How We Bring Teams Closer Together While Being Apart: Introducing Global MINGling
When you work from home, it’s easy to feel disconnected from your team. We already highlighted in a previous article that the occasional small talk during meetings contributes to improved team morale, can ease back-to-back meetings, and makes us get to know our colleagues better on an informal level. But when you work remotely, this aspect of team bonding becomes more and more difficult, as we try to keep meetings short to avoid Zoom fatigue. Especially when we’re introducing new joiners to an existing team.
And that’s where the idea for the Global MINGling initiative first came up, a virtual coffee chat to meet people from different offices. During the pandemic, we at MING found lots of ways to improve the remote onboarding experience for new team members. This also included introducing them to our MINGions globally. And as we continuously try to enhance global collaboration and exchange, we wanted to extend this opportunity to every team member worldwide.
Moving From Manual To Automation
For the first MINGling session, our P&O team randomly selected pairs of employees for a virtual coffee chat, making sure they come from different geographical locations and, if possible, from other departments. This should improve exchange between people who usually don’t have a lot of overlap in their everyday work. To simplify the selection process, we then wanted to automate the whole thing. So our Global Technical Director Thinkey and our Software Architect Derek came in to develop the bot.
The task was clear: Develop an automation process that schedules 30-minute sessions once a month, to randomize international pairs, find a slot in their calendars that works, and schedule the meeting with a dial-in.
Developing The Bot
We checked in with Derek to guide us through the steps of creating the code from the beginning. “We chose to write a Slack command instead of using a web portal, as we use Slack on a day-to-day basis and writing a command in our own channels is much easier and convenient,” he explains. After that, Derek checked out Google APIs for our main requirements: selecting pairs of employees, reading calendars, detecting available time slots, and sending invitations. For the ones less savvy with dev language: APIs are application programming interfaces, they define interactions between multiple software and/or hardware apps.
To deliver on all of the functions, we decided to set up an Azure Function to host our code. How Azure works is that we only need to provide the essential code for the requirements mentioned above, and Azure would do all the rest.
- We started by putting a list of all our employees into the code, and Google would provide us with an API to pick a random pair from different offices and another API for finding a matching time slot in their calendars. One thing that made this phase pretty complicated was that we had to consider different time zones between offices, as well as lunch and working hours. For this, Derek had to preset the time zones for each person in advance.
- Another API from Google is the automatic creation of a calendar invite for the selected pair and their suitable time slot. The bot would go through all of the time slots provided, pick one, and automatically set up an invitation for MING’s Google calendar with a dial-in code to start the meeting.
Challenges & Next Steps
In addition to some of the challenges mentioned, Slack has a very restricted rule on executing your own command. You only have three seconds to do it, then it will raise a timeout error. But talking with Google calendar requires some time, and considering the general network request time, it sometimes fails to return the correct response. So we needed to use the interactive component of Slack command to call back our code to update the Slack window later when the job is done, over responding immediately after typing the command.
Fun fact: The whole thing was estimated to be one week’s worth of work, but it ended up taking us three months as our dev team could only work in between client projects.
Setting up the Slack bot and automating our Global MINGling process was a fun internal dev project that made us experiment with Google Calendar APIs. Still at the starting point of this journey, there are a few next steps for us to further improve the process:
- Getting smarter: For future sessions, we’d like the bot to remember the couples that already had their coffee chats together and to avoid matching with the same person for a while. For this, it will have to remember all of the previous invitations.
- Getting more automatic: One command to schedule the MINGling sessions for the whole company would make this process even smoother.
- Getting maintainable: Currently, the list of employees is hard-coded in the code. Meaning when people join or leave the company, we now still have to update the list manually, with the P&O team informing the developers, and the developers then updating the list. Instead, the employee list could be added to a Google sheet and synced to the bot by another command.
Our employees found it interesting and enriching to get to know someone from a different location — people that they’d usually have no formal reason to exchange with. So they were thankful to have a dedicated space for meeting one another. All in all, it was a fun initiative. And in some chats it even sparked new ideas, meaning it could potentially be good for business too.
There’s obviously still room for improvement to make this an even more automated and smart process. But so far, setting up the first automated MINGling session went pretty smoothly and we’re excited for the team to connect and exchange more regularly, getting the chance to unite across borders and departments. Until now, the team’s feedback was that “it’s cooler to get a meeting scheduled by a Slack bot than a real human.” ;) We’re not yet sure if that’s a good thing or not.
MING Labs is a leading digital business builder located in Berlin, Munich, New York City, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Singapore. We guide clients in designing their businesses for the future, ensuring they are leaders in the field of innovation.
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