How Are We Strengthening Communication While Working Remotely?
At Trendyol, we firmly believe that teamwork is the foundation of success. We take great care to ensure that our teams work together harmoniously and maintain optimal communication.
As the Moderation & Fraud team within Dolap, we are a team of 10 individuals, including 7 Software Engineers (4 Back-end, 2 Front-end, and 1 Dev In Test), 2 Product Managers, and 1 Team Lead. Our team is dispersed across various locations throughout Turkey: 5 individuals in Istanbul, 3 in Izmir, 1 in Ankara, and 1 in Ordu. We have all embraced the remote work model as our preferred way of operating.
While we may not have many opportunities to physically gather, we strive to enhance our communication through various online methods. In this article, I will share how we keep our communication lively with the team and create a more intimate working environment.
Team Activities
Every Wednesday, we organize meetings that we call team activities. These meetings offer an intimate and fun environment where we come together as a team to get to know each other better and strengthen our communication by playing specific games. We carry out our activities in both Turkish and English, alternately. The weeks conducted in English both improve our language skills and provide an opportunity to enjoy our time together.
# Wheel of Fortune
To get to know each other better, we initiated the Wheel of Fortune game. We integrated the icebreaker questions we found online into this game, and we determined whose turn it was by spinning the wheel. The person can either answer the question or choose to pass and draw a new question.
Thanks to this game, we discovered unknown sides and characteristics of our team members, which allowed us to understand each other better and enhance our camaraderie.
You too, with a short search on the internet, can find a set of questions and try the Wheel of Fortune game within your own team.
# Codenames
This game is played at https://codenames.game/. The team is divided into two equal parts, and one person from each team is chosen as the ‘spymaster’. The objective of the game is to find your team’s colored cards as quickly as possible by giving clues.
Throughout the game, we stay in voice communication via Zoom and discuss some cards. In our team, we try to guess how the clue-giver thinks and which card they want us to find. We make the game more fun by misdirecting the process of finding the opposing team’s cards.
Each time we play, we randomly assign teams and ensure a different person takes turns being the ‘spymaster’. We play this game in both the Turkish and English team activities. In the English version, since there are new cards each time, we both improved our English vocabulary and had the opportunity to practice speaking.
# 1 Lie 1 Truth
This game is based on each person sequentially telling 1 true and 1 false story. As a team, we try to guess which piece of information is true and which is false, and we gather information about the person who is telling the story. Telling a false story in a realistic way can be challenging, so we prepared as a team before this activity. At the end of this game, we gain insights about one true story each person has told. This increases the intimacy and communication within the team even more.
# Other Games
The above games directly increased the intimacy and communication within the team. In addition to these, we also played games like Gartic, Gartic Phone, and Geoguessr. These games both allowed us to have fun-filled moments and helped us learn new things.
Slack
At Trendyol, we use Slack for written communication. There is busy messaging traffic within our team throughout the day. Therefore, we implement certain practices to strengthen our communication within the messages.
# Fun Channel (Moderation Goygoy)
We have a special fun channel dedicated to our team. In this channel, we share funny visuals, videos, and GIFs, and engage in non-work-related conversations. This creates an environment where we can cheer each other up with entertaining content.
# Emojis
Expressing our emotions within messages can sometimes be challenging. To aim for more fun and intimate communication, we have increased the use of emojis in our team’s messaging. In addition to standard emojis, we create our own emojis using the custom emoji feature in Slack and use them accordingly. For example, each member of our team has their own set of three custom emojis.
Emoji set for each team member:
- Dance
- We use this emoji when someone from our team achieves success, supports someone, or wants to express gratitude. This emoji is usually used when we are happy or in a fun situation.
- Shake
We use this emoji to express our concern during negative situations, alarm states, or events. (We call this emoji our “panic” emoji.) - Fire
This emoji is used in situations where a problem arises or an alarm state occurs, indicating “there’s a fire.”
We have ensured that everyone on the team has these emojis. Using these emojis abundantly in our Slack messages makes our communication more intimate. These emojis are unique to our team and are created and used exclusively by our team. Apart from these, there are hundreds of fun emojis used by the entire Trendyol team.
You can also create your own custom emojis by searching for “emoji maker” on the internet and make your messaging with your team more enjoyable.
Tech Room
At Trendyol, we use Zoom for voice and video communication. We conduct all of our team meetings through Zoom. In addition to regular meetings, we have developed a method to recreate the office atmosphere while working remotely: Tech Room.
Tech Room is a meeting room link that we create on Zoom. This meeting room is constantly open and accessible. Using Zoom’s “breakout rooms” feature, we add sub-rooms to this meeting link. Throughout the day, we actively use these rooms.
When we feel bored or want to take a break, we can directly join our teammates in the other room and have a chat. We also gather in these rooms when we encounter a problem or need to work on a project together. We also use these rooms for pair programming.
When creating “Breakout Rooms” in Zoom, we can give names to the rooms. Each time we create a new room, we enliven the atmosphere by giving them different and fun names. So far, we have personalized our work environment by using various names such as cities, districts, car brands, favorite songs, favorite artists, favorite movies, and film characters.
If you also use Zoom for voice-video communication, you can make your remote work environment more intimate and lively by using this method.
Pair Programming
At Trendyol, we value collaboration. Therefore, we always make sure to work together on tasks that can be done collaboratively. This not only strengthens our communication within the team but also allows us to transfer knowledge and expertise to each other. We have added a custom field called “Pair Assignee” to the task cards in Jira. This enables us to assign two people to a task and work together.
We track our collaboration using a custom dashboard named “Moderation Pair Chart” created in Jira.
We analyze this dashboard at the beginning of each month and evaluate our collaborative efforts. Our goal is to ensure that every team member works together with at least one other person at least once a month.
Special Days and Celebrations
We value everyone’s special days within the team. When it’s someone’s birthday, we prepare a special Zoom background and organize a birthday party. If a new colleague joins our team or if someone gets married, we plan fun Zoom meetings for such occasions as well. Remembering and celebrating each other’s special days strengthens communication within the team and creates a more comfortable working environment.
So far, we have celebrated the following special occasions, and we plan to continue organizing such events:
- When we complete a major project or achieve significant success,
- When a team member has a birthday,
- When a new team member joins,
- When a team member gets engaged or married,
- On International Women’s Day,
- When the new year comes,
- When a public or religious holiday arrives.
…
In fact, even though we are a remote team, we strive to keep communication lively, work with a spirit of camaraderie, and maintain a friendly and humble atmosphere. Alongside the practices and events mentioned, we also organize various activities, including chats and games when we physically come together. We coordinate these activities together and carry them out using the motivation budget provided by our company. While physically coming together is undoubtedly enjoyable, we also make an effort to make remote work more enjoyable.
We hope this article has been helpful to you. If you decide to implement any of these methods in your team, we would be delighted if you could share your experiences and opinions with us.
Thank you for reading.
If you want to be part of a team that tries new technologies and want to experience a new challenge every day, come to us.
