How to Build a Better Engineering Team with Fika
Hey, I’m Jeremy! I work with the fantastic team over at StartupLandia to help create amazing startups!
The world of remote work can be lonely. Over time, the lack of communication and collaboration could cost you a lot more than your sprint goals. I am going to explain the best tool I know for creating rapport and intimacy within a remote team…
Fika!
As you read this, I would recommend choosing a few pieces that might work for your team and modify them as you go. I will try to give a few examples of ways you can change Fika to work for you!
What the heck is Fika and why would I pay my employees to take a coffee break?
You might have heard of Fika before, but if you haven’t, simply, it is a coffee break. A short scheduled time for co-workers, friends, enemies, or family members to relax and let their minds wander. It's a time to converse, drink coffee, and eat sweet pastries.
But, I plan to talk about it in a less prescriptive manner. Breaking away from the Swedish tradition to morph it into something useful for remote engineering teams.
Studies show that taking regular breaks throughout the workday can increase performance and satisfaction at work. Taking these breaks with others can help to create relationships that expand past work and increase collaboration across the board.
I do not doubt that you would find that even the simplest form of Fika adds a layer of comradery to your team that it might be missing.
What is the most basic form of Fika you can share with your remote team?
I was leading a team at a small startup in the middle of the pandemic. We hailed from Sao Paulo to Boston, San Francisco, and New York, so finding good times to meet wasn’t a simple task.
A couple of months into leading the team, we ran into a few large tickets all at once, and we all went quiet. Everyone was focused on getting their tickets done and almost entirely checked out of slack and non-mandatory meetings. The focus seemed great at first, but I saw a death spiral forming.
Pre-scheduled Fika
The next week, I'd set up a thrice-weekly calendar event notifying them to bring coffee and a snack; on Fridays I even recommended a drink. We would sit in a Google hangout call, joke around, talk about the tickets we were working on, or anything really. Leaving the conversation to evolve naturally over weeks and months.
I was able to slowly sell the idea that teamwork is less about the work and more about the team. After a while, I saw that our sprint velocity leveled out. The occasional ‘off sprint’ where we only accomplished 40% of our goals seemed to be a thing of the past. I have theories about this, but my primary assumption is that people were able to openly say that they “didn’t know how to do something” to their coworkers when the environment was purposely relaxed.
Open Fika
A few years prior, I was part of a much larger team that was more split up time-wise. My manager at the time decided to open up a 24/7 video call. At 2 PM my time every day, I would go get coffee and a banana and jump into the call.
Sometimes, there would be someone writing some code they needed help with. One guy would hop on and practice card tricks. On Fridays, there were always a few beers out. It made the team feel like a team. We were able to talk about the things we cared about, our frustrations with the current stack, or what we felt would make our project “great.”
Eventually, the teams were split up, as happens at large companies occasionally. I left the company. A few years passed. Yet, I am still going out for drinks with the people from that call. We still talk about careers, programming problems, computer vision, etc. My wife and I even helped babysit for an old Fika Friend.
The point of all of this is to say that Fika can foster innovation, friendship, and accountability in the same way that MIT’s Plywood Palace did for Bose and LIGO.
I hope you give it a try and see how it can benefit your team.
Sources:
- Bhatia N, Murrell KF. An industrial experiment in organized rest pauses. Hum Factors. 1969 Apr;11(2):167–74. doi: 10.1177/001872086901100210. PMID: 5779524.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20
