Keeping the Design Team Connected During Shelter-in-Place

Emojis play a big role

For the design team at Confluent, shelter-in-place felt like it happened slowly and then all at once. For most of February, we’d been carefully watching the coronavirus dashboards, speaking to family members in China, and quietly speculating on when we’d be working from home, especially as other tech companies instituted their own WFH policies.

On the first Friday in March, a few of us were in the office and had just enjoyed our usual social Friday lunch when word came from our manager. He wanted the entire design team to work from home for the foreseeable future, just in case, and that day would be our last in the office. Everyone packed up at the end of the day, saying more serious goodbyes than typical and beginning to speculate on when we’d see each other again.

During the first Monday of working from home, everyone was feeling a bit out of sorts. Uncertainty was high with coronavirus, and it felt strange to process the emotions by ourselves, far away from each other. The design team doesn’t see each other everyday when working remotely, as we’re frequently working with our cross-functional teams, and it was difficult to feel each other’s presence.

New Rituals

To keep everyone communicating, I started the ritual of asking the team a Question of the Day, via Slack. The parameters:

• I post a question everyday that we’re in the office, between 8am-10am.
• People on the team create a thread of their responses.
• No one is required to answer any question, and occasionally, there’s a longer dialogue that happens within the thread. Also, sometimes a teammate goes back a few days to revive an older question.
• Friday always has the same question, to check in on everyone: List a rose, a bud, and a thorn for you right now. We format it with emojis, like so:

• I also occasionally post two questions of the day. This happens most frequently on Fridays.
• We also have the occasional guest question, which has been fun.

Now that we have 15 weeks’ worth of questions, I want to share what we’ve learned from this ritual.

Quick Hits

The average number of responses to a question is 9.4, with a high of 77 and a low of 0. The median number of responses is 6.

The most popular day of the week to answer a question is Thursday, and the least popular is Wednesday.

Most Popular Questions

Unsurprisingly, the most popular questions are superlatives. For us, superlatives are a combination of two irresistible factors: vote-by-emoji and knowing your teammates. To set up a superlative question, I create a thread where each person chooses a representative emoji (mine is 🏃🏽‍♀️). Then, I post each superlative on its own line, and everyone votes for the superlative by adding the emoji of the chosen teammate.

My reasoning on the popularity of the superlatives is the ease of interaction, coupled with the interest in understanding how you view your teammates and how they view you. It’s way easier to click an emoji than to type a response, and it’s also fun to think about how you fit into the team.

Other popular questions are:

• What’s the most money you’ve ever blown in the shortest amount of time? Did you have fun? (original tweet)
• If ________ announced that he / she / they were giving a TED talk, what would you assume he / she / they would speak about?
• What does your WFH setup look like?
• What is the silliest thing that you’ve bought in the last few weeks?

Least Popular Questions

The least popular questions, the ones that received 0 responses, are as follows:

• What are the best / worst re-designs in recent years?
• You get to eliminate one noise from the universe. What do you pick? (original tweet)
• A genie grants you 50 billion dollars to curb political polarization in the United States. That’s your only goal. How do you spend the money? (original tweet)
• Start an argument in 5 words or less (original tweet).

My sense on the lack of interest and responses for these ones relates to both timing and difficulty. I asked a few of these questions after George Floyd’s murder and during the #BLM protests, when everyone was processing what was happening in their own ways and work may not have been at the top of everyone’s priorities. A few of these questions invite argument, and at this moment, our team seems averse to conflict.

Timeline

As expected, response rates were heavily influenced by events in the outside world, as well as Confluent-specific events.

For our team, it appears that we have a need to connect right as a world-changing event is happening, like the start of the coronavirus shelter-in-place (week 2) or George Floyd’s murder (week 12). Responses at these times are high. However, after the initial intensity, it looks like many people retreat and respond less, perhaps to process things alone.

I also looked at response rates after the second quarter started at Confluent. Usually, there’s a ton of design work right as the quarter starts, and everyone is busy. This is reflected in the the low response numbers starting around week 4.

Surprises

I typically ask two types of questions. The first type is a question is one that I’ve generated, and may be very specific to the design team or Confluent. The other type of question is based on something that I’ve seen on Twitter or elsewhere on the internet, and I’ll post the original tweet along with the question.

I expected to see more responses to the Twitter-based questions, especially because people can open up Twitter and see how the public has responded. However, the custom questions received twice as many responses as the Twitter-based questions, averaging 11 responses per question. The Twitter-based questions received an average of 5.8 responses.

The other interesting trend is about ladies and sandwiches. I’ve asked three questions about sandwiches:

• What is the sandwich that you still think about? (original tweet)
• Which sandwich shape is better, squares or triangles? (original tweet)
• Which are your top three sandwiches, based on the image below? (original tweet)

Encyclopedia of Sandwiches

The responses to all these questions are overwhelmingly female — across all three questions, there’s one male response. Ladies love sandwiches, I guess?

What I Learned as the Question-Asker

I primarily do UX research at Confluent, and it’s always humbling to be reminded of the tenets of one’s craft. The big lesson for me was to remember my audience and to ask questions that people feel comfortable answering.

Early on in shelter-in-place, I was writing a question-of-the-day and I realized that I was only including binary pronouns. That realization was uncomfortable to me, and I started including all pronouns when asking a question.

About a third of our design team emigrated to the US, and I realized that some of the questions were not easy to understand, especially when it’s over Slack. I asked questions with a premise based on sarcasm or peanut butter. These questions occasionally spurred good discussion, but sometimes felt awkward because they were so US-centric. I want to create an environment where everyone feels equally comfortable when responding and reading others’ responses, and now I consider that angle carefully when posting a question-of-the-day.

If you’re interested in starting a similar ritual with your own team, I’ve captured all of the questions in one spreadsheet.