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Our fully remote 10 person team has a very brief daily standup, and 20 minute standdown. We also have a biweekly demo to which we invite leadership. I sent out
by roflc0ptic 5y ago
Our fully remote 10 person team has a very brief daily standup, and 20 minute standdown. We also have a biweekly demo to which we invite leadership.
I sent out an anonymous survey recently, and everyone wanted to keep doing each element of this, and thought it was very beneficial. People also said they wanted more planning, more pair programming, and more context given in people's standup/standdown updates. Only one person said they didn't want more collaboration.
We recently introduced doing some planning every 8 weeks; plan is fly to the home office, spend a week having those spontaneous in person conversations that are hard to replicate. We've done two of these ad-hoc, everybody liked them, so we decided to make it a thing.
Every day we choose stand down ordering by answering some random dumb question with a unique answer and the rule "un-serious answers only", e.g. "What is your favorite color? RGB values only", answer "#FACB12", "My favorite color cannot be represented via RGB." or and then arbitrarily ordering it, e.g. "alphabetized by third letter in answer", or "most pedantic response", or whatever. It adds some human flavor without forcing any Bonding™. It's a nice light touch way to give the opportunity for banter without forcing it.
- jfk13 5y ago> We recently introduced doing some planning every 8 weeks; plan is fly to the home office, spend a week having those spontaneous in person conversations You plan to have everyone fly somewhere for a week, every 8 weeks?! Wow. Really glad I'm not on that team.
- madeofpalk 5y agoEvery 8 weeks seems quite frequent and exhausting, but I recently met colleges from the wider company in person for the first time and I loved it. I recognise there's value that comes from that!
- jfk13 5y agoSure! Pre-pandemic, my company used to bring people together a couple of times a year, and I agree there was considerable value in it. But every 8 weeks? Maybe that team are all young, energetic, and family-free, but at my stage of life I would find that pretty gruelling.
- roflc0ptic 5y agoYeah, I'm 33 and I'm wondering if I'm going to find it too grueling. The detail I'm omitting is that half the team already lives in NY, most of the rest live in driving distance, so there are actually only two of us flying in, and we have the clear option not to fly in. I bring a woman I'm seeing along, we go see plays, it's pretty pleasant. If I had kids I think this would be no fly, so to speak.