How Synthesis — and its product team — nails working from home
Working from home sounded like the worst thing that could happen to me. As a college student in the year 2020, I’d already attended three months of Zoom University before embarking on my internship at Synthesis.
A soul-numbing day at Zoom University (or remote anything in general) includes:
- Hours and hours of silent Zoom calls
- Static profile pictures where people should have been
- Long, awkward pauses after questions where no one is answering
I’d already grown used to the depressing lack of human interaction ( insert sad face ), so I wasn’t expecting my remote stint at Synthesis to be any different. I was glad that I was so wrong!
Here are some of the ways Synthesis as a company — and the product team in particular — nails working from home
1. Morning company stand-up with some top tier improvisation work
At the start of each day, we have a company-wide call, in which everyone — yes, everyone! — updates each other on what they’re going to do for the rest of the day.
Loosely inspired by the Agile framework, we call this the morning stand-up, and refer to our planned blocks of time as “daily sprints”.
When I first heard about this, I was surprised. Everyone’s involved? As in, more than 30 of us? Really? Not only was the answer a resounding yes, I gradually came to enjoy it, and personally found that including the whole team made a lot of sense. The daily stand-up helps me plan out my own day and be accountable to the rest of the team as well.
That’s not all there is to it. Every call is hosted by a different individual (who then gets to choose the next host). The host comes up with a unique theme for the day’s call, which we riff off while presenting our sprints.
Some past themes include:
- A content-snobbing session on what Netflix series everyone should watch
- Emotional and patriotic talks on favourite Eurovision songs
- A poetry showdown (Resident poet Ashvinder, our head of Partnerships, was really on his game that morning)
- Favorite ice cream flavors (with some revealing that they don’t like ice cream! Can you imagine the drama that unfolded?)
… and lots more!
These spicy themes keep us involved in the meeting, and lets us see the faces of the people behind those Slack messages. Aside from the clarity of tasking for every individual, the great energy that this morning meeting brings, helps everyone start the day with great excitement.
2. Pro — Duck — Tea — Vi — Tea
Our resident abang (Malay for ‘brother’) and full stack engineer, Arif Rahman, introduced a daily water cooler talk to our team when we started working remotely. You heard that right. A company approved water cooler talk. We call it the “productivi-tea” session, where we combine technical discussions (productivity) with casual chat (spilling the tea) for 30 minutes each afternoon (and management is okay with it!?!)
We chat about topics from the serious to the causal, like
- How we should store a certain type of document in MongoDB
- How we should spend our weekends
- Specifications about our new React Component
- Specific details about the interesting news, or ‘tea’, going on in our team and the company
While I found it pretty surprising at first, having an official water cooler chat isn’t such a crazy idea. Just Google the term ‘water cooler chat’, and you’ll find plenty of sources supporting its benefits for both companies and employees.
Not only do I get a chance to bring up the technical problems I’m currently facing and get advice, I also gradually became very comfortable with reaching out to my teammates to collaborate and ask for help outside of the productivi-tea meetings.
Additionally, the meeting has also served as an opportunity for the team to sync up on common terminology and also have a place where miscellaneous questions are permitted, which improves our team’s communication.
The meeting got me involved in the company’s culture and conversations, even though our team is remote.
3. Weekly Showcase & SNACK BUDDIES 🍇🧁🥤
A weekly company showcase is a pretty common practice. It comes with numerous benefits: helping employees understand the overall trajectory of the company, highlighting the work that others are doing, and fostering company culture.
However, there’s one easy way to make any meeting even better and boost employee morale… (drum roll please… ) and that’s through food.
At Synthesis, the Snack Exchange is the most sacred event of each Friday. Once the roster has been generated, it becomes your solemn duty to provide your snack buddy with suitable sustenance for the weekly showcase. This usually involves a quick chat about what food they like, before choosing some snacks to be delivered to their doorstep.
This simple exchange of snacks allows you to get to know another person in the bigger company for a little while. Waiting for the food to arrive is also rather exciting, as you aren’t sure what exactly the other party got you!
There might be a bit of a Pavlov’s dog situation going on here, but I’ve found myself looking forward to the weekly showcase every week. Enjoying some snacks while learning about the interesting things done by other teams in the company makes it all the better.
Aside from the upbeat vibes, this is also a platform where interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration occurs.We often have data scientists bringing in a unique perspective (and possibly new innovations!) on the work strategists present.
And for the product team, showcasing our work gives us valuable insights on our product designs and features from our strategist colleagues who work directly with our business partners.
4. Did I forget about camera on, sound on for all video calls?
Alright, maybe not for all calls, but most.
On the product team, instead of having long chats over Slack, we try to hop on a video call to talk things through. Instead of copy pasting and explaining code through messaging, we can easily screen share our code or the documentation we are working on during our video call.
This keeps the various contexts of a discussion the same. It helps us reach solutions faster by preventing miscommunication, avoiding a situation where we find out we were talking about apples and oranges the whole time.
It’s tempting to only communicate via Slack, especially when you’re at home in your PJs and looking disheveled. But the small boost of social interaction from these discussions really keeps you going throughout the day.
If, however, the discussion involves more than one person, we wait to talk about it during the productivi-tea meeting (see Point 2). That way we observe good meeting hygiene, and avoid disturbing the flow of people working on their own tasks.
5. Oh and also… great people
All of this wouldn’t have been possible without the people involved. In Synthespeak, it wouldn’t have been possible without people who ‘plus’, or add on to, each other. It takes a different kind of effort to get the ball rolling over calls, but once the general mood and flow has been established, it’s easy to get conversations flowing.
What I’ve learnt is to make video calling either interesting and fun, or keep it short. That way people won’t dread video calls, and you’ll be able to maintain a good level of interaction within your team even while working from home.
That’s a wrap!
Remote work doesn’t have to spell doom. There are some benefits from working from home that I didn’t realise existed. I get longer periods of focused work as there are fewer distractions, and obviously save time from being able to roll out of bed and be at “work”. The new challenge is really to balance the efficiency of work from home with positive social interactions.
I think it’s all the simple rituals (that I have mentioned above) that brought Synthesis’s culture into everyone’s home office. All of them started with someone’s suggestion in a meeting. So take up some of our rituals, or think of your own — bring them up to your team and let us know how it goes for you! Most importantly, be receptive to the suggestions your own colleagues might bring up as well.
Stay safe in these uncertain times!
