Cultivating company culture in lockdown: mission impossible?
With Covid19 forcing companies around the world into extended office shutdowns, Sqreen’s People team have had to get creative to find new ideas, methods, tricks to maintain the culture that is one of the central pillars of working at Sqreen.
Lockdown has fundamentally changed the way companies and teams work. The major question we faced as a team was: How can we keep a great Sqreen culture with our entire team behind a screen?
Sqreen has always been remote-friendly, with Sqreeners based in 12 different locations around the world (and counting)! But, we’ve also built a great atmosphere and ambiance at our Sqreenhouses in Paris and SF, and regular travel to one or both of these locations was a core part of our culture. Lockdown provided a new challenge, because without travel and regular face to face time, many of our usual tips couldn’t work. Our challenge? To take our Sqreenhouse atmosphere 100% online.
Before going further, it’s important to understand that Sqreeners = Sqreen culture! If you want to know more about the importance of culture in Sqreen, you can read this article about our vision of culture written by Alison our Head of People.
Why worry about culture during lockdown?
Lockdown experiences in our team vary greatly, because each person is different and not everyone has the same circumstances (e.g.: house with garden vs. apartment, size of living space, locked down alone or with children, other family etc.).
It was our responsibility to keep the morale of the Sqreeners afloat and to keep the spirit of Sqreen alive because our culture is Sqreen’s identity.
The idea was to ensure our team’s mental health and make everyone feel as good as possible given very trying circumstances.
But how?
It all depends where you start from, and at Sqreen we were lucky to be in a company where we already had a distributed team and remote work is common, with some Sqreeners working remote full time. We already had in place the tools we needed to help us in our day to day life (e.g. Slack, Zoom, using Notion for asynchronous communications) and this was a huge help.
The biggest part of the challenge was to make us all feel united and foster a sense of human connection. We tried a lot of things! Some of them worked very well and some didn’t, here are some ideas by categories.
Existing things we tweaked slightly during lockdown:
- Welcoming 10 new Sqreeners: Usually our onboarding consists of a welcome gift before the 1st day, add new Sqreener on our #pre-sqreeners channel with a personal email address. On the 1st day all the team from Paris or San Francisco meet around a welcome breakfast. Then the different team meetings take place in the first weeks so that the new Sqreener can get to know the team. During the lockdown, the whole process was kept, the only difference was for the welcome breakfasts which were done with zoom.
- Sqreenfit: Before the lockdown, a sports coach came once every two weeks to train us in our offices. During the lockdown we maintained our sports sessions but moved these on to Zoom. Whether it’s cardio or yoga, there was something for everyone.
Things we tried that didn’t work:
- Virtual coffee Slackbots: Forcing the team to have virtual coffees by using a matching tool. Each week two people were randomly assigned to have a coffee via Zoom during the week. It didn’t take, as many Sqreeners found it artificial, and not at all like the serendipitous conversations they enjoyed at the coffee machine in the past. Now, we use a looser system where everyone is encouraged to have at least one coffee with another person they want during the week. It works much better!
- Making birthday videos with all the Sqreeners: Before lockdown, we celebrated birthdays in our offices with cake and lots of singing! During lockdown we wanted to continue this tradition, so we would record a video via Zoom for the person whose birthday was approaching. Except, with a 70-person team that meant a lot of videos to record, and with the whole team invited, we can easily say “oh, I can skip that one”, but if everyone says that, there are no more people to make the video. Now we’re setting up a 7–10 Sqreeners for each video in a rotation and it’s going well :)
New things that did work:
- Over-communicating: A lot more communication in the different channels on Slack e.g.: our: #food, #pets, #gardening, and #parents channels! This allows everyone to share more of their daily lives in lockdown. We also made some fun photo challenges, like recreating photos from our youth and the dog as artwork challenge etc.
- Games! A LOT of games! Participation wasn’t mandatory, after lunch slots were proposed so that we could do a relaxed game, with us Skribbl was the big winner, we discovered a few artists in the team, even if some tend more Picasso than Renoir! These relaxed moments allow you to decompress, to forget for a while that we are far from each other.
- Surprise delivery for Easter: At Sqreen, we love to eat! So we sent chocolates to all Sqreeners all over Europe and the United States :) A thought that made its effect!
- Regular no-agenda hang out meetings with your own team! For example, the people team had a slot every night to discuss, exchange on different subjects! Believe me, we learned a lot of informal things during these exchanges ;)
TL;DR, the key to surviving the lockdown was over-communication.
Managers and the people team were able to support our Sqreeners, recognize signals quickly and offer constant support and to reinforce positive behaviours.
We owe a big thank you to all the Sqreeners for being patient with us, for proposing ideas, for being a good audience and for sharing tips to improve our daily lives.
The lockdown in San Francisco is not over yet so a new challenge is emerging: how to deal with the hybrid challenge of re-opening one office in Europe and focusing on helping our Sqreeners in San Francisco as much as possible.
It is through these different factors that Sqreen’s culture has been maintained, not only thanks to the few actions mentioned above, but by a willingness to do the best, to try, to adjust and to continue because we’re all in this together :)
