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I used to think that social rituals were bullshit, but I've completely changed my mind. I think they are just often done poorly and distract the team from what

by pea 5y ago

I used to think that social rituals were bullshit, but I've completely changed my mind. I think they are just often done poorly and distract the team from what is important. I'm sure there is room for improvement and YMMV, but our current process is working really well for us: - As some context, we use Basecamp's Shape Up to deliver features. This prioritises independence, async communication, and deep work. Engineers and designers are largely free to manage their active projects to how they see fit (managers provide context). - Team social activities only happen on Mondays and Friday. Tuesday -> Thursday are reserved for deep work. - We found that mixing social and work meetings didn't work (i.e. a weekly kick-off where people both talk about their weekend and their priorities). Instead, we have a 100% social coffee video call on Monday mornings with some jazz. Weekly work updates happen async and are project-dependent. - On Fridays afternoons we have a quiz or a board game. We like doing it later afternoon on Friday, where deep work is less likely to happen. We also have an async social check-in with a different prompt each week, where you can share some experiences, pictures of a holiday, etc. - Quarterly retreats where we get the team together. We do a morning session and an afternoon session every day, with the rest of the time unstructured/fun. Things are avoid: - We avoid stand-ups which devolve into people listing out what they did yesterday - instead, we encourage async self-organization - We try and back to back meetings to avoid context switching and 30m-2hr deadzones - We discourage arranging calls just to organize thoughts (I was bad at this myself). In our experience, communication is higher fidelity if it is written up in message threads on Basecamp. Video calls are really only used for 1:1s, social meetings, demos, or regrouping in the context of an active project. - We got rid of Slack. Active projects have their own chat rooms, but the rule of thumb is: presume anything not in a forum thread or document is ephemeral and will be lost forever. We have started putting together a lot of our rituals and culture together in our handbook (https://handbook.datapane.com https://handbook.datapane.com), so would love any feedback.

madeofpalk 5y ago
> We found that mixing social and work meetings didn't work (i.e. a weekly kick-off where people both talk about their weekend and their priorities). One thing I like about my current team is that we have a 30 minute daily to begin the morning with, and usually the first 15 minutes is spent just doing light socialising, talking about whatever we fancy. Then we get into work. I think it's valuable to have the social connection with your team mates, and its a good way to ease into the day.
valeness 5y ago
You have too much stuff tacked onto a friday. If you want happier employees just let them have the early weekend instead of doing a "quiz" or "board game". I come to work to work, not be forced to play games with colleagues. Also social check-ins are not great unless everyone is just living their best life. Over the pandemic it was pretty damaging for me as I was stuck in my 500 sqft apartment with an immunocompromised mother, too scared to go get groceries; and then seeing people from other departments posting about their spur of the moment vacation to cancun was quite the demoralizing agent... And, again, my colleagues aren't always my friends and I don't like to be forced to share my personal life with random people I wouldn't talk twice to outside of work. It sounds like as an employer you're exercising unjust control over your employees personal and social lives. Some people may like this, but it's never been received well by me, my colleagues, or even friends I've worked with. We'd all rather have just enjoyed the extra time off and we could hang out if we were friends anyway. So while it may work for you, I believe you are self-selecting out of employees who would find this kind of thing a giant red flag; so the advice is likely skewed to those who want to foster a tolerable work environment for everyone. I do like your forum idea though, I've been a large proponent of written documentation and thread-based persistent communication for years. However, convincing product/design/business of this is very difficult.

by pea 5y ago

madeofpalk 5y ago

> We found that mixing social and work meetings didn't work (i.e. a weekly kick-off where people both talk about their weekend and their priorities). One thing I like about my current team is that we have a 30 minute daily to begin the morning with, and usually the first 15 minutes is spent just doing light socialising, talking about whatever we fancy. Then we get into work. I think it's valuable to have the social connection with your team mates, and its a good way to ease into the day.

valeness 5y ago

You have too much stuff tacked onto a friday. If you want happier employees just let them have the early weekend instead of doing a "quiz" or "board game". I come to work to work, not be forced to play games with colleagues. Also social check-ins are not great unless everyone is just living their best life. Over the pandemic it was pretty damaging for me as I was stuck in my 500 sqft apartment with an immunocompromised mother, too scared to go get groceries; and then seeing people from other departments posting about their spur of the moment vacation to cancun was quite the demoralizing agent... And, again, my colleagues aren't always my friends and I don't like to be forced to share my personal life with random people I wouldn't talk twice to outside of work. It sounds like as an employer you're exercising unjust control over your employees personal and social lives. Some people may like this, but it's never been received well by me, my colleagues, or even friends I've worked with. We'd all rather have just enjoyed the extra time off and we could hang out if we were friends anyway. So while it may work for you, I believe you are self-selecting out of employees who would find this kind of thing a giant red flag; so the advice is likely skewed to those who want to foster a tolerable work environment for everyone. I do like your forum idea though, I've been a large proponent of written documentation and thread-based persistent communication for years. However, convincing product/design/business of this is very difficult.