Best team practices that we learned during remote working
By Gözde Uzun and Tilbe Özkaraca
Never-ending meetings, disturbing background noise from a teammate, silence after raising a question, off-topic conversations, a teammate who has no idea about the product feature, and more. These are some of the challenges we faced, and thanks to these challenges, we have been learning what types of practices work and do not work for our team.
Before sharing practices, we want to start raising the following questions to tell you that you are not alone in experiencing them:
- Did you think some of the meetings you attended were inefficient?
- During the meeting, have you ever checked your social media account?
- When someone asked you a question, did you ask to be asked again because you didn’t listen?
- Do you think that you can answer all the questions about the product that the team owns?
- Do you follow product performance? What are your KPIs?
- Can you have fun while working?
Here are the practices that we tried during remote working:
- 45 minutes meeting
We all have attended countless meetings during remote working. Some of these meetings were quite short, while others took longer than an hour. There is no standard for how long meetings will take. On the other hand, the research conducted by Microsoft shows that attending meetings without a break has a negative impact on the brain. According to the article, non-stop working affects stress, anxiety, and concentration level in a destructive way.
Image Credits: Microsoft/Brown Bird design
Of course, video conferencing is a part of our lives but running from one meeting to another meeting means exhaustion. How can we prevent these effects:
- Setting up max 45 minutes meeting
- Taking a break after the meeting
- Avoiding meeting at lunch break
- Asking for a break if you lose your attention
When we implemented these practices, participation at the meetings increased and the off-topic conversations decreased.
2. Feedback
It is significant to receive and give feedback for your self-improvement and team development; therefore we try to make feedback a part of team culture.
What we are doing is:
- 1–1 feedback: You can ask your teammate for feedback; also it is an amazing opportunity to give feedback to your teammate and to encourage your friend to ask for feedback from other teammates. In this way, everything will normalize and you can gather information about yourself, the team, the product, and team practices.
- Anonymous survey: Don’t hesitate to make an anonymous survey. It is an easy way to gather information from your teammates. They express their opinions more openly and sincerely because they know that information is being collected anonymously. For instance, we use anonymous surveys to take feedback for “Did you find this meeting useful and productive?” or “What did you think about the product that we launched in a short time?”. The last question that we end the survey with is always “How can we enhance it?”. You can use anonymous surveys in different areas.
- Customer feedback: You can share customer feedback about the product with teammates. It brings about new features and new ideas.
3. Metric Quiz
We all work alone at home and get bored from time to time. If we were at the workplace, we could have fun and laugh with teammates during the coffee break, while working, and after work. I’m sorry that we don’t have such an opportunity but we shouldn’t give up easily.
Adding a teaspoon of fun to the work changes everything, especially the motivation of teammates, and it is called “Sawyer Effect” named after Mark Twain’s novel. Daniel Pink defines the Sawyer Effect as “Practices that can either turn the play into work or work into play”. In the novel, Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into painting a fence for him by convincing them it was fun.
As a team, we try to add more than a teaspoon of fun to the work. One of the funny practices that we learned from the Mobile team and haven’t experienced yet is Metric Quiz (ASAP we will).
It is a kind of competition where teammates try to answer the question about the project metrics. It is enjoyable to randomly answer and guess who will win. For instance, one of the questions can be “How many unique users logged in yesterday? And how many of them are women?”. In this funny and unforgettable way, your teammates will have information about the data of the product and features released. They can even quickly create new features and request more data from you. It is a really good practice to raise product awareness among the whole team.
We suggest you create a quiz on Kahoot. There is no doubt that you can be more creative.
4. Retropoly
We were very excited when we saw the post of Agile Coach, who works in another company, explaining this method on LinkedIn. We immediately adapted it to our Retro and shared this experience with the team.
What we did was very simple. Apart from the classic monopoly actions, we added the topics we talk about the most in our Retro’s as questions on the board.
We created the board on Miro and added pawns with the photos of our teammates. We used an online application for the dice. One of us was responsible for rolling the dice and running the game. At the end of the game, we gave an online badge to our friend who won the game :)
Playing games with the team is always fun but Retro gaming is more than that. Gamifying Retro has also allowed friends who don’t usually speak much in Retro to be part of the process. The fact that everyone is playing, in turn, means everyone has to talk in their turn. Of course, we can skip if there is nothing to say, but it’s also an opportunity to give an opinion.
Image Credits: Our Retropoly Board
Thanks to this practice, everyone contributed equally and constructively to the retro. Furthermore, the team started asking to play retropoly in every retro.
5. Sprint Report
In Scrum, the owner of the job is the team, not just one person. Therefore we think it is valuable for the team to know which tasks we have completed and which tasks we didn’t.
We publish a post-sprint report so that developers know about the entire sprint, not just the task they are part of in the development process.
To add some fun we started to prepare our reports on Canva. Using Canva’s poster samples, we created an appropriate draft for ourselves. After creating the draft, the rest is entirely up to your imagination. We’ve added which outputs we thought would be helpful to see. If you want to take a look, we’ve included an example of our own report below. Don’t forget to ask your teammates for feedback after sharing your report :)
Image Credits: Our Sprint Report
6. Happy Fridays
Like the whole world, we have been working from home for more than a year due to the Pandemic. Most of our teammates have never met face to face. As a team, we meet for half an hour every Friday. Having that face-to-face conversation, even though it’s virtual, is more important for our relationship.
“Having virtual happy hours, coffee breaks or lunches with remote teams can foster a sense of togetherness, camaraderie, and understanding. That kind of interaction makes remote working relationships much stronger in the long run.” said Brie Weiler Reynolds, career development manager, and coach at FlexJobs.
Besides talking, we also play games during Happy Friday’s. Our favorites are Haxball and Gartic.io. We have a lot of fun playing, so we highly recommend it to you.
Thanks to this practice, we had the opportunity to get to know each other.
Conclusion
To sum up, having fun while working and working while having fun is the key to team development and motivation. At the same time, this should be supported by 45 minutes meetings or breaks to keep the attention.
Don’t forget:
- Take a break before and after the meeting
- Ask your teammate to give and receive feedback about yourself, your team, and your product
- Prepare a metric quiz to inform your teammates about the data of the product and features released
- Visualize Scrum activities
- Reward your Fridays
We want to hear about your experiences and practices :)
Useful Links
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/21/this-is-your-brain-on-zoom/
