How we kept our team motivated and integrated during the pandemics
2020 started as a great year: great songs, great music, big technology promises and then… COVID-19. Suddenly we faced ourselves locked at home, using masks to go outside, unable to hang out with friends or even going to the cinema.
Here at Red Ventures, we had to figure out ways to keep our team communication even with 100% of our employees at home and also to motivate and take care of their mental health.
In this article, I'm listing some of the initiatives we had trying to create a good WFH environment.
Checkpoint forms
Trying to understand better how our employees are communicating between themselves, we sent twice a month a simple form containing some questions such as:
- How good is the communication with your team?
- How good is the communication outside your team?
- How motivated are you?
- How productive are you?
And also we asked them to check all the employee's names they talked to. With that in hand, we were able to create a communication graph where each node represented an employee and the color represents which team they're working at.
Looks at the graph it's explicit which employees are considered "under the spotlight" and interact with most people but, mostly important, we can also find if there's anyone isolated from everybody and that may need assistance or more attention.
WFH 101 Guide
Right in the beginning of this "new normal", we created a small guide with some hints about how to work from home effectively. Since most people never worked like that before, we suggested, for example:
- Muting microphone during calls when not talking;
- Muting any other app notifications (Slack, Skype, etc) while on a meeting;
- Put every event/meeting/call in the calendar so everybody knows when you're busy or not…
… and many others. Even being only a virtual guide, it helped most of the employees to create a routine and adapt themselves to that new environment.
Onboarding Updates
We kept hiring even during the pandemics, so we had to create a whole nem onboarding process to our new employees. Since we have many employees that come from other states, we started doing everything virtually and there was no need to go to the office to sign up anything: we started sending computers to their home along a small welcome kit with some stickers and a new welcome guide we prepared especially for the WFH environment.
Also, our teams had to reinvent their interviews to allow candidates to do the whole process all at their homes, so we started using Zoom to have video calls with the candidates and also use collaborative tools (coding, design etc) to allow more interactive and detailed interviews.
Virtual Happy Hours and Lunch Time Integration
Some of the best events in the office were our happy hours, so we didn't want to just throw them out. During the pandemics, we tried to do something different every month since it'd be held online via Zoom calls. Some of our happy hours were:
- An amazing talent show where people could sing, dance or even show an amazing skill they had and we didn't know
- A Pictionary contest where employees were divided in groups and competed to see who could discover the meaning of each drawing
- A happy full of group games such as discovering the name of the music that was playing, figure out who was the baby in the photo (hint: it's a RV employee!)
Another amazing time we used to spend together was during lunch time, so we tried to bring it back while working from home: every month we split our employees in groups with 6 random people so they can choose a day-time to have lunch together, meet themselves and talk about music, soccer, TV Shows… anything! 😁
Mental health advices
This is probably the most important item of the list (and also my favorite 🙂): we created a Slack App to simulate our own “Mental Health Guru”. We called her Juliana and every week she posted on our main slack channel some hints on how to stay healthy at home: exercises, pets, plants, meditation etc.
In some of them, we asked our team to interact by sending photos or sharing some music and it was a huge success.
Thanks, Ju! 😉
Hopefully some of the initiatives listed above may be of great impact in your company, contributing to the employees' wellness as much as it did to us at Red Ventures.
Feel free to share in the comments any other initiative that worked really well for you or any question/suggestions you may have to us! We'll be glad to hear them!
Stay safe! 🏠
