Read our announcement of this experiment here.

The pandemic has shifted everyone’s lives, dealing with unique and personal challenges. We worked incredibly hard in these uncertain times and most of us worked on average 10 hours per day, including Saturdays when needed. Working this much and on top of that, having to deal with personal challenges is exhausting. Overall, our team members experienced varying degrees of additional anxiety/distress (see chart 1). Read our CEO’s notes to learn more about these challenges.

In addition, when we asked our team members on what is a barrier to self and family care. Out of 45 team members, we had 43 responses to this survey of which 24% indicated that they feel guilty for taking time off, and 26% indicated that they feel too distracted/anxious to take time for self or family care (see chart 2).

When we asked the parents how Bunny Studio could help, 50% responded to a shorter workweek (see chart 3). Thereby indicating that they could use 1 extra day to attend to family-care needs.

Research by Stanford suggests that teams experience a decrease in their total output which might be related to their stress levels that consequently make an employee much less efficient. In addition, WHO has warned for a mental-health crisis and urges organizations to invest in preventive measures. Hence, we believe that it won’t do our team members nor our company any good if the stress and anxiety remain unchecked by not taking the time to recharge, both in the short- and long-term.

By experimenting with a shorter workweek, we want to manage the stress and augment our flexible working schedule. A 4-day workweek will allow our team to have additional time to attend caregiving or other responsibilities such as run errands, rest, upskill, work-out, volunteer, etc. Whatever they want and need to do to take care of their mental health and overall well-being.

What do we want to prove?

The 4-day workweek experiment will allow us to disrupt our habits, break from traditional frameworks, and put our creative brains to work to explore how we can be more efficient and innovative.

We are going to run this experiment for 8 weeks because 4 weeks is simply too short to draw definite conclusions. Whereas an additional 4 weeks will give us more data and time to run an analysis and present results at the end of the quarter to determine how our work schedule will look like for the rest of the year.

We have two main hypotheses for this experiment:

1. By implementing a 4-day workweek we can achieve the same company results with 20% less working time.
2. By implementing a 4-day workweek we can increase the overall well-being of our team members.

Hypothesis 1: productivity

By implementing a 4-day workweek we can achieve the same company results. The metric for this hypothesis is measured through productivity, which we define on a company level as:

• Achieve 80% of roadmap and OKR goals company-wide and per team with the same quality as we would have aimed in a 5-day workweek;
• No negative impact on our company and team KPIs (company and unit):

We discussed this experiment internally with our management team after we had set our quarterly OKRs and built our roadmaps to:

1. Control the experiment variables- not changing our goals based on the assumption that we wouldn’t be able to achieve them with one day less in the week.
2. To offer our team the opportunity to think about and experiment with how they can achieve the same results with 20% less working time.

Hypothesis 2: well-being

By implementing a 4-day workweek we can increase the overall well-being of our team members. This will be measured by:

• By implementing a 4-day workweek we can reduce the feelings of anxiousness/distress that our team members are experiencing.
• By implementing a 4-day workweek we can reduce the perceived levels of stress our team members are experiencing
• By implementing a 4-day workweek we can increase the feelings of perceived work productivity and efficiency.
• By implementing a 4-day workweek leaders’ perception of their ability to perform will not be impacted negatively.
• By implementing a 4-day workweek team members will invest more in their professional development.

These will be measured by a weekly survey. Please note that the results of these surveys might have an implicit bias because we believe people want a 4-day workweek and, consequently, give us answers that they might think will lead to the implementation of a 4-day work week for the rest of the year. Therefore, we will also implement an observation process that will require a bi-weekly mini-report from leaders to be sent to our People Ops team on the hypothesis above on how they perceive the overall well-being of their team.

What our 4-day workweek will look like

We’ve decided that the whole company will be off on Friday (with exceptions outlined below) and become part of their new working schedule for the next 8 weeks. The idea behind this coordinated effort is to prevent a loss of cadence across teams. Please note that it’s not our intention to ask our team members to compress their workweek by adding more hours to a regular workday.

We’ve built an online schedule that is accessible by all our team members to keep track of everyone’s availability for the rest of the quarter. This schedule also includes everyone’s national holidays and planned vacation days.

Exceptions

Our Customer Experience (CX) and Engineering teams have an exception to having all Fridays off. They’ll have to coordinate their schedules to ensure we can always offer support to our customers and SLAs with our internal and external users are not affected.

CX

For the next 8 weeks, our CX and CLON teams will rotate in their shifts, alternating Wednesdays and Fridays off. This is to ensure that the team is available at the beginning of the week- when we usually have a high volume of tickets- and are able to have a day off on Wednesday to break the week. At the end of the week, we usually tend to have lower volume and team members can enjoy a long weekend in those weeks. For our Muslim team members, they will rotate in taking Sundays and Wednesdays off.

Engineering team

Our engineers have indicated that they would rather have 4-days of continuous work. How we will start experimenting is that all of our engineers will be off on Friday, except the support developer of the week who will need to be present in case our CX team or users need support.

Other

Our CEO, CTO, and People Ops (POPS) team should remain available for any urgent matters. You can contact them through WA. Their phone numbers can be found in their Slack profiles.

CEO & CTO

Emergencies to involve CEO (Santiago Jaramillo) and/or CTO (Luisa Moscoso):

• Major issues with core interactions in the platform;
• Phishing;
• An attempt of fraud through our platform;
• Blocker to decisions;
• One or more clients are blocked that can’t be resolved by anyone else.

POPS team

Emergencies that will require POPS support:

• Being locked out of G-suite, LastPass, Zoom or Slack;

Holidays and vacation

Whenever there’s a national holiday during the week, the team member can choose to either take the holiday or the chosen workday off to comply with the 4-day workweek. As per our usual processes, we expect team members to share this information with their leaders at the latest in the first week of each quarter to ensure final details and expectations of roadmap execution are based on team members’ planned availability.

The same goes for any planned vacation days. These will need to be discussed and pre-approved by the team leaders.

Planning your week

We’ve always emphasized the importance of planning ahead in a remote work setting. Having a shorter workweek will require us to be more vigilant with ensuring all of our G-Calendars are updated to showcase availability across teams throughout the week. The latter is especially true for our CX and CLON teams who will be having rotational days off.

Team members who work in account management should share expectations of their availability:

• a) indicate in their signatures that Bunny Studio has a 4-day workweek of which Fridays is our day off; and
• b) have their “out of office” message scheduled each Friday.

Focus days

One of the bigger challenges with a shorter workweek is managing our focus days. At Bunny Studio we have our Mondays to Wednesdays reserved as focus days in which we discourage team members to book meetings (unless project-related or to remove blockers). With a shorter workweek, especially team leaders, will have to juggle on how they will manage their schedules without distracting their team members too much. Management will need to organize Thursdays for their 1–1s and checkpoints. Any other meetings can be booked on Wednesday afternoon.

Agreements

Being part of this 4-day workweek, all our team members agree on the following:

• Completed roadmaps and set OKRs and KPIs before the start of this experiment.
• Received approval from team leaders on the vacation days and national holidays they plan to take during Q3 2020 before the start of this experiment.
• Same day reply to the weekly surveys being sent out by our People Ops team.
• Out of office (OOO) box scheduled in their calendars for the next 8 weeks.
• Updated phone numbers in their Slack profile to ensure availability in case of an emergency.

What happens after these 8 weeks?

As aforementioned, we will gather feedback from our team on a weekly basis and we’ll monitor OKRs and KPIs as a quantitative measure of productivity. Based on these results, we will determine if we will continue the 4-day workweek for a longer period of time or to return to a more typical workweek. In the meantime, this will not become a permanent policy and we won’t be setting precedents. Like with all we do, this is an experiment.

How we are going to manage our 4-day workweek experiment was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bunny Studio is making a move to determine if a four-day workweek is a feasible option to assist our full-time team members while keeping up the high-quality services that our clients expect. The shortened workweek experiment will begin on July 6th, the start date of week 28, and go through August 29th, the end day of week 35.

Even before the pandemic hit, companies have started looking at ways they can help their employees integrate their professional life with their personal as best as possible. At Bunny Studio we have always wanted to ensure our team members are satisfied with their work and workplace as we believe that highly engaged and rested team members provide the best work possible. The pandemic has had a significant impact on everyone, from our team to our clients. Everyday stress is now exacerbated and seems to be even more problematic.

Our experiment is intended to help improve our team members’ well-being by giving them a shortened week without having to worry about a cut in pay by reducing their workweek by a day. Their day-off can be used to spend time with family, take care of their errands (which nowadays take longer than usual), and give them more time for personal and professional growth.

To our clients, we assure you that this experiment has been set up not only with our team’s well-being in mind but with your expectations in mind, as well. To achieve the goal of a shortened workweek, but offer the same high-quality service, we’ve taken a hard look at our schedule. Many of our team members will be off on Fridays. However, our essential staffing will still be available to you throughout our typical business week by staggering the days off for some of our crucial positions.

Our end goal is to use this experiment to determine if it’s feasible to continue going forward with this schedule or if we need to examine other ways to go about our business. We have set up several ways to evaluate the success of this program, such as surveys and quality control criteria. We don’t know how this may change our future workflow at the end of the experiment, but we strive to provide a workplace that our team members can be proud to be a part of and the best service to our clients possible.

To read more about how we got to this decision and how we are going to manage this experiment, read this article.

Written by Bunny Studio Writing.

Bunny Studio is going to experiment with a 4-day workweek was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bunny Studio has zero-tolerance for racism. Black Lives Matter.

With the recent events happening in the United States, we’d like to emphasize that we stand with our Black colleagues, partners, collaborators, and the entire Black community, today and every other day.

At no cost, for the coming days, we will support the creation of content that supports anti-racism and promotes dialogue about diversity and inclusion. If you are an NGO or activist group promoting anti-racism, please reach out to support@bunnystudio.com

Bunny Studio was built to allow creatives to participate in a global economy, regardless of their race, beliefs, culture, gender, and sexual orientation. We are a diverse team composed of different ethnicities, nationalities, races, religions, sexual orientations, and gender identities. In diversity, we find strength, we find support, and we make each other stronger, enabling others.

We’ll continue to educate ourselves on how we can build a more inclusive platform and be of better support. We will update you on our learnings and potential changes that we’ll implement.

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” — James Baldwin.

P.S. For those interested in knowing how to take a stand virtually, we’re sharing this comprehensible list of “[Resources for accountability and actions for Black Lives”]

Written by Maika Hoekman, Julian Correa, Luisa Moscoso, Juanita Casas, Maria Fernanda Murcia, Santiago Jaramillo in representation of the Bunny Studio team.

Bunny Studio has zero-tolerance for racism was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Below, I’ve outlined what has helped me as a person who has been diagnosed with Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).

What is Lupus? “Lupus is defined as a complex autoimmune disorder that can affect any organ system in the body. Lupus develops when your body’s immune system attacks your own tissues and organs. Inflammation caused by lupus can affect many body systems — including your heart, kidneys, joints, skin, blood cells, brain, and lungs. Lupus is a chronic disease that does not have a cure at this time.”

From the definition and onset of the disease itself, three main facts solidified themselves in my head:

• Lupus can affect any organ in the body.
• Lupus develops when your immune system attacks your own tissue and organs.
• It is a chronic disease that doesn’t have a cure.

Although I had read about Lupus and understood it from an intellectual perspective, I kept telling myself: “I’m going to recover”. I kept asking doctors for an average time until full recovery, I wanted to “go back to normal”. Doctors never answered the question the way I was expecting them to, so I decided it was best to look further and get in touch with other people who had been diagnosed with Lupus. After reaching out and having multiple conversations with Lupus patients, I finally realized there is no going back to normal. I finally got to understand that I had to build up my new normal.

Shortly after I was diagnosed, I began taking corticosteroids and other medications. The side effects kicked-in quickly. My face and stomach swole; I couldn’t sleep much at night as my heart was beating extremely fast, and I was sweating buckets. Mood swings, depression, fatigue… The term I used to describe it was me being in the “zombie” state. While the zombie state was challenging, it allowed me to stop, and question what my beliefs, values, and priorities were in life. It made me realize that before the new normal would set in, I had to let go.

Question your beliefs

Whenever I was feeling physically tired, it dawned on me how much I’ve demanded from my body over the years. Having 12 to 15 hour-long days was perfectly normal to me; I was a student-athlete, so in school and university I was studying and training every day. In fact, I began training for sports every day since I was 9 years old. But what was going through my mind? I was always pursuing a clear objective, winning a tournament, doing my best in the Colombian national soccer team, earning a scholarship.

When I eventually left soccer, it was still the same mindset, but mostly focussed on work. I started as a Voice Actors Agent for VoiceBunny, and I always wanted to start my own business so I jumped right into every challenge I was presented with. By the time my diagnose came in early 2019, I was the CEO of Bunny Studio whilst pursuing a master's in Gestalt Psychology. So, in fact, I did meet my initial objective and learned as much as possible, but after being diagnosed, I came to realize that I was extremely exhausted.

I never took the time to appreciate what I had, because I was always looking forward to the next goal. Even more shocking, was spending my time demanding my brain and body to keep up with said goals, and never made room for taking care of myself. Deep down, I thought people around me liked and loved me because of what I did.

Only when I stopped working so hard towards my next goal, due to Lupus, and received love from people around me, I was able to internalize that people loved me because of who I am and not for what I do. That was just one example, but I did find myself thinking things like “you have to be strong”, or “you can’t be vulnerable”. That is not true for me anymore.

Once you question your beliefs about yourself, it is important to decide whether you believe it or not, and if you want to keep carrying those beliefs moving forward.

Question your priorities

When we go through important life events, we tend to wind down back to essentials. Being diagnosed with Lupus was definitely an important life event for me. It allowed me to review the priorities around me. I used to put other people’s needs first, and leave my own personal wishes, desires, and priorities last. So I decided that my physical, mental, and spiritual health should become my top priorities. It was important to establish my new priorities, but even more so to openly talk about them with my family, my partner, and my boss (in my case the board of directors of Bunny Studio). This also taught me that I don’t have to figure out everything right away. Instead, I worked with all of them in different ways to build my new normal based on my new needs and priorities.

Allow yourself to feel

I usually didn’t have the time or the need to stop and feel. Feel my body, my emotions. In fact, my body gave me a lot of signs of tiredness and stress, but I was not paying attention to them. When I got diagnosed, it was important for me to allow myself to feel sad. Usually, the first reaction I had was to get distracted because “you’re not supposed to cry”. But a mix of me challenging my old beliefs, medicine that lead me into a depression, and physical tiredness allowed me to finally surrender. To surrender and feel ashamed for not putting myself first, for not taking good care of myself. The grief of losing that invulnerable and idealized idea of myself, to surrender to a new me who feels pain, weakness, emotions, and feels scared about the changes that this new normal could bring. Surrender to Lupus itself and open up to its message. From the conversations I had with people diagnosed with Lupus, all of them mentioned that allowing themselves to surrender was the key to later transformation.

Giving up control

Lupus has taught me to give up control. I used to think I could control everything: my schedule, my mood, my body, my emotions. Lupus brings a lot of uncertainty; it can affect different organs in your body, so you have to go in for constant check-ups. You don’t really know if it is going to react well to corticosteroids or how long the process is going to take, you don’t really know when the next flare-up will happen or exactly why. You don’t know whether you are going to have a “good” or “bad” day tomorrow. If you are going to have enough energy to complete what you planned for.

It was extremely frustrating for me to go from planning everything to having so much uncertainty. My brain was the leader and organizer of my entire life, and it turns out “she” was very selfish, “she” never asked if the body could manage all the tasks. Lupus changed that, and now my body is the one who leads; through the entire day, I try to be connected with my body and trust her over my brain. Further on, I will explain how I set up expectations and helped those around me in understanding and being prepared for it.

Acceptance

Acceptance is not easy, I used to think that acceptance meant resigning yourself to it. I found myself fighting against such an idea; Lupus was not the exception. My first reaction was to fight Lupus and what it meant. Initially, I saw Lupus as my enemy. It was making me feel weak, unreliable, incapable of doing anything. I was feeling physical and emotional pain, but Lupus was only mirroring an internal conflict between two opposing sides of myself: the warrior who can do it all and will take over the world, and the peacemaker who doesn’t want to fight anybody, only to love. One that wants to do everything now and only trusts its rational mind; and the one who trusts life and its own body and emotions. It took careful introspection and emotional work to accept that Lupus is just an emissary that came to tell me that I’m, in fact, both.

Long ago I was rejecting and bullying my peacemaker, my body, and myself. And it was not about accepting Lupus itself, but about accepting myself as both the peacemaker and the warrior. Accepting that one day I can wake up to be a warrior and take over the world and the next day I will just take care of myself and pay attention to my body; that I do trust my body and I do trust life. Accepting that I need to be compassionate and loving with myself and that doing so doesn’t make me any less of a warrior.

The new normal

The following are actions and tips I believe were key for me when building “my new normal”, which was mainly adjusting to my new reality, priorities, and beliefs. If you are going through a difficult period in which you are being forced to create your new normal, I hope what has helped me, will help you too.

Emotional support

When diagnosed, I continued with my master's in Gestalt Psychology. The interviews I carried out with Lupus patients were part of my thesis before graduating as a Gestaltist after four years of studying. The main conclusion was that, while all of the patients eventually did change their habits and mindsets to have a better lifestyle, it took longer for those people who did not have access to emotional support or any other emotional resources. In my own experience, emotional support was key when I was first diagnosed, and through my zombie stage as well. It was also key to figure out my new normal and achieving a much healthier lifestyle.

Different people prefer various types of emotional support. While Gestalt worked for me, I would recommend anyone who has Lupus to reach out whatever you feel most comfortable with: a therapist, counselor, or coach. They can support you and guide you during your entire process. Lupus patients have to go through a lot, and building support networks will be essential. You can also join lupus communities and make friends; having someone who understands how you feel is priceless during hard times.

• Get emotional support (therapist, coach, counselor).
• Accept that some days you won’t be able to work as you used to and learning to be ok with that.
• Allow yourself to disconnect from the routine and work without feeling guilty.
• Join Lupus communities and talk to people who have been diagnosed with Lupus. You are not alone!
• Have at least one Lupus friend with whom you can talk openly about what is happening in your life.
• Communicate and work with the people closest to you. (see: relationships)
• Connect with yourself and your purpose. Having a purpose, and being connected with yourself helps you go through the tough times and decide what’s best for you.

Physical health

Building a loving and caring relationship with yourself can be translated into actions that you enjoy and will help you keep your stress levels at a minimum.

• Take time for yourself when starting and ending your day (you can meditate, or just sit and try to connect with your body).
• Exercise. I started off by doing a small routine one day a week and then built it up to four days a week.
• Take breaks, maybe even take a nap in the middle of the day. I used to push myself into finishing all my tasks, even when I was tired, by telling myself that I would rest afterward. That was never the case. I always had more work waiting for me and never allowed myself to rest. Now I believe it is better to rest whenever I feel tired because when I push myself too hard, my body will shut down and I usually need one or two days of total rest to recover.
• Take on activities that improve your health. In my case, I started getting a Thai Yoga Massage at least once a week; it helps me relax, boosts my energy, and it reduces the pain I usually feel in my joints and muscles as well. It can also alleviate any bruises and improve the range of motion of my body.
• Food habits are also very important; I used to eat whatever was the fastest option for me. After being diagnosed I started eating organic food and cooking at home instead of ordering takeout. I realized that eating fish like salmon and tuna, as well as vegetables do have a positive impact on my body and energy levels.

Personal Relationships

Managing relationships is very important as Lupus indirectly affects those around us.

• Let other people see you while taking care of yourself. One of the hardest things for me was letting people “see me” while I was in my zombie stage. I felt physically and emotionally vulnerable. I couldn’t even recognize myself, I felt ugly; I kept telling myself “I don’t want anyone’s pity”, when in fact I was scared of letting others “see me”; I kept on saying “ I do not need anyone to take care of me” when in fact, I was afraid of letting my family, my partner, and friends take care of me. When I finally let them in I realized that it was not pity, it was love. I did need them. Do not push yourself into letting everyone in at once, nor let people in before you are ready. It is a natural process, so don’t push it.
• Use the spoon theory to explain to people that you have limited energy. Set expectations that you may have to cancel plans at the last minute, and encourage spontaneous plans as well. Make sure to explain that you can’t be exposed to the sun and while in treatment you can’t be around crowds.
• Communicate your new priorities to your family and friends. Have open conversations about what you want, what you need, and how they can help. We do have expectations about parents, partners, and friends, but most of the time we expect them to magically know what we want or need. Communicating those expectations and needs is important; although it doesn’t mean that we will get exactly what we ask for.
• Put yourself first! It’s likely that those around you who are not used to it will resist it. You might have to put some distance to take care of yourself. Even if you feel guilty or selfish, do it. No matter how hard it is, do it! Those who really love you will understand and support you.
• Make sure you don’t put all of the pressure on your loved ones, as it can be hard for them to fully understand what you’re going through. It can be too much. That is why it is important to seek emotional support through professional advice and people who have gone through the same experiences.

How to work with your employer

One of the hardest topics for Lupus patients is uncertainty when it comes to working. Sadly, most of the people I spoke with ended up being fired from their jobs, quit because they were bullied by their peers (or even superiors), or simply quit because they can’t handle the amount of stress and work they were used to. Fortunately for me, I was privileged enough to be the CEO of a company, but even then, my first thought was “I won’t be able to handle this anymore”. I thought about quitting. But thanks to my doctor’s advice, I didn’t rush into resigning but instead I started a conversation with my boss, the board of directors.

Here’s my advice:

• Work on your career plan with your leaders. Lupus is likely to change your perspectives and long-term goals, so take the time to align with your purpose and reflect that in your career plan. Communicate with your superiors about Lupus and your new priorities. It is important to ask yourself whether or not your current job will allow you to adjust to your “new normal” while being open about it. In my specific case, after understanding that one of the things that can trigger a drop in my wellbeing is the amount of stress I go through, I realized being the CEO of the company wasn’t the best fit for me. It was not good for my own health and it was not good for the company to have a CEO that was on medical leave for several months.
• Work along with your HR manager on a plan on how to slowly come back and incorporate yourself back into your responsibilities. If possible start trying to work towards a future where you can manage your own time.

You can take your experience as a transformation point for your career. Get involved in helping others. Think about your strengths and how you can contribute to your new normal. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What are my competative advantages?
• What skills does the world/ your organization/ your team want and need?

In my case, I worked in Product and Operations pretty much since I started in the company seven years ago. I also know our platform and algorithms by heart. So after speaking with our board, we determined that I could move from CEO to CTO and focus on where I bring the most value to the company.

To come up with an efficient schedule and make the most out of your time ask yourself:

• When are you the most productive? (Morning, afternoon, night)
• When do ideas come to you? (Morning, afternoon, night)
• What things aren’t as important for you? Whatever it is, try to turn it into an easy routine so you don’t have to dwell on it too long. It will help reduce the cognitive load. For example, if you don’t mind what you have for breakfast, you can eat the same every day.

Build your schedule around those answers and also keep into account

• Prepare/revise your schedule the night before and make sure all of your events have a purpose to make use of your time (and energy) in the most effective way.
• Lock time for a contingency, as you will always have them. We usually tend to address them in our personal time.
• Divide your big goals into smaller ones, and proactively revise how much time you spend on each of them.
• Track how much time you spend responding to other people’s priorities instead of your own.
• Sleep is the only area where you should not cut back on, sleep at least 8 hours. Less than 7 hours of sleep will affect your performance and increase your tiredness; several studies have shown that you will not notice that your performance is decreasing, so that is why most people do it. You also don’t want to feel tired and push yourself too hard or you will have to spend entire days recovering.
• Plan on having days off to rest and go to medical appointments.
• Plan on having at least an hour and a half or two hours for your lunch break; build your schedule around your most productive hours, where ideas usually come to you. Leave the other hours for meetings.
• Actively pursue your goals each day.
• Make sure you advance in your goals and find a system for you to keep track of your achievements.
• Don’t passively respond to others, but instead practice proactive, descriptive, and contextual communication. If you don’t have an answer, simply say so.
• Learn to say ‘no’ whenever you believe you can’t do it.

Remove unnecessary dependencies

Remove as many dependencies as possible. You will likely have to take a day to recover, go get tests, and then rest. If you have a flare-up you will have to take time to recover. Removing dependencies becomes essential so people get things done whenever you have to be absent. Of course, that doesn’t apply for all types of jobs and positions.

• Review your team structure and adjust it so you can delegate.
• Build clear decision-making and accountability processes, you can use the DARCI framework which is similar to RACI but includes decision making. Make sure your team knows what decisions can be made without you and who will be the person in charge in case you are out.
• Give visibility to your projects by having clear processes, clear documentation, and roadmaps so anyone can easily take over or know where you are at.

Reduce your number of meetings

Meetings usually take a big share of your time if you are a leader, so revise the number of meetings and the length of those meetings. Also, revise the nature of meetings; meetings should be for:

• debating issues and brainstorming;
• negotiating and resolving conflicts;
• meeting clients or associates for the first time;
• visually showcasing pages and receiving quick feedback;
• building team spirit and alignment;
• celebrating wins;
• performance reviews;
• personal feedback;

Exclude yourself and your team members from unnecessary meetings. You can say no to a meeting if you don’t think it is relevant. It is important to understand when something is contiguous but irrelevant to you.

• A meeting should not be set for merely exchanging information.
• A meeting should not be set just because it is a routine.
• No meeting should last more than 40 min.

Before starting a good meeting, everyone should have the agenda with the purpose/objective of the meeting, as well as the topics to discuss. Everyone should read the material in advance, if applicable. Send the material with at least two days of advance if it’s short and at least a week or two if the reading material is long. This will allow you to make use of your time more efficiently.

Whether you can implement some of this advice or not, the most important thing is to build new foundations around your own beliefs, priorities, and purpose. Building up your new normal around taking care of yourself, making health your first priority, and being explicit and intentional about where you want to go and why.

For me, lupus presented itself as an opportunity to reinvent myself, to accept myself, and to build a different and hopefully more meaningful and uplifting life. It taught me to be more present, to value my time and energy much more, to enjoy myself and those around me whenever I have the time and energy to share moments with others. So as crazy as it might sound today, I’m grateful for my experience with lupus. I see it as a teacher that will be there with me as long as I need to be reminded that I have to be first.

Living with Lupus: creating a new normal was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is part of a series in which we provide insight into our learnings on how to get the best out of Slack as your main communication tool.

Slack can be a fantastic and distracting tool at the same time. It keeps all your team communication in one place, but your team also likes to talk a lot! Below, we have listed a couple of good practices that are being used in the company to avoid Slack being a distractor. They’ll help manage your focus time and, as such, your productivity.

Manage your Slack time 🗓

• Time reply. The expectation within the company is to reply within 24 hours — so chill out. Ideally, you reply the same business day. It’s wrong to think that Slack is a “get-back-to-me-now!” type of communication.
• Block time in your calendar to check Slack. Most of our leaders in the company have time blocked in their calendars to address Slack messages — in the early morning, around lunch, and at the end of the day. You don’t need to have it open all day. If people need something urgent from you, they’ll find another way to communicate with you. Find a cadence that works for your team.

Manage your channels 💁

Let go of your FOMO. You 👏don’t 👏 have👏 to 👏 be 👏 part 👏 of 👏 every 👏 conversation 👏 or 👏 channel. Get organized.

• Don’t star all channels. Is every channel you have starred really that important?! Starred channels are intended to prioritize your communication and should be the first ones you reply to or acknowledge when you open Slack. Hence, be picky with the channels you star. For example, the channel about a specific objective you will be working on during a quarter, your team-important channel. Everyone in the company should have their #co-important-all channel starred.
• Leave channels: It’s okay to leave channels that aren’t relevant to you. In fact, we recommend it. Remember you can always search for things in channels you’re not in while keeping your channel list limited to your most important discussions. Here’s a how-to on leaving a channel.
• Mute channels: Try muting channels you only need to check occasionally. Muted channels won’t appear bolded when there’s an unread activity, and you won’t be notified if you’re mentioned. Follow these steps on how to mute a channel.
• Archive channels: After a project ends, you can archive channels you no longer needed. All content will be saved and remain searchable, but no new activity can be posted to the channel. Read on how to archive a channel here. Take into account that for this action you probably will need to contact an Admin, so in this case, reach out to POPs through the Help Center.
• Add a purpose to every channel. As we mentioned earlier in this article, Slack offers different types of channels. Use these channels with the intended purpose. Leave all random and fun topics in your watercoolers and work-related conversations should happen in others.

Manage your notifications 🔈

• Do Not Disturb: When you really need to focus, turn on Do Not Disturb (DND) to snooze all notifications for as long as you need. If there’s an urgent matter, they can choose to send you a notification through a different channel such as WhatsApp.
• Block your notifications. Our CEO, Santiago Jaramillo, suggests blocking your notifications altogether. “You don’t need them.” This way, you can keep Slack on the background whilst you get work done, you don’t have to manage your DND settings, and you don’t have to always open and close Slack countless times throughout the day.

Customize specific notifications 🎶

• Channel-specific notifications. Some roles need to keep attention to alerts that may come from the platform, e.g., in the case of engineers to be alerted of 911 downtime or bug notifications. If you are part of a team that does need to keep Slack open all the time, there’s an option to keep notifications only from pre-determined channels, at it’s really useful. Here you can read on how to set this up.
• Key-word specific notifications. This feature will give you a warning whenever someone mentions a topic you care about. Be selective to avoid getting too many notifications. Here you can read on how to set them up.

Set reminders 🗓

Some days, it might feel as if everyone is pulling at you and needs something from you. Instead of feeling the urge to having to respond to everyone at once and at that very instant, set reminders instead. Ask Slack to remind you about certain messages that don’t require your immediate attention so that you can back to them whenever you have the headspace for it.

To set a reminder, hover over the message, click the ··· more actions icon, select “Remind me about this”, and select when you want to be notified.

Create instant tasks, reminders, polls, etc. out of messages 💡

Slack offers app integrations which will allow you to semi-automatically create a task out of a message. Check-out what project management tool you use to keep up with your tasks, either this is Evernote, Asana, Todoist, Trello, the possibilities are plentiful.

Slack shortcuts ✂️

Shortcuts should become part of everyone’s skills repertoire. It increases efficiency, and you’ll be able to accomplish more tasks. It makes you a better multitasker, and you prevent work-related health issues related to extensive use of the mouse. Here are a few listed that, in our humble opinion, are the most useful ones:

These are the guidelines that we use at Bunny Studio. We genuinely hope that it will help you get your own Slack a bit more organized.

If you’d like some clarification, send your questions through the comments section. Happy to help!

Slack you later! 👋

Don’t miss out on our other articles:

• Our tips on how to use Slack (1/3): organizing your Slack. How to prevent Slack from becoming a cluttered monster that becomes too overwhelming to deal with.
• Our tips on how to use Slack (2/3): The bliss of lean and assertive communication. The importance of maintaining superior written communication.

Are you a seasoned Slack user and you have some additional tips and tricks? Please let us know by adding them to the comments section!

Our tips on using Slack (3/3): Productivity tips was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve learned at Bunny Studio that Slack is an incredibly powerful communication tool. It’s our primary communication tool, and what we used before has long been forgotten. Nonetheless, it can become a mess and a distraction if you don’t set clear guidelines as an organization.

We believe that by sharing our guidelines on how to get the most out of Slack, it might help some of you who are either a) new to Slack and we’re able to facilitate accelerating your organization in adapting to using it to enhance your organizational agility, or b) you’re a seasoned Slack user but your organization has reached a point where it has become a tangled hair mess with lots of distraction and has lost its power to be a productive collaborative space.

In this article, we will go into:

• Slack organization. How to prevent Slack from becoming a cluttered monster that becomes too overwhelming to deal with.

The other articles will go into:

• Practicing lean and assertive communication. Tips on maintaining superior written communication in a remote work setting through Slack usage.
• Productivity tips to get the best from Slack. We’ve listed a couple of good practices that are being used in the company to avoid Slack being a distractor.

Slack at Bunny Studio

Slack improves our communication, collaboration, and organizational agility. Slack facilitates asynchronous communication and accelerates decision-making because you can always send a message to anyone you have a request, comment, or question for — no matter their position, timezone, or status (online or offline). Like any other tool, we’ve learned to get the best out of it to use it to be our main window to communicate with the team.

When onboarding new team members one of the first sentences that our People Operations team utter to them is: “Forget Gmail, here at Bunny Studio we don’t use it”. After that, the majority don’t need another reminder. Once they enter our Slack workspace, they are amazed by the amount of information to be found and the ease of communicating with their peers. Or, it’s just the informality of our internal communication and the extensive usage of gifs and customized emojis that make it so much more fun to work.

1. Determine what types of channels your organization will mostly use 🤔

You’ll need a labeling system that is KISS so that it is intuitive for the whole organization on how to browse your channels when searching for information or for a channel to: reach out for help from a certain team, share a cool article they saw and thought useful for another team, etc.

But first, understand what types of channels Slack offers and how you’d want to use them. Slack has 4 types of communication channels, and you’ll have to determine how you want your team to use them.

We recommend to use them as follows:

• Public channels. Within the remote work setting, the free-flow of communication and information is crucial to allow for cross-collaboration. Moreover, having this information publicly available is detrimental to lean transitions, promotions, successions, and new-hire onboarding. For that reason, all our team channels must be public and our default communication takes place in these. Public channels also allow for some fun during work, for example, creating channels based on interests and hobbies where team members can cross-functionally connect and build rapport.
• Direct messages (DMs). When the conversation only involves two people, use direct messages (unless your team consists of only two people- move team convo’s to your team channel). You can talk to anyone directly. You can have up to 8 people in a DM conversation. However, we recommend limiting them to three because often-times, if more people are required to be looped in a conversation, it warrants the usage of a channel related to that subject.
• Private channels. These are best limited to discussions of sensitive or confidential matters. Just like direct messages, private groups can only be accessed by the people that belong to the channel. These groups are not indexed in Slack as public channels and are only visible by members of this channel.
• Shared-channels. Slack allows you to share a specific channel with another organization. Members of this channel can send each other direct messages, upload files, and start calls in this common space. This is especially useful if you are working on a project with one of your partners, allowing your team to keep information centralized within Slack and not revert back to long email-threads. We have a couple of shared channels with our partners and top clients to be able to provide excellent customer service.

Once you have determined how your organization wants to start using the various channels, you’ll also have to determine:

• Who is allowed to create channels? Everyone or only admins?
• Who will be your admins?
• What labeling method will you use for your channels?
• How will you ensure that every channel has a clear purpose?
• Are there any specific rules, you want to set for some channels?
• Which channels are only for important updates, and chatting is not allowed.
• Which channels you expect everyone in your organization to be part of.

2. Set a labeling system for your channels 🏷

When you create a channel, always ensure you use the following format: team-category/purpose-sub purpose. These labeling guidelines are helpful for your team to find everything they need. It keeps things predictable for everyone and eases browsing through your channels when you want to look-up for information later on.

Below are some prefixes for each business unit and the team we expect everyone to use.

• CEO: ceo-
• Client onboarding: clon-
• Customer Experience: cx-
• Customer Operations: ops-
• Engineering: eng-
• Marketing: mar-
• Legal: leg-
• Finance: fin-
• People Operations: pops-

Besides work-related channels, we allow for fun channels, specifically:

• Watercoolers: wc- (The watercooler channels are for informal non-work related conversations).

How do we use it?

Here are examples of real-time channels used in our Slack, including purpose, to give you an idea:

Channels we expect everyone in the company to be part of:

• #co-important: important announcements for the whole company. No chatting is allowed on this channel.
• #co-i-dont-know-it-all: As you tackle new challenges, start by asking for advice from others. We are all ready to help. Be inquisitive. Avoid being arrogant. Don’t pretend you know it all. To keep this channel readable, please reply in a thread. Don’t use the @here
• #wc-all-company: Good vibes and memes.
• #wc-feed-kudos: to give recognition and praise to your fellow team members.

Allow your team to have fun on Slack! This enriches your culture and allows team members to express themselves through emojis, gifs, and bots by lack of being able to joke around face-to-face in an office.

Some fun channels to connect with the rest of the company:

• #wc-break: random pairings for coffee breaks every week
• #wc-foodies: Cooking, what a joy! | All things FOOD. All of them.
• #wc-now-vibing: links to music that others are rocking out to
• #wc-tv-guide: keep each other up to date to the latest best TV-series
• #wc-valar-morgulis: GOT for the win!
• #wc-pets-galore: to discuss pet-related stuff.

Examples of team channels

Here are some team channels to give you a clearer idea of how we label internally, including descriptions:

• #cx-clon-workbench: this is a channel for our Customer Experience (CX) and Client Onboarding (CLON) team to communicate and ask questions about sales, money matters, etc.
• #fin-consulting-finance: Confirmation of Consultant payments, invoice reminders!
• #mar-cat-audio: The purpose of this channel is to focus on conversations for the Audio Category
• #ops-circle: Ops alignment between unit leaders, QC (Audio), CX (Audio), CX (Text).
• #pops-general: A channel where team members and the People Ops team can communicate directly.
• #tech-standup: Channel used by Technology team to share their standup
• #pro-general: Brainstorm product improvements and innovation. Sorry, no cats.

Hopefully, by giving you an insight into how we at Bunny Studio organize our Slack will help you in preventing Slack from becoming a cluttered monster that becomes too overwhelming to deal with.

To go further into our Slack guidelines, we recommend you also read:

• Our tips on using Slack (2/3): Practicing lean and assertive communication. The importance of maintaining superior written communication practices.

And

• Our tips on using Slack (3/3): Productivity tips to get the best from Slack. Slack can be a fantastic and distracting tool at the same time. We’ve listed a couple of good practices that are being used in the company to avoid Slack being a distractor. Including, our top used shortcuts.

Slack you later! 👋

Are you a seasoned Slack user and you have some additional tips and tricks? Please let us know by adding them to the comments section!

Our tips on using Slack (1/3): organizing your Slack was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve said this many times before in our other articles (such as this one about communication structures), and we believe in the power of over-communication: in a remote work setting, it is crucial that you improve your written communication skills. In an office setting, you’d probably walk over to your colleague to ask a question or give feedback on their product design. However, in a remote work setting, you’ll have to write it down.

To avoid any miscommunications and reduce the back-and-forth we at Bunny Studio have learned the importance of lean and assertive communication, which we define as the ability to:

• contextualize communication to prevent miscommunication by prefacing communication with context;
• express oneself effectively through written form;
• communicate to the point with a minimum amount of words which will allow the other person to receive the information they need to make a good decision.

We have copied our guidelines on how to practice lean and assertive communication in Slack below. Perhaps you’ll find something that might be of use to you!

Keep your slack profile updated 💁 💁‍♂

Whenever there is an emergency, and a team member needs to contact you through WhatsApp, they’ll need to verify your phone number. In addition, when transitioning into new roles, it is important you update your role for new hires to be aware of what you do.

Communicate in English

All written communication, especially in channels should be in English. No exceptions. Remember we are a global company, and this way every team member can feel included. Be respectful.

Move long conversations to Zoom 📹

If a topic needs more than 4x going back and forth to get a point across, jump into a Zoom meeting. If you have been going back and forth, most likely the other team member also has the option to jump into a call for a few minutes. Whatever decisions or action steps you have decided during this call, ensure you record them in the Slack thread you had. This will help you remember agreements.

If you need something from someone, ask it 🗣

If you have a question, concern, comment, or doubt, ask it directly through Slack. Don’t feel blocked by sending a message to the person because their status is “offline” or “snoozed notifications.” Nor book a meeting with them or wait until you have a meeting. You can solve topics asynchronously. Slack is an instant messaging tool that can make you and your organization more agile by sending instant messages.

We encourage our team members to have enough focus time and not have Slack as a constant distraction on requests or questions that don’t need their immediate attention. The expectation within the company is to reply within 24 hours to Slack messages. Now, if you are dealing with a MEGA blocker or emergency and the person is not responding promptly on Slack, send them a WhatsApp message that you need them.

Get to the point ☝️

When you send a team member a DM, do them a favor and ask your question or state your comment right away. Don't ask if you can ask them a question. Don’t say “hello” without continuing what you have to say or ask and wait until they respond back. This can be a waste of time and before you know it, you forgot why you reached out in the first place (see real-life example below)!

Every decision we have to make has a cost, some more than others. “If you get to your point and ask the question, you change the decision from one of evaluating an infinite number of possibilities and assumption creations to a simple verification” for the other team member: “can I help with this question or not?”; “can I engage in this conversation now, or do I need more time to think?”. Thereby you are verifying a simple yes or no answer and potentially a direct answer or an action plan on when you can get the answer to that question.

This is considerably less costly than first having to go back and forth before you get to the point. If you are not being direct and first asking if they can do you a favor you’re (unconsciously) binding that team member to an unknown that could potentially take a lot of resources. They have no idea the time or cost if they say yes.

Provide context

Don’t assume that the person on the other side will understand what you are talking about when you send them a message “out of the blue” — even though you’d promise them to get back to that specific topic (we’re all caught up in our own work that another peers’ topic might not be at the top of our heads). Moreover, when something is out of the ordinary preface your communication with context to avoid miscommunication.

Write in paragraphs 📜

Ever opened Slack and felt overwhelmed or anxious about the number of unread notifications that came in while you were offline?! Then realizing that most of them were a lot of sentences instead of a story shared in the same message? Happens to the best of us! So, here’s a recommendation for the sanity of all of us: please write your ideas, comments, instructions in paragraphs compared to chatting. Simply click shift + enter to create a new line in your message.

See an example below on how to quickly make the other realize how annoying it can be if they don’t write in paragraphs:

Label your conversations 🏷

While we’re at it, if you are sharing an idea on a topic, label it! In the first sentence, state what your message is about in bold.

Labeling your conversations will help you navigate channels much easier and keep them organized.

Reply in threads 💬

Reply in threads to keep discussions in Slack organized and centralized. They let you ask questions, add context, or give feedback on a specific message without disrupting a conversation’s flow. Moreover, only those that have contributed to it or who are following it will be notified of new replies, creating less noise for everyone else. In case you haven’t noticed:

ACK messages sent in team and other important channels you are part of ✅

For conversations that you’ve read and felt comfortable moving forward with and don’t require a response, you can simply add a checkmark or other emoji to acknowledge (ACK). This lets the sender know that you have read it and acknowledge the message. FYI, we expect EVERYONE to ACK whatever important news is shared in the #co-important channel.

Hopefully these insights into how we at Bunny Studio practice lean and assertive communication in Slack have inspired you to also get the best out of slack in making it a collaborative and agile communication tool.

To go further into our Slack guidelines, we recommend you also read:

• Our tips on using Slack (1/3): Organizing your Slack. How to prevent Slack from becoming a cluttered monster that becomes too overwhelming to deal with.
• Our tips on using Slack (3/3): Productivity tips to get the best from Slack. Slack can be a fantastic and distracting tool at the same time. We’ll list a couple of good practices that are being used in the company to avoid Slack being a distractor.

Slack you later! 👋

If you have any further recommendations on Slack organization, please let us know by replying in the comment section!

Our tips on using Slack (2/3): The bliss of lean and assertive communication practices was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With the pandemic, good has come out of it for our planet to heal, even if it’s just a bit. Many cities’ smog has almost disappeared due to lockdown measures. Most of us have likely seen the satellite images portraying air pollution before and during the pandemic, pictures from cities in northern India being able to see the Himalayas again; in Bogotá, the volcano Nevado del Ruiz has been spotted when there are no clouds, rivers have become cleaner, and, amongst many more examples, wildlife has been taking a vacation.

It shows the power companies can have if they loosen-up their work policies and allow office personnel to work from their homes more often after this pandemic is over. Remote work can be a major contributing factor in fighting our current climate emergency. As a remote-first company, our carbon footprint is considerably smaller than if we would’ve had HQs. We’re not having the greenhouse-gas-emitting commutes of all our team members, nor do we have face-to-face meetings, requiring another commute. Moreover, we don’t use airconditioning to keep big spaces fresh. A 2019 report from the Global Workplace Analytics estimates that remote workers collectively reduce emissions equivalent to 600,000 cars for a year. A 2017 study from the same organization determined that the remote workforce of that year in the U.S. (about 3.9 million people) saved carbons equivalent to 540,000 homes powered by electricity for a whole year or planting 91.9 million trees!!

Dev.to did some further calculations based on 2019’s U.S. workforce and made a conservative hypothesis that we can apply a 7x multiplier compared to the 3.9 million in the 2017 study (on how they got there, check out the full article here). To lay it out for you, that would mean carbon savings equivalent to 3.780.000 homes powered by electricity for a whole year or 643.3 million trees planted. Mind you; these are only calculations based on the U.S. remote workforce. With Dev.to’s estimation that 10% of the world’s internet users would move towards remote job opportunities, you could apply a 20x multiplier to their hypothetical calculations. Wouldn’t that be a dream come true?!

If you’re reading this and want advice on how your organization can go partially or fully remote, reach out to people@bunnystudio.com! We are here to help, for free!

What you can do as a remote worker from home

There’s always more that we can do as remote workers to protect and preserve our environment. Kudos to all remote workers for reducing an incredible amount of greenhouse-gas-emissions. What’s next? We asked around in the company, and these are the recommendations that our team members have for y’all:

Buy snacks in bulk! We all love to munch on chocolate goodies, cake, crisps, nuts, and much more. The amount of individual packaging of our beloved nibbles is having an impact on our environment. Consider buying a big bag or box that don’t have sweets or salts individually packed. Momma Earth will love you for it.

Request your take-out restaurant not to add disposable cutlery. With the whole world being at home now, our kitchen should have a drawer offering reusable cutlery. Still not convinced why the use of single-use plastic cutlery is just a bad freaking idea? Watch this turtle having a FORK (!) stuck in its nostrils or check this out.

Opt for beverages provided in glass bottles. We’ll be talking to deaf ears if we start recommending to stop buying sugared drinks. Hence, check if your supermarket or restaurant offers your favorite beverages in glass bottles instead. If they don’t provide glass alternatives, consider buying a big bottle instead of a small one for each of your meals. Be mindful that most likely, your bottle will end up in a landfill forever. Feeling creative or know someone who is? Here are some ideas on how you can reuse plastic bottles. And, yeah, the obvious, get in the habit of taking your reusable water bottle and cup with you whenever you go out. Most places are pretty cool in serving their drinks in that instead.

Stop sucking. The same goes for straws, don’t be square and ditch the plastic ones. There’s a wide variety of excellent glass, bamboo, steel alternatives for choosing your straw. Why are plastic straws so bad? They are used for minutes, polluting our environment for centuries to come, piling every day while harming marine and wildlife ecosystems. #StopSucking For A Strawless Ocean

Be aware of the plastic packaging that’s used to store grocery items. If your grocery shop only offers plastic packaged fruits and veggies, explore another supermarket close to you that offers unpackaged produce! Your oranges don’t need to be in the orange net, nor do your apples have to be packaged in a plastic bag — they already got natural protection! Grab them individually and store them in a cloth bag while doing grocery shopping. If you are having your groceries delivered, you can kindly request them to not pack individual fruits and veggies in plastic bags.

Apply minimalism. Only buy what you really need.

Reuse. Gather water from your shower, while you wait for it to get warm and flush your toilets with it instead of leaving your toilets unflushed after peeing (you can if you drink enough fluids and it doesn’t stink). Reuse the plastic bags that were unavoidable at the supermarket or store for your cat litter, dog poo, or toilet bins. Wash your ziplock bags, and you can use them a couple of more times!

Recycle. What you can’t reuse, recycle. Have a separate bin for recyclable materials such as glass, paper, and plastic. Many cities have recycling initiatives and give clear guidelines on what recyclables they’ll pick-up. If your city doesn’t offer such solutions, get in touch with the local government, and put pressure on them to implement or improve their waste management priorities. Recycling isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than a landfill.

Donate to a local organization. If you can, donate to a local organization focussed on preserving your local environment. You don’t need to only donate money, but you can also donate your time or skills to help them become stronger organizations. One of our team members recommends planting a tree via TreeNation. This organization partners with planting sites around the world and involves locals in the planting process which educates more people on the importance of preserving nature as well as actually preserve nature.

It all starts with small baby-steps. If we all consciously work to make a change, we can beat trash and other pollutants together! Let’s take charge and be the change we want to see. We need to stop killing our planet.

“One person can make a difference, and everyone should try” — John F. Kennedy

If you want to get a bit deeper into the science of remote work and the impact on the environment, we recommend reading the following sources that focus on that:

• Why working from home might be less sustainable
• Is Remote Work Really as Green as It Claims to Be?
• 5 Stats About Telecommuting’s Environmental Impact
• Is telecommuting good for the environment?
• How allowing remote work can cut a company’s carbon footprint

Remote work and what you can do from home to chip in to protect the environment was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Communication issues are cliché workplace annoyances, and it doesn’t get any different when you’re working remotely. In fact, one might argue that it’s a more significant issue when having a remote team because team members have to ensure that their asynchronous communication skills are superior. In our previous article, we’ve scratched the surface on setting expectations within your organization regarding your expectations of remote communication. For some of you, this might have been overwhelming- where do you even start, right?!

Communicating through Slack (or your internal communication tool of choice) can bring its own challenges. Often times, it’s easier to jump into a quick video call to resolve the matter either amongst yourselves or to help out a client ASAP. However, if you don’t abide by certain etiquette, these meetings can become a nuisance in themselves riddled with miscommunications, annoyances, and wasted time.

You don’t have to wing it and learn by doing like we had to do. We’ve got you covered. After many years of experimenting, we feel confident to say that we now know how to run productive remote meetings. We’ll lay it all out for you. Feel free to copy + paste it for your own internal guidelines.

Scheduling your remote meeting 101

1- Have an updated calendar. We want to remind you: the virtual calendar is your best friend, and we recommend you insure it’s updated frequently (read: daily) so that your team members know when you’re available and vice versa. If you don’t, by default, it will become a nightmare to book a meeting that works for everyone on your guest list, which includes a lot of unnecessary back and forth on what time would work best for everyone. By having updated calendars, you allow yourself and others to jump right in, check when all stakeholders are available, and send an invite.

Given that our team members at Bunny Studio are scattered across multiple timezones, we recommend our team members adding in their calendars when they’re sleeping, usually plan to have lunch, go to the gym, and ad hoc spaces available for meetings, etc. By doing so, we remove the cognitive load of checking everyone’s timezones and determining whether it is an acceptable time at their end to meet. If you don’t feel comfortable in adding this information because you consider it private, you can change the settings of those timeslots to private so that they are only visible as “busy” for others.

2- Ask yourself, does this require a meeting? Before you book the meeting, do everyone a favor and ensure that the subject does require a meeting instead of a simple message to share and FYI, receive approval or sign-off. Moreover, when possible, try to book a meeting with 24-hours in advance. Your problems or issues don’t have the same urgency as for others. Hence, be respectful of your peers’ time and try not to disrupt their planning or focus last-minute.

3- Ensure you add a clear title to the invite. When setting the invite, don’t be vague by adding, for example, “checkpoint” or “feedback.” Instead, be as clear and straightforward as you can in the title fo the invite, e.g., “Tommy: onboarding checkpoint week 4” or “Jules/Feedback on search.” This way, when team members look at their calendars, they can see in a birds-eye view what’s coming up for the day/week. Within the description, you can go into the details about the purpose of the meeting, adding any materials you want your team to read beforehand and an agenda.

4- Add your conference link. If you haven’t been working remote previously, perhaps it would’ve been obvious what meeting room you’d be meeting in. Working remotely, everyone needs to have access to a particular video conferencing link.

5- Set your notification settings. Last but not least, add a notification rule to help you and others receive a reminder and ensure everyone arrives on time. You can do this through your Calendar settings.

Remote meeting etiquette

Outlined below are the 30 rules that have accumulated over the years at Bunny Studio. Most of them were implicit cultural learnings and we published them in written form last year to improve our new-hire onboarding experience. We’re sure that some (or all!) of them might be of use for your organization to improve your remote meeting experience by setting some rules of engagement.

1. Confirm whether or not you will be attending the meeting. Let the organizers and others present know if you accepted or declined the meeting. There is nothing more frustrating than waiting to open a meeting to give an extra minute for the other person to join (or not).
2. Be punctual. Ensure you receive reminders and notifications on your desktop before the meeting starts.
3. Feel free to cancel the meeting if the other team member hasn’t come in after 10% of the meeting time has passed and they haven’t informed you about their tardiness. Let them know that they can reschedule the meeting whenever they see fit.
4. Have a proper set-up. If you are sitting, you should be working from a place that has a good chair and a functional desk.
5. Be aware of your surroundings, especially if you are meeting with an external party. Adjust your workspace as you regard appropriate. Avoid like you are working from a cave due to bad lighting, which either only shows a contour of your head due to backlight or your face as a beam of light surrounded by darkness. Don’t show in the background: your pile of dirty clothes, unmade beds, clutter, or open closets. Remove noisy distractions. Work in a space that is dedicated to working.
6. Your camera should always be turned on. You wouldn’t put a paper bag over your head during an in-person meeting, right?! We consider it to be rude and disrespectful to have your camera off. This confirms that the people in the meeting are engaged with the subject at hand, and not just listening in the background while doing other things.
7. In case not everyone is remote in your team, ensure that during meetings, everyone logs-in to the video call through their own computers. This enhances the meeting experience for everyone because it reduces the chances of starting a discussion amongst the “non-remote” team members sitting in the same room.
8. Mute your microphone if you are not speaking. Be mindful and mute your mic while someone else is speaking. During a virtual conference, noise from others can be very distracting for the person talking and can make them lose their train of thought.
9. You must have a headset with a noise-canceling microphone. We’ve all been there, someone’s talking while you hear a lot of background noise, echo, and perhaps some static. This is distracting to what the person actually has to say because we’re all adjusting our noise, attempting to get better sound. For great virtual meeting experiences, everyone must have access to a functioning noise-canceling microphone.
10. Don’t have your video call resting on your bed. It’s just not cool.
11. Be mindful of eating or drinking. Never eat or drink when attending meetings with customers. If you are with your team and they feel ok with eating, don’t eat with your mouth open, and make sure you mute yourself — nobody wants to hear your eating noises.
12. Introduce everyone during the meeting. If new team members are joining the meeting for the first time, make sure you introduce them to everyone. If you are an organizer of a meeting between several external parties, ensure everyone gets the chance to briefly introduce themselves.
13. If you want to record the meeting, inform others attending the meeting. When you’re meeting with an external party, never start recording a meeting without receiving their verbal permission first.
14. Be present and manage your attention. Show that you’re listening. Don’t be distracted by your phone or other incoming messages on your computer. People notice when you are disengaged by your eyes dashing around the screen and your arms making movements of typing on your keyboard (side note, this is only acceptable if you are taking notes). In fact, close your internal communication tool while in a meeting. It is very annoying, distracting, and rude to notice that you are not putting your full attention to the meeting. If you notice that someone is distracted or not present, let them know and ask them to bring their attention back to the meeting.
15. Don’t pick up phone calls during a video call. Put your phone on silent or mute all notifications. If you believe the phone calls you are receiving are an emergency, apologize to the team and leave the meeting. If you are expecting an important call, let the participants know before the meeting starts.
16. Raise your hand when you want to speak. Do not unmute yourself and start talking out of the blue as this can lead to instant chaos during remote meetings- especially if you are with more than 3 people.
17. Always have a moderator when engaged in video conferencing. Having a person control the meeting allows a free flow of ideas while maintaining order, especially when dealing with large groups of people. This person can give the turn to people to speak or ask questions.
18. Don’t bombard the chat on zoom. This is very distracting for the presenter and those attending. If you have something to say, raise your hand!
19. Be creative when your internet is having issues. If you experience problems with your internet connectivity, try the following: a) dial-in through your phone. Zoom adds several phone numbers you can call in order to join the meeting, or b) turn off your camera and send a chat informing team members about your weak connectivity.
20. Give everyone an equal chance to contribute. If there are people in the meeting who are less comfortable speaking up, structure the meeting in a way that gives everyone an equal opportunity for their voices to be heard. If you notice that someone on the team is trying to contribute but getting overshadowed by more extroverted team members, carve out time for them to speak.
21. Make time for casual conversation. Frequently, teams don’t interact much outside of work matters. Allowing a few minutes of casual interaction before diving into the meeting can really build rapport and keep the team engaged when the conversation jumps to the business objective of the meeting.
22. Make sure everyone can access the videoconferencing link. Video conference settings can be tricky. If you are organizing a meeting on behalf of others or a group-wide meeting, ensure they can join the meeting without the dependency of you having to be there.
23. Stay on topic. Make sure to lead the conversation back to the primary purpose, even if you notice that the host/presenter is going off on a side conversation. If matters come up that are only relevant to you and another person or people, make time to discuss it later instead of taking up everyone else’s time.
24. Manage time so you can be respectful of everyone’s time and end the meeting on the hour and minute you had initially planned.
25. Keep your cool, don’t lose your temper during a meeting. If a team member negatively impacts your meeting, don’t use meeting time to let them know. Call a private meeting with that person afterward to discuss if necessary.
26. Allow breaks for lengthy sessions, so that team members can grab something to eat and use the bathroom.
27. Unless the organizer has stated otherwise, don’t leave a meeting before it ends. That’s disrespectful to the organizer/host/presenter unless you have informed them beforehand that you intend to dash out earlier.
28. If you have to cancel a meeting, cancel it in advance so people can re-organize their schedules with the proper anticipation. If you are the organizer of this meeting and you cancel, ensure you reschedule. If you are not the organizer of this meeting and you cancel, ensure you reschedule if it was a 1–1 meeting.
29. Train your family/friends/roommates that working from home does not mean working less or not working at all. Explain to them that you have to concentrate and ask them to respect your time and space by not barging in or starting a conversation at any given point without checking if you have a meeting first. If you don’t have a dedicated space in your home to work from, but you work in a shared communal space, tell your family or friends to put clothing on because we wouldn’t want to see them in their underwear or topless in the background. An idea that you could implement as well is that whenever you are in a meeting, hang a sign on your door or chair with a notice saying, “Don’t disturb, in a meeting.” notifying your housemates about it.
30. Allow some fun during certain meetings. Remote meetings are the few moments team members are able to build rapport with each other. Allow the first couple of minutes for people to have a casual talk. People are also working from home so once in a while a spouse, partner, kid, cat, dog, or other pet might pop their heads in front of the camera to say hi. And especially for parents, have their kids sit on their lap if they want to whilst attending a meeting. In addition, why not dress-up when there’s a special event happening?

Apart from these guidelines mentioned above, we recommend sli.do to make your meetings more efficient. Sli.do is a website where users ask questions to the moderator or other members of the meeting, and it has an integrated voting system where people can vote on the most pressing answers. We use these for our Town Halls. Zoom has a similar feature called Raise Hand, but this one simply organizes who raised a hand chronologically.

In addition, if you want to schedule a meeting with people outside of your organization we recommend you setting-up a Calendly link. Calendly allows others to see specific days and time-slots you have available in your calendar and automatically books a meeting or group event in your calendar once the other person has selected a time that works for them as well. We’ve learned that it speeds up the process if you send the link explaining to them that you’re adding your calendar to facilitate the process of finding a day and a time that works for all.

We hope that by sharing our guidelines about remote meeting etiquette, you’ll be able to organize your own remote meetings and ensure a memorable experience for everyone. If you find them useful, please let us know in the comments.

Are you already a remote worker? We’d love to hear about the additional lessons you’ve learned in the comments.

Remote work- the absolute essentials: remote meeting etiquette was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is part of a series about what we recommend at Bunny Studio to get you started in working remotely.

In our last article, we went over the essential hardware we recommend to people that are starting to work from home. Today we’re going to focus on the essentials that will benefit you and your team to streamline your communication and make your decision-making processes more agile as you adapt to being remote.

One of the most critical aspects that will let you solve many issues down the road as a remote team is how you communicate with your coworkers and stakeholders. The following is a set of tools and frameworks that we use at Bunny Studio.

Choose your internal communication tool

Do yourself and your team a favor, steer clear from Whatsapp, and Email as your main form of internal communication. It’s a fact that you’re no longer in the same physical space as your colleagues. However, this does not — nor should it — block you from checking-in with your team or having thoughtful discussions. Whatsapp and Email will not take you far. These won’t offer you the possibility of organizing your communication based on your projects, topics, or teams. Nobody likes to be part of multiple Whatsapp groups where there are numerous conversations taking place. Nor do they like having their email inbox flooded with emails where too many have derailed into a different topic than the original subject. Both of these scenarios will lead to you and your team feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, inadvertently losing track of information such as decisions taken, and action steps decided on inadvertently ensuring broken communication links within your organization.

You need a system that will let you chat quickly and effectively amongst yourselves while maintaining a record of everything discussed and files shared in a clear and organized manner.

At Bunny Studio, we use Slack, but there are others such as Google Hangouts, Chanty, and Microsoft Teams. For us, Slack has become our internal collaboration hub that has replaced Email. It facilitates cross-functional collaboration and keeps communication organized because it encourages the creation of various channels for different purposes. Moreover, we have labeled these channels based per department, unit, project and cross-functional dependencies. Our members chat, send files, create discussion channels per project or topic with other team members, and manage their operations in real-time.

This chat-based system is useful for facilitating conversations, while at the same time keeping each other updated on OKR progress and asynchronous decision making. Moreover, we advise you to allow for some fun within your organization. Accept that your team will use gifs and emojis. It’s a way of expressing emotions with the absence of facial expressions and body language when having these face-to-face conversations.

Internal communication guidelines

Whether or not you are in a position to change to a user-friendly internal communication tool, if you want remote to work, you need to get your communication structures set from the get-go. Make sure your organization has set clear communication guidelines to establish rules of engagement. This is for both written and verbal communication- on how you want to manage your remote meetings.

These guidelines should be able to answer questions such as:

• how to use your current communication tool;
• how to label conversations or subjects — do you have specific prefixes for each team or unit, and should they add a sub-fix to indicate projects they are referring to give you a birds-eye view of your inbox?;
• what your expectations are towards lean communication practices;
• when to create email threads or WhatsApp groups and when not to;
• who should and should not be notified about specific topics (perhaps implement a RACI matrix?);
• where you should notify your leader on the latest reports/KPI updates;
• which meetings are mandatory for everyone to be present?
• what your expectations are regarding remote meeting etiquette — all videos on or off? everyone muted if not talking? rasing hand if you want to talk or do a dance?;
• what your expectations are in everyone having their virtual calendars updated;
• how people should book meetings — do they ask the person first, or can everyone access the calendar of their peers and book them on an empty slot of their choosing?
• etc.

This list of questions might seem daunting, but trust us, getting yourselves better organized in your remote communication set-up will pay off because your communications will become more streamlined, leading to a) in the short-term by removing anxiety, FOMO and perhaps a feeling of disconnectedness or even feeling lost; and b) in the long-term, as you have become more sophisticated in your communication, virtual onboardings or other moments of succession will become a breeze because people will have access to the information they need, without much hand-holding.

Finally, experiment with what works for your organization!! Don’t be afraid to try out different things.

A sneak-peek into our Slack guidelines

Slack or any other internal communication tool can be a major distraction rather than an enabler if you don’t ensure a couple of guidelines to get the best from it (yes, we know we are repeating ourselves here!). We can write a whole article on this, but for now, these are the basics we want to share with you:

First, you’ll need a system of labeling to organize your organization’s channels. At Bunny Studio, we define the purpose of our channels by assigning prefixes to them. Let’s look at 3 random channels that the company uses.

• co-important. CO stands for Company. This is how we divide the channels depending on their purpose. We use this prefix for all company-wide channels, and every team member should be part of these. In this channel, we only post important announcements that everyone should be aware of — no chatting allowed in this channel.
• cx-workbench. CX stands for Customer Experience. This is where our Customer Experience Agents can talk about projects we are currently working on. Only the Customer Experience agents and employees that work with them are registered.
• wc-all-company. WC stands for Watercooler! Just like in your normal office, you need a space where people can unwind and talk about general things. Given the pandemic, we’ve set up more of these separate spaces to keep our employees engaged, like wc-booknerds for our avid readers, wc-videogames for the gaming enthusiasts, and more.

We’ll dedicate a separate article on our recommendations for Slack — or any other internal communication tool- guidelines.

A sneak peek into our remote meeting guidelines

We’ve gone over written communications, but what about video? You’ll surely have had more than one video conference within the past few days. Going forward, you might be jumping from video conference to video conference with coworkers and people outside your organization. Here’s a sneak peek into our guidelines:

• Start on time and close the meeting on time.
• It is important that everyone always keeps their camera on during conferences and be present.
• Always mute your microphone when you’re not speaking.
• Always have a moderator when engaged in video conferencing.

If you are reading this and you are not part of the HR, IT, and leadership team, thinking to yourself: “This is all great and dandy, but I don’t have a say in this” we encourage you to be proactive in providing solutions that might work for your organization! Surely, they are overwhelmed with adapting to new remote (management) structures, so lend a helping hand.

Documentation — in the cloud!

Along with chat-based systems that facilitate day-to-day communication, you also will need a cloud-based collaboration tool that will allow you to create and store all your processes, frameworks, policies, playbooks, KPIs, product cards, engineering bug, and task reports, etc. Essentially your wiki!

At Bunny Studio, we use Atlassian, which allows us to have long-standing documentation of essential aspects of the company. As well as have a place to archive issues that we might need to refer back to regularly, such as strategy updates, KPI dashboards, Product roadmaps, or operational processes.

G-suite and Notion are other great options to look into. Whatever tool you use, though, you’ll also need guidelines on how you want your organization to archive digital information. Otherwise, it becomes an absolute mess making it impossible to find what you or others are looking for, and team members go rogue saving documents on their computers, hampering collaborative work.

An updated virtual calendar

We’ve only scratched the surface on written communication. However, some issues might require you to jump into a virtual meeting with another team member. For virtual verbal communications, besides having access to the obvious: Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, etc. a virtual calendar is your best friend!

Everyone at Bunny Studio uses and has access to each other’s Google Calendar, so it’s easy to see when someone has an available slot to meet. Many of us also time block our calendars, indicating when we are having lunch, working on specific tasks or projects, and ad hoc slots that are available for meetings. Below is an example of one of our team member’s calendar.

Having an updated calendar reduces the need for us to have to check in with a peer if they are available, but instead, we jump into their calendar and book them on one of their free slots — no need to ask permission! For this to work, though, team members should keep their calendars updated.

Daily and weekly standups

Last, but certainly not least, daily and weekly standups are a robust framework to prevent micromanagement, increase team engagement, and facilitate alignment. We won’t be where we are now without them.

Every day, each team huddles together for 15–30 minutes (depending on team size) through a video conferencing call. Before the meeting starts, each team member should have shared in writing, in their respective team channel, their answers to the following questions:

For weekly standups, which take place every Monday:

• Top achievements from last week
• Top misses from last week (what weren’t you able to achieve)
• Top goals for this week
• What objectives are at risk?
• Is anything blocking you from moving faster?
• Is there anything that can help you move faster?

For our daily standup, we use the same questions, only the first 3 are rephrased to:

• Top achievements from yesterday
• Goals I wasn’t able to achieve
• Top goals for today

Then, as a team, you go through all of the answers during the meeting where questions and comments are encouraged! Incorporating this management structure will especially help team leaders keep a birds-eye view on the progress of their team, facilitating their decision-making. Be consistent though! So, book everyone already in their calendars for the next couple of weeks to make it part of your organizational routines.

If you want to keep up-to-date on a more detailed level about the progress of OKRs or milestones and KPIs of each team member, we recommend you discuss these during a weekly 1–1 with your direct reports. This meeting only needs to last 30 minutes. We recommend 60 minutes though so that you also have time to build rapport with your peers and guide them in their professional development.

These frameworks deserve an in-depth article for each, and we’ll ensure to share our learnings with you ASAP!

For now, if you have any questions at all, please feel free to email us at people@bunnystudio.com.

We hope that our recommendations above will guide you in creating much-needed structure, speed, and order while keeping you away from messier communication platforms and practices that will most likely bog you down.

For the next couple of weeks, we’ll go a bit deeper into best practices when having to deal with written communication, video conferences, and some frameworks to keep alignment within your team while building rapport.

Remember, you and your coworkers are all in this together. For some of you, it might be a sudden change, but the more aligned you are, the easier the transition to working remotely will be.

Remote work- the absolute essentials: setting your communication structure was originally published in We Are Bunny Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.