Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals
I'm curious what unexpected team rituals have been helpful for your software development teams as you've been working remotely.
Rituals that are expected:
- everyone on the team writing up weekly summaries.
- record every video conference
- have lots of 1:1 meetings to maintain relationships
Rituals that have been unexpected:
- Posting once a week about what I did for fun over the weekend, usually with photos.
- Setting up longer phone call 1:1s where both attendees are walking.
I think the future of our working relationships will be increasingly remote, but I'm struggling to see interesting creativity for tightly integrated dev teams.
If new ways of working aren't established, I struggle to see how remote teams will compete with teams that meet in person on a weekly/daily basis.
152 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadAnd why assume introverts don't like these things? If anything, I prefer having an arena to be social, rather than having to take the initiative myself.
That sounds kinda forced
- Schedule peer programming sessions, especially with less senior staff. Without the office environment they have less opportunities to grow.
- All meetings should have a note listing all decisions made.
- Promote async communication. Have people describe a problem instead of saying hi and waiting for a reply.
Ask the damn question then.
I can assure you it’s just as frustrating having to slow an in person meeting down to remote pace because one person didn’t want to show up.
Borderline micromanagement and something to be padded and gamed.
* We have a monthly book club
* Every Friday afternoon we have an optional wrap-up call to just casually chat before signing off for the weekend
> Setting up longer phone call 1:1s where both attendees are walking.
Please god no.
> Please god no.
when both parties explicitly are not setup to do buerocratic work, it gives room for other important things and can reduce the bs burden dramatically.
I absolutely love this ritual on my team. I work with humans, not robots and knowing what they spend their non-work time doing (if they want to share, there's no pressure) helps build relationships which ultimately makes us a more effective team.
At previous full remote positions meetings were the exception and all communication happened either on IRC or hipchat/slack. And that was enough for us to be productive. It wasn't until I started working remotely for companies that define themselves as hybrid (aka we hire contractors too) or that were forced to go remote after the pandemic that my agenda has been being filled with zoom meetings.
I do not define myself as either introvert or extrovert, but I prefer to fill my social needs outside of work and some companies obsession with cult do really take a toll on my energy. It sometimes really feels self-catering to some people that seem to either always be connected or just slack off and sit their asses on meetings for the entire day while what I enjoy is getting shit done. </rant>
This doesn’t get enough airtime in the whole remote vs in-office debate IMO. I wish this topic was brought up more often because a diverse network of friends is a very special thing in life.
Every time someone complains that they miss their coworkers, someone just has to comment that "you should make friends outside your workplace" or, worse, that it's "unprofessional" to socialise at work.
As if those two things were mutually incompatible. You can have friends outside of work (some of them may even be former colleagues!) and you can still be friendly with your coworkers and enjoy seeing them.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s great to have genuine friendships with your coworkers. You work better together and have strong recommendations for the next job or have strong referrals to other companies when your friends leave.
At the same time though your employer is not your parents. The best thing they can do is respect a healthy work life balance and give you time so that you can establish your own friendships.
Schools provide an easy atmosphere to develop friendships without having to look too hard. College does not help with this.
I suspect some of them don't know how to make friends on their own.
Note: This is from the perspective of someone who didn't have more than one friend as a kid at any time.
Personally, I've never heard anyone explicitly say it's their employer's responsibility.
But if my employer occasionally offers me the option to leave the office early and go drinking at their expense, while getting paid? Nobody's going to oppose having the option.
But god forbid anyone just want to put in their time and go home, and not socialize with their coworkers after hours. How anti social of me. I clearly am not a team player.
I get great joy at socialization by working with people. It is something I've come to discover about myself, and I am not alone. And "work" doesn't have to include a job, but "working" with people on a sports team, or doing renovation at home or any other thing where we are working together to do something. Many other social things people like to do just doesn't do it much for me, although I've gotten better at it as the decades have passed.
It's not that I don't like leisure activities, it's just that my leisure activities are largely solo: video games, reading, tinkering on projects, etc.
So I'm starting to get really annoyed at this idea that "work" is something orthogonal to socialization, when I think the opposite is more true. Connecting with people I work with is important, and I am not alone. Nor do I think I'm in the minority.
You think it caters to people that just want to slack off. I think what you are describing creates a work environment devoid of joy and humanity. Working is not anti-human, it is a fundamental component of humanity.
Working is anti-human when that human has no choice but to work or else they become homeless and die in the street. For many, including myself, a job is a means to an end, not an extension of sociality. Apart of being human is understanding that other humans have a different perception of socialization and not being offended when they don't want to join you in small talk.
And to be honest on HN there's a lot more people getting offended by the idea that someone might enjoy small talk than vice versa.
I'm not saying that people should be forced into smalltalk, and I'm not saying that people that "just want to work" have something wrong with them, I'm just pushing back on the notion that it anti-human and aberrant to want to have a social component to work, when "work" is an important part of life.
But I also get great joy out of socializing by working. It's completely different from the other sorts of socializing I get, and neither is in any way a substitute for another.
I also am just happier and more productive in a social workplace. I get that not everyone needs or wants that, but it's important to me, and I know for a fact that there are plenty out there like me.
But on the weekend I play RPGs with my ancient group of friends and we have a huge history and common interest and that's a lot of fun too.
I also don't think that the introvert/extrovert distinction works well. I am quite a social person; I participate in quite a few activities like climbing, playing music, or ecstatic dancing. Recently I've been spending a lot of time busking and really enjoying my interactions with passers by. And I also really like to be at home, alone, getting stuff done-- work or writing music or whatever.
I have much preferred having more agency over what that looks like, and that rarely includes just chatting with co-workers. Fortunately, my coworkers all seem to feel the same.
Waste of time unless you’re an obsessive micromanager. Other team members either don’t read these entirely or just skim them.
> record every video conference
Don’t do this shit. It’s a great way to have everyone reserved rather than relaxed with free flowing ideas.
This is probably true if you work in complete isolation.
If, however, you are a part of a larger team or organization a lot of value can come out of this type of transparency - it removes the need for a lot of meetings and is a great tool in an asynchronous work environment.
Just two minutes ago one of the devs in a team I manage picked something someone from a different team logged about, and decided to initiate a discussion about a potential conflict.
I agree that it should not be mandated though, but should come from the fact that people see it as valuable.
There's also a cultural aspect of it - it brings life to an online community that have to be built, and it works to fill the need of casual interactions during lunch or other spontaneous gatherings that no longer occur with regular cadence.
I receive around 50 to 70 mails per day (on a slow day). Most of them corporate noise from the mother ship. I still need to at least skim them as sometimes parts or single mails are relevant.
Also there is a barrage of mails from the different projects I am onboarded onto as an expert for specific topics.
So I need to take a close look at these and see if there are action items for me included.
Then the regular mails from within the team I need to skim if anything is expected of me.
On top of that there is Slack and MS Teams. And a few different Jira Instances I need to stay on top of.
Over the last 16 months I have seen my team in person exactly once for an afternoon at a working offsite.
When Corona started I did a daily stand-up post in our team channel in Slack. I stopped a few weeks ago as except for one colleague nobody had participated for over a year. So why add to the noise for them I asked myself.
How would you expect me to read additional prose about what my colleagues have done. I just wouldn't get enough out of it. Because the things I would profit from in terms of synergies would be nitty-gritty technical details that would be omitted in a weekly summary.
It would just be additional noise to me.
If I have a question I ask in Slack and receive great substantial replies within very short time. If I can contribute I answer questions in Slack.
Else I do my work and try to ignore as much of the corporate noise as possible. At least it is email noise. Not open space office noise. The latter is harder to ignore.
The diary entries are supposed to replace other forms of communication - not be an addition.
My place of work strive for autonomous teams within specific business domains. You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in various projects, via email no less.
We’re facing completely different work environments, and as such you see a daily or weekly log as an additional burden. I see it as replacing tones of emails and meetings.
Again - it’s not required here, but as people have noticed the use and asynchronous discussions arising from these log entries, it’s taken a hold. I do them myself as a manager, as my team deserves to know what I’m up to.
The place and direct team not - the corporate mothership probably. It would be easy if I could at least filter out (internal) spam via sender addresses, but the sender address is a central one for ham as well as spam.
> You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in various projects, via email no less.
I am in part a bottle neck - in part just the consultant that is being onboarded into projects for specific questions, but as the probability is high that in the future there will be additional requests in my specific domains I am not rolled off these projects and therefore receive all client/project based "global" communication - even if my contribution is one hour every half a year.
So yeah. This is an interesting way of putting strain on my inbox.
> I see it as replacing tones of emails and meetings. I would love this. Would probably not work with my specific job - even if it could work for a lot of people in the place I work at.
Being a function across different teams makes this unpractical for me - but not for others.
I am, almost an involuntary, manager of 6 different dev teams, and I often say that my aim to reduce the “management” part of my job to a shared duties whiteboard.
Having this as an utopian goal I really strive to remove anything that will hinder team autonomy.
Transparency, communication and ownership is crucial to this mission. Always team, never individuals!
Where I work we have weekly update emails usually sent out on Friday. I actually enjoy writing down a bullet list of tasks I finished and which ones are planned for next week to keep myself organized. It's mostly for myself and not for others. You are not really expected to religiously read everyone's emails and skimming them is fine to keep a general overview what people around you are up to.
Try daily summaries, which is what we do. Glad to know this screaming "micromanaging" wasn't paranoia from my part though.
It’s kind of a shame that this is probably true. My company has some bi-weekly presentations/meetings that are recorded and I get a ton of value out of not attending them, but then pulling them up in my own time and playing them back at 2x speed.
i used to enjoy this too until i realised that not everybody can do it and i am probably beeing a dick for doing it.
idk your specific situation; it might make sense temporarily, but try to be emphatic.
I'm a senior who's been here for a while on a team of folks who are less experienced or are comparatively new to the company. My team has started doing a brief (few sentence) drop into Slack every few days and I couldn't be happier because it means I know when people are stuck and need a hand.
Remote orgies to appease the gods of nature and ensure a good deployment. Everyone wears traditional handmade masks for anonymity and we only do it if all tests are green, obviously. Every three months or so; depends a bit on the moon.
Previously we tried more traditional stuff like fire walking but we had to stop doing that one because a guy in another team wasn't careful setting up the coal, ended up burning the company laptop, and then HR banned it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Edit (for constructive commenting):
I guess I don't like rituals. I much rather prefer a less forced environment for more spontaneous and relaxed communication.
That's not to say you can't have some habits or whatever, but I feel most of those "cool ideas" always end up feeling tiresome to some part of the group if they don't grow from the people themselves.
tbh I found fire walking to be overrated. Onboarding is really difficult and, as a consequence, the Kanban board just doesn't paint a full picture for new staff during their first weeks. And the ritual has to happen late at night so every once in a while someone starts bickering about having to stay late at work and demands to be paid for extra hours. It's far more trouble than it's worth, I don't think it has any significant advantage over sacrificing a goat on spring equinox, which you only have to do once.
Really suspected this was just a metaphor for showing off your kids on camera. But then I read the rest, and I'm not sure any more.
I picture the collective hackernews nodding in unison, muttering 'obviously.'
- weekly 1:1 with our line manager
- weekly Team meeting (15 minutes of status updates, rest of the time talking over project ideas or other LoB)
- shared team chat room on Webex teams.
Both meetings are video optional but most folks choose to hop on video.
That’s it. It works well, and there is minimal bureaucracy.
- 3 daily standups per week (15 minute video calls for team alignment),
- weekly 1:1 with line manager (30 minute call or face to face if in UK office)
We do record some of the video conferences when our Indian and Japanese colleagues cannot attend.
WIPs.
Asynchronous comms.
That’s it. For people who want to, they develop a closer relationship and catch up more often. But it’s not expected.
We trust our people, and expectations have been set and agreed upon. It’s enough.
An interesting choice of word worth exploring. One could have said "activity" or "procedure", but ritual carries some connotations about the state of remote/hybrid working.
What I think you're asking is - what ways we can connect/bond in human ways? Group dynamics, team identity, loyalty, non-monetary reward, focus and satisfaction, and much more, are determined by the interpersonal bonds that obviously have been disintegrating in a post-pandemic workforce.
Great that people want to find ways to preserve that.
Rituals can be healthy, but also toxic. If an organisation already has a strong charter they can be used to keep it on track. But they can be used to select and filter group membership, and if anyone (the super-sociable one) gets to define and enforce rituals they become a mechanism for one group to take over the company and impose their values by fiat.
For example, food in the workplace is contentious. I consulted at a medium sized London startup where there was a daily banquet of obscenely healthy vegetarian food. At the order of the MD's wife, lunch attendance was "required", lest you fall our of favour with "the family" (which is how she cringingly referred to the company workers). She would sit and watch everybody with eagle eyes. Having a controlling "feeder" policing the staff this way felt toxic.
In many big London firms, "pints with the lads" on Friday is a City ritual that weeds out the family-men and those who can't navigate the social status intricacies of "buying the boss a beer". Going to a bar with 18 year old lap-dancers gets old when you want be at home and talk to your wife, or 18 yo daughter about her A-level homework. In some Japanese work culture, drinking till you can't stand up is a symbol of workplace vigour and loyalty. Although in healthy companies the women come out for drinks too, these rituals are often ways to cement male domination.
To quote Nietzsche "What new rituals must you invent to atone..." As rituals transform into electronic versions there is no doubt that new controlling behaviours will emerge, making performative rituals of loyalty, denouncement, compliance and symbolic belonging. There are already new ways of including or excluding people via technological means just along the lines of "Teams or Zoom" [1]
Meetings can also just be meetings. But really they are more. "Rituals", if they are to be healthy, need to be optional, evolve organically, and do so in a way that is inclusive of the whole team.
[1] Other much better teleconferencing solutions are available.
You may speak of ritual or ceremony when something has been instituted for generations or at least several years, for significant effects towards the group itself (not towards its output).
When the form and content of your practices change every 6 months, and vary widly because the things you work on, or because the hierarchy mandates you to, or because the group/team itself changes, that's nothing that's been instituted.
A business company may very well have its own set of practices. But trying to tweak vocabulary towards making them sound like they are of the same level of importance and impact as rituals or ceremonies, with what those words mean in the social and religious senses, is really an attempt at manipulation.
I absolutely agree with you, and it's all around us, and becoming normative. We work in an industry, only 40 years old at most, that believes, with near religious fervour, that it's purpose is to radically redefine the very nature of life, work and society [1]. (I was given this super interesting link to the Barbrook Cameron essay by another HN poster [2].)
> When the form and content of your practices change every 6 months, and vary wildly because the things you work on, or because the hierarchy mandates you to
"Move fast and break things" isn't only about technology. It's also about breaking extant norms and transvaluation. One of the sinister sides of digital technology, in my opinion, is precisely this lie of omission with respect to "disruption". It's not just about "progressively replacing old and inefficient", a disruptor weapon can be turned on anything to gain the ends you want. That makes an even bigger nonsense of the already ridiculous notion of technological determinism, because at the very least you now have to ask "determined by who". Which gang of breathless neophytes will be telling me how to live my life today?
[1] http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideol...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=30931517
I don’t use zoom regularly, my org is into Google Meet. I’ve also used talky.io for small groups (and to play their waiting rocket game haha).
- As some context, we use Basecamp's Shape Up to deliver features. This prioritises independence, async communication, and deep work. Engineers and designers are largely free to manage their active projects to how they see fit (managers provide context).
- Team social activities only happen on Mondays and Friday. Tuesday -> Thursday are reserved for deep work.
- We found that mixing social and work meetings didn't work (i.e. a weekly kick-off where people both talk about their weekend and their priorities). Instead, we have a 100% social coffee video call on Monday mornings with some jazz. Weekly work updates happen async and are project-dependent.
- On Fridays afternoons we have a quiz or a board game. We like doing it later afternoon on Friday, where deep work is less likely to happen. We also have an async social check-in with a different prompt each week, where you can share some experiences, pictures of a holiday, etc.
- Quarterly retreats where we get the team together. We do a morning session and an afternoon session every day, with the rest of the time unstructured/fun.
Things are avoid:
- We avoid stand-ups which devolve into people listing out what they did yesterday - instead, we encourage async self-organization
- We try and back to back meetings to avoid context switching and 30m-2hr deadzones
- We discourage arranging calls just to organize thoughts (I was bad at this myself). In our experience, communication is higher fidelity if it is written up in message threads on Basecamp. Video calls are really only used for 1:1s, social meetings, demos, or regrouping in the context of an active project.
- We got rid of Slack. Active projects have their own chat rooms, but the rule of thumb is: presume anything not in a forum thread or document is ephemeral and will be lost forever.
We have started putting together a lot of our rituals and culture together in our handbook (https://handbook.datapane.com), so would love any feedback.
One thing I like about my current team is that we have a 30 minute daily to begin the morning with, and usually the first 15 minutes is spent just doing light socialising, talking about whatever we fancy. Then we get into work.
I think it's valuable to have the social connection with your team mates, and its a good way to ease into the day.
Also social check-ins are not great unless everyone is just living their best life. Over the pandemic it was pretty damaging for me as I was stuck in my 500 sqft apartment with an immunocompromised mother, too scared to go get groceries; and then seeing people from other departments posting about their spur of the moment vacation to cancun was quite the demoralizing agent... And, again, my colleagues aren't always my friends and I don't like to be forced to share my personal life with random people I wouldn't talk twice to outside of work.
It sounds like as an employer you're exercising unjust control over your employees personal and social lives. Some people may like this, but it's never been received well by me, my colleagues, or even friends I've worked with. We'd all rather have just enjoyed the extra time off and we could hang out if we were friends anyway. So while it may work for you, I believe you are self-selecting out of employees who would find this kind of thing a giant red flag; so the advice is likely skewed to those who want to foster a tolerable work environment for everyone.
I do like your forum idea though, I've been a large proponent of written documentation and thread-based persistent communication for years. However, convincing product/design/business of this is very difficult.
What do you write in them that you didn't already mention during the daily standing meetings, the biweekly retrospective, the team meetings, the company meetings, or the Slack channels at the time they were relevant?
I've worked with people who wanted more status updates, but all too often those updates just became "No news to report since I've been in status update meetings or other meetings since my last status update." and nothing was actually getting done. So we trimmed some of those rituals back (and could trim more.)
If anything, all those rituals and forced chats not only get in the way of getting work done, they also get in the way of the natural spontaneous development of working relationships. The sort of banter that happens when people are actually getting things done and feeling good and want to chat. Instead of being stressed because they're getting nothing done and constantly interrupted with all of the forced chat and rituals.
Well I would rather write up weekly summaries and cut down on meeting time. Daily standup is not a time for summary. It's a time to check to see if people are blocked. If no one is blocked, you go back to work.
I wish most teams did it this way, but it is almost always the case that time is burned going over what they did. I feel like that could always be done asynchronously in a place like Slack.
Also: Jira ticket updates (e.g. rule to update them at least once a day), commit messages, PR messages, ...
Also, meetings to make collective decisions about ongoing work as needed.
This and a Slack channel has been working well for us. We don't record zoom calls, but write down the minutes with concrete action points. I don't think we had many more 1:1's.
We have a permant meeting open the whole day where everybody is free to join. Normally, it is started in the morning and a few people will join. After initial chit-chat everbody is doing their work either with the microphone off or on. When there are short topics to be discussed or questions arise it is directly done in the meeting and for bigger topics a new meeting/call is setup with the people involved. So most of the time it is quiet but you only hear the typing of your colleagues.
It basically mimics an open space office and direct human interaction where you can ask questions and overhear interesting topics with the advantage of being able to simply leave (or lower the volume) when you have a meeting or need absolute silence.
Additionally, we have a coffee break meeting in the afternoon for half an hour, that is also not obligatory, in which you can small-talk with your colleagues.
So, in total we have lots of opportunities to interact with colleagues but nothing is mandatory.
For me, and most people I've worked with, having an all-day meeting specifically to mimic the open office is not something we'd ever propose ourselves. Was it a bottom-up or a top-down decision? Is everyone happy with it?
The meeting grew organically: When I started in Corona times I had a few meetings a day with my mentor to talk about open points and questions. From there it evolved to a permanent meeting, also with others joining.
Attending the meeting is not mandatory; everybody is free to join and leave whenever they want. Some use it more regularly, some don't. I haven't heard of anybody not being happy with it.