101–110 of 153 posts
Cameras are optional for meetings except once a week when the whole team gathers and syncs up. The day is known in advance so even people who don't like cameras have time to "tidy up". Once every two weeks we discuss team/process related issues. If the agenda is empty we still have the meeting but instead talk about community, volunteering, or just do games/current events.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like your place of employment have a bunch of cultural and work process issues to sort out, to be honest. The diary entries are supposed to replace other forms of communication - not be an addition. My place of work strive for autonomous teams within specific business domains. You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in various projects, via email no less. We’re facing comp…
> Seems like your place of employment have a bunch of cultural and work process issues to sort out, to be honest. The place and direct team not - the corporate mothership probably. It would be easy if I could at least filter out (internal) spam via sender addresses, but the sender address is a central one for ham as well as spam. > You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in vari…
I am, almost an involuntary, manager of 6 different dev teams, and I often say that my aim to reduce the “management” part of my job to a shared duties whiteboard.
Having this as an utopian goal I really strive to remove anything that will hinder team autonomy.
Transparency, communication and ownership is crucial to this mission. Always team, never individuals!
- text chat is huge and where the main form of socialization happens rather than verbally. I gotta admit - to somebody that has bad hearing, it's been a boon.
- sending each other "good morning" gifs a few times a week. It's endearing. :)
- so many gif responses.
- friday music chats.
- "private" watercooler channels with the immediate team where the suits (aka my boss) aren't allowed in, as well as more public ones where they have read/write access. both are needed for very different reasons. not that you want to commit to text anything you wouldn't tell your boss, but sometimes there needs to be an area where you can be snarky about a suit's (bad) presentation and there's no fear.
- I was more hands off at the beginning of the pandemic but really have taken a point to schedule 1:1's depending on the bandwidth of the other person and it's been the glue that holds together the team tbh.
> - Posting once a week about what I did for fun over the weekend, usually with photos. Honestly, if I heard about this during the hiring process I'd see it as a red flag. Especially the photos. I once had this terrible VP who was a horrible micromanager and an all around a-hole. For every weekly meeting he'd go around the room forcing people to share what they did on the weekend. It was under the guise of "team buil…
I think I'm hyper sensitive to this because of my old boss, like you are more sensitive to sharing what you did over the weekend. Bad managers suck and can cause issues that impact you for years.
Having worked remote for more than 10 years I feel most of these rituals as imposed after the pandemic by the managing layers and people obsessed with work culture. I accept any non mandatory activity and might participate sometimes. But boy, I hate that my week is filled with meetings. At previous full remote positions meetings were the exception and all communication happened either on IRC or hipchat/slack. And tha…
>> but I prefer to fill my social needs outside of work This doesn’t get enough airtime in the whole remote vs in-office debate IMO. I wish this topic was brought up more often because a diverse network of friends is a very special thing in life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> but I prefer to fill my social needs outside of work This doesn’t get enough airtime in the whole remote vs in-office debate IMO. I wish this topic was brought up more often because a diverse network of friends is a very special thing in life.
Agreed. I’m curious why young, fresh out of college grads who move across country (and have few / no friends in the new local area) make it their employers responsibility to foster friendships? Don’t get me wrong - it’s great to have genuine friendships with your coworkers. You work better together and have strong recommendations for the next job or have strong referrals to other companies when your friends leave. At…
Personally, I've never heard anyone explicitly say it's their employer's responsibility.
But if my employer occasionally offers me the option to leave the office early and go drinking at their expense, while getting paid? Nobody's going to oppose having the option.
> - Posting once a week about what I did for fun over the weekend, usually with photos. Honestly, if I heard about this during the hiring process I'd see it as a red flag. Especially the photos. I once had this terrible VP who was a horrible micromanager and an all around a-hole. For every weekly meeting he'd go around the room forcing people to share what they did on the weekend. It was under the guise of "team buil…
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…
> 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.
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. Engineer…
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.