Lessons in Maintaining Digital Safe Spaces: How strong digital company culture can not only endure but evolve
Last March, I wrote a piece about the importance of creating digital safe spaces for employees during the sudden and unexpected shift to remote working. As we know by now, what was supposed to be a few weeks of remote working has turned into a very, very long year.
Reading it now, I thought it would seem silly and naive, but the notion that digital company culture is as important as office culture seems more relevant than it did when it was originally written. As months passed and we settled into remote work, growing anger and frustration with the reality of the pandemic truly started to set in. As a consequence, stimulating creativity and keeping Abovers motivated from the increasingly claustrophobic confines of their own homes got harder the longer we worked from home.
The fact of the matter is, we’re past the point of questioning if the company culture is something that can actually permeate into digital spaces as well. Instead, we should be asking ourselves how we can grow and evolve digital company culture in a way that doesn’t become stagnant the longer we work from home?
Over the last few months, team members from both studios at Above have experimented with exactly that. How could we breathe life into our digital social presence in ways that made us want to still hang out for a cheeky digital after-work even after staring at each other all day during online meetings?
What we’ve found is that sometimes the best way to get out of a creative slump is simply to do something creative. Not something related to the task at hand, but something inconsequential and, most importantly, fun to break up the monotony of working and socializing in the same digital space for months on end.
🎦 ‘Show & Tell’ works for adults too
We realized last fall that digital fikas (the coveted Swedish coffee break used to socialize with colleagues and get a reprieve from work) had all but disappeared from our calendars because people would call in and make super awkward, forced small talk chock-full of uncomfortably long pauses. Simply put, no one was gaining anything by being there.
So, we approached the fika-problem like any other research task — with a hypothesis: if you provided people with a topic to talk about, meaningful conversation would inevitably follow.
It’s taken some trial and error to perfect this “themed” fika approach, but, at its core, we ask a bunch of adults to do ‘Show & Tell’ every week. And it’s worked surprisingly well. For example, one of the most popular fikas to date with the Malmö design team was to bring photo proof of their worst hair misstep(s). The task was simple enough (provide a picture) for everyone to contribute. It also gave everyone a chance to speak, rather than just the dominant personalities of the group. Moreover, people could choose the level of participation they wanted. Some just showed pictures on their phones while others had multi-slide Keynote presentations. Regardless of what they presented or how they presented it, the sharing component of the fika gave everyone a spot at the table as well as a more concrete reason to be there in the first place.
There isn’t one prescriptive way to “program” a fika, but a few takeaways we’ve learned over the past few months are:
- Keep the fika group small (15 people max)! This allows everyone the chance to speak and participate within a 30-minute window without dragging on to the point where people start to tune out.
- The topic should require minimal time/effort. While we think the fikas have been great for maintaining strong digital company culture, they shouldn’t eat into peoples’ work or personal time.
- Have a casual moderator. Even if fika topics are collaborative and conversation is flowing, having one designated person in the meeting casually moderate ensures that everyone gets a turn to speak/present.They can also help negate some inevitable awkward pauses.
😊The things that make you happy might make others happy too
Undoubtedly, one of the best things that Abovers bring to the table is the vast amount of hobbies and interests. Ironically, we’ve actually benefited more from these personal interests when working remotely—sometimes in wholly unexpected and wonderful ways. For example, music has long been a staple in the Above studio. When one of our software developers realized they missed the simple act of listening to music with others in the studio—discovering new songs or artists—they created an online radio that anyone at Above could tune into whenever they wanted. People could queue songs of their own or simply let the radio play. While the concept seems simple, it created a real sense of community because listeners could see how many fellow Abovers were listening at the same time as them. It felt like we were doing something together, even without meeting. The gesture was small, but the impact was big.
Inspired by bringing personal passions and interests into the digital work sphere, I’ve been experimenting with Taskmaster-themed fikas. The idea is to give everyone the same task, but the fun unravels in how individuals interpret that same task. For example, we recently bid farewell to our lovely colleague Gabriel Uggla, who hails from the apple capital of Sweden, Kivik. So, the task for fika that week was to create a homage to Gabriel using apples. As you can see below, interpretations of “using an apple as the medium for your homage” ranged from photoshopping on an Apple computer to apple-flavored Jello to unsettling apple video chat filters. Needless to say, this type of inconsequential creative task leads to some very entertaining outcomes.
It’s worth noting that task-oriented fikas differ slightly from “theme” fikas in that they usually require a little more from participants (I mean someone made Jello and carved it). Save them for special occasions!
🕒 Encourage asynchronous participation
While we understand that asynchronous communication is essential to remote working, that doesn’t mean that we became sudden experts when we started working from home. As the pandemic continued, and we encountered numerous articles praising asynchronous communication tactics, we wondered how they could be used to maintain a strong sense of culture within Above.
Luckily, we were met with the perfect challenge to test out our wildest asynchronous ideas during the holidays. Infection rates in Sweden meant that we simply could not host a holiday party in any format other than digital. And, from the aforementioned fika takeaways, we knew that hosting 50+ members of the Above team for a virtual holiday party would, frankly, not be very cheery or fun.
Instead, we devised an asynchronous advent calendar with daily activities that Abovers could participate in if they wanted to and at a time that suited them best. The calendar was set up through a Slack channel and an activity was posted daily to encourage casual conversation and/or participation that created a sense of community with minimal time investment from Abovers. “Minimum” time commitment varied from quick swapping recipes to sharing holiday traditions from back home to a gingerbread house competition.
Like it or not, we’re not quite ready to go back to the office just yet. Even then, “remote work and virtual meetings are likely to continue, albeit less intensely than at the pandemic’s peak,” according to a report from McKinsey. The time to invest in strong digital company culture is now. Moreover, the most effective digital activities often end up being the most simple, built on the things we did as kids, like ‘Show & Tell.’
Strong digital company culture is just the tip of the iceberg at Above! We’re a bunch of passionate cross-functional creatives who get to work with cool tech and progressive companies. Even after a year of working remotely, I can definitely say the work we do keeps life colorful and interesting. We have vacancies, so come work with me! Who knows, maybe someone will even carve your image in Jello: www.above.se/joinus ✌️
