How we migrated our team’s social life to the cloud
Working in a project where we have always had our focus on strong collaboration and social interaction between the team members, switching from our co-located setup into a fully remote one over night brought challenges far beyond the setup of stable video conferencing. So here is what we have learned.
Good tools are a must have, ranging from video conferencing and screen sharing, over asynchronous text messaging/chatting to collaboration like task boards for Sprint planning, or whiteboards for workshops and retrospectives. It is important to use tools which do not only provide the required features, but also a good UX. If a tool doesn’t “feel” good, people will avoid using it, which ultimately means less interaction. For example, while MS Teams was a huge improvement over Skype for video conferencing, we soon learned that its chat function was not a replacement for our Mattermost channels. It is simply too easy to miss messages, and too hard to keep an eye on interesting discussions. This led to a dropping number of interactions until we moved back to Mattermost.
The same applies to hardware. No one likes spending multiple hours a day in online sessions with poor audio and video quality, while wearing an uncomfortable headset and sitting on a kitchen chair.
While those topics were soon addressed by our IT colleagues, we still had to figure out the equally important aspect of how to put them to good use.
Therefore, we created meeting areas in form of MS Teams teams and channels, where most of our video calls could take place. All of them are freely accessible within a reasonable scope — some on team level, some on project level. This gives everybody the chance to see and join meetings as well as ad-hoc discussions, just like it was in the office. Thus, we were able to create offers for social interactions instead of enforcing them (i.e. scheduling regular meetings).
One example is our pair programming channel which enables the developers to easily switch between pairs or get an overview of topics other colleagues are working on:
Using those channels, we now have a platform to establish new routines. In general, we encourage everyone to turn on the camera. This allows feedback and interaction on another, visual level, so that people can stay muted and do not need to interrupt the person who is currently talking. This has been a quite controversial topic at the beginning, but in the end, the vast majority of the team found that it is very helpful in the end. Nevertheless of course, no one is being forced to turn on their camera.
However, some colleagues even moved their video calls to the next level using green screens and other studio equipment:
Being used to one daily stand up in the morning, we soon realized a lack of coordination for a 100% remote setup. Therefore we scheduled a second one after the lunch break as an additional synchronization opportunity within the team. This made it easier for everybody to continue working on the “right” tasks and find new pairing partners.
Additionally, we started having unscheduled morning calls. This is how it works: The first one at work and in the right mood simply starts a call session in the project channel, others stop by, sip their first cup of coffee together and start the day with some chatter while writing the first lines of code. People just come by or leave as they like and once the meeting hours start, the call ends. Those sessions not only strengthen the social bonds between our different teams, but also boost the information flow within our project.
Within our team, we also scheduled a non-mandatory daily coffee break in the afternoon, as a second chance to have a chat or hear some familiar voices while working. The same applies to the weekly “after work drink” invite, Friday late afternoon, which sometimes ends after 5 minutes and sometimes lasts a few hours, depending on the people and topics — just like it would be in the office.
While this might seem like a lot of time spent “not working”, the results seem to prove us right. The team is still working very closely together, even after being reorganized and remotely on-boarding new colleagues every now and then. Our productivity remains very high,and we are keeping our customers happy as well.
In the end, we have learned a lot about the things the office implicitly offers, which have to be explicitly reinvented when going fully remote. There is no walking over to a colleague’s desk, no discussion on the other end of the room, that might catch your interest, and no coffee kitchen — creating those is now up to you.
