How to keep your team sane while working from home…
It’s been 5 days since we closed nuom head offices… and around 4 days since we (and the rest of the country) all realised WFH isn’t as great as it seems. We’re all starting to go a little stir crazy, so, I thought I’d share what we’ve found in the hopes it will boost our productivity, and help us stay in touch for what might be a few months working from home.
1. Hanabi
This card game was already a regular classic in the good old office days, but now we’re playing it remotely. If you’re like us, and have just spent 30 minutes watching your next-door neighbours cat climb over fences then this is a great game to keep you on your toes. You can also link to Discord for those that use it!
It’s a cooperative game meaning all players work together as a team. The aim is to sort all cards by colours and numbers. In Hanabi, you can’t look at your own hand of cards, instead, you hold your hand outwards for everyone else to see. The way you get information on your hand is through clues that others give you. The more cards the players play correctly, the more points they receive when the game ends.
2. Virtual Lunch Dates
We’ve got our first virtual lunch date scheduled for Monday morning. After starting to run out of things to IM my closest colleagues about work-wise, I decided to book something in the diary so we can recapture the ‘coffee-machine’ small talk that is often a well-needed brain break. We’ve already grown the invite to two more, so we’ll see how this goes! I’m interested to see what weird combo of lunches everyone may have with a good few of us in isolation now…
3. Scribble
This is a nice quick game if you’re stuck on a task and need a change for 5–10 minutes. Create a private room and share the link with your team. You can add in your own custom words to make this much more interesting. When it’s your turn to draw, you will have to choose a word from three options and visualize that word in 80 seconds, alternatively when somebody else is drawing you have to type your guess into the chat to gain points, be quick, the earlier you guess a word the more points you get!
4. Discord
I don’t personally use this, but I know most of our developers (and not so closeted gamers) love it. If you work well by multitasking a light bit of convo whilst writing code, then this is the best way to boost your productivity.
Discord is a super-easy way to communicate over voice, video, and text, that helps you to feel like you’re back in the office. Being on a chat throughout the day means projects can be discussed as they would around the office, without having to type out explanations or set up a special call. It’s a big game-changer for those that need to work super collaboratively or just bounce ideas throughout the day.
5. COD
A few (by that I mean all) of our devs play COD. It’s a surprisingly good stress relief and team-building exercise alike. Warzone is free to play and can be downloaded on your Xbox, PlayStation or desktop.
The battle royale mode players compete in a continuously shrinking map to be the last player remaining. Players parachute onto a large game map where they encounter other players. As the game progresses and players are eliminated, the playable area shrinks forcing the remaining players into tighter spaces. It’s a good way to keep in touch once or twice a week, whether it’s on a lunch break or later in the evening.
6. Exercise
I noticed yesterday one of our designers updated her slack status to ‘lunchtime run’, and thought it was a great idea! You can do this one solo, or there are a range of free classes you can stream online. Fitpack are also offering free workouts and recipes during the pandemic. We particularly like this one because we built it! Download, set your preferences to ‘at home’, and log into your Hangouts, Zoom or Microsoft teams to do these challenging workouts together.
I hope some of these are helpful for some other teams too. If you have anything else that’s worked for you pleaseeeee share below. It looks like we’re going to need to cover a good few months here!
