ago

We have a Slack channel for that. But what really works: round-based boardgames. So we play that once a week, instead of / as our weekly meeting. Leaves plenty of room to chat about the weekend, comment about bad game moves and just talk. Turned out to be fun enough that non-tech ppl are joining, too.

insomniacity 7y ago
What do you play? How do you visualise the state of the board? (Obviously if it's something like chess that's easy, but that's only 2-player)
- muratk 7y ago
  There is an app for that. ;) We use BoardGameArena. They bring boardgames beautifully online. I'm paying for a pro account so I can create private games, $5/mo. Worth it. https://en.boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=carcassonne https://en.boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=carcassonne You can watch others play, if you're curious how it looks: https://en.boardgamearena.com/gameinprogress?game=1&all https://en.boardgamearena.com/gameinprogress?game=1&all

Kaze404 7y ago

This was the biggest challenge for me at my last job. I liked my teammates and when we were in-person we'd have a great time, but since outside of those we only talked about work (and we were at an incredibly stressful phase of the project) I ended up resenting them over time. It's a shame because I enjoyed their presence, but after a while hearing their voices just made me think of the sleepless nights caused by work. I quit after a while.