Knack Tunes: How a Remote Team Uses Music to Connect With Teammates
One of the perks of remote work is being able to listen to music just about anytime you want, whether on headphones in a coffee shop or at home on a stereo system. However, working remotely can also make connecting with teammates on a more personal level challenging when you work in a different city, state or even country.
One Giant Playlist
At Knack, we decided to help address the challenge of connecting with teammates remotely and celebrate our love of music with a collaborative Spotify playlist. We use a channel called #spotify-favorites in our internal Slack, which has an integration (powered by IFTTT) that posts a message whenever a new song is added to a shared collaborative playlist in Spotify.
This has become a fun and easy way to share, discover and discuss new favorites. Nearly a third of the team has added at least one song to the playlist since its inception, with one playlist reaching 99 hours and 29 minutes of listening enjoyment. In fact, last year we hit the song limit for the Slack integration (no more than 1,500 songs allowed on the playlist) and had to start a second collaborative playlist.
The Playlist Challenge
Late last year, we decided to hold a playlist creation challenge to encourage more team members to participate in the channel. The challenge was to create a set of curated playlists on the theme of “Remote Focus”. This was chosen to be intentionally vague and open to interpretation with the only rule being that each playlist had to be more or less 10 songs and all songs used had to come from our collaborative playlist (although new songs could be added for use in the event).
At the end of the event, we ended up with six curated playlists:
There’s obviously a lot of overlap between playlists. Based on this sample, team members associate focus with downtempo and chill music, with Gorillaz, Air, Beach House, and Tame Impala all featuring in multiple playlists. Each playlist definitely features the personality of its curator and gives the team a glimpse of what remote focus sounds like for them.
This playlist event was a ton of fun for everyone involved and is a great example of how something relatively small can do a lot to build community within a 100% remote team.
