How We’ve Leveraged Gather to Enhance Our Remote Culture
One of my favorite things about Storyblocks is how rounded and multi-passionate our workforce is. Currently, we have on staff an actively-touring musician managing rights and licensing and a product manager who co-owns a gym for adaptive athletes. We have parents more easily juggling school schedules and, of course, pet-parents frequently posting about the cherished moments they would otherwise miss. This is all possible due to the benefits of a remote-first work environment. Despite these benefits, however, there are some aspects of an in-office workday that felt important to preserve. This is where Gather comes in.
What is Gather?
Gather is an app that simulates an in-office experience, with the ability to reserve a desk, personalize the space, and interact remotely without Zoom calls. Each employee who opts in at Storyblocks has their own dedicated desk that they are free to decorate using Gather’s item library.
Additionally, employees can create custom objects, using image editor tools such as Gimp or Krita, that can be imported into the app. Gather has a mapmaker feature that allows users to expand the office, create portals to other rooms, and make a space private (only others in the same space can hear) or spotlight a space (everyone in the room can hear a speaker).
Goodbye, Zoom Fatigue
We’ve begun using Gather more frequently for meetings. From our Engineering All-Hands (~40+ attendees) to smaller daily standup meetings, we’ve brought back the practice of convening in a shared space, which leads to more organic discussions, better team building, and an overall feeling of connectedness and community within the workplace.
Celebrating Life Events
When big life events happen, such as birthdays and weddings, we wanted a way to celebrate. Now, we can decorate each others’ desks for any occasion using custom and interactable objects.
Community Spaces
At Storyblocks, we have several active resource groups (BRGs) through which people with shared experiences are able to meet and form community. Out At Storyblocks (OAS), our LGBTIA+ BRG, now has its own meeting space that we recently used to host an OAS luncheon. We also hosted our annual Pride trivia event in Gather this year.
New Hire Resources
For onboarding engineers, we’ve created a room for new hires to hang out in as they set up their environment and complete the onboarding process. This gives them the chance to ask questions and get to know their new teammates in a more organic setting.
Team Building
We meet on Friday afternoons for a remote gaming event that anyone can join. This is a great way to unwind at the end of the week and get to know people throughout the company. Some games we’ve played have included Wavelength, Codenames, Skribbl and Top Four. Gather also has an escape room template that can be used as a fun team building exercise.
Celebrating Individuality
Gather has given us a new way to express ourselves and be goofy. People have come up with so many creative ways to style their avatars and decorate the office space. We’ve even started up a Storyblocks ‘marching band’ group to rally for birthdays and other events.
The ‘Gather Keepers’
A group of our most Gather-obsessed employees has banded together to encourage use of the app and to continuously develop new ways to apply this resource. Gather Fridays is our most recent initiative where we encourage employees to spend Fridays working from their ‘desks’. The Storyblocks Gather team maintains a list of our custom objects, so that anyone in the company can use these items. Our list also contains special requests for wishlist items, such as BRG logos and desk decorations.
A Gather office can change and grow — just like an in-person office setting. We just completed the process of designing a new-and-improved layout alongside the Gather team to facilitate even more collaboration, and we plan to iteratively generate feedback for future improvements.
A Tool For The Times
Gather has introduced new elements of productivity and just-plain-fun to the work day. It’s contributed to employee engagement and collaboration, and has served as a fantastic medium through which we can witness different personalities coming together to build a great product.
Interested in joining our team and getting in on the fun? We are hiring!
