While our team has always had the option of work from home days, a full-time work from home culture is new to us. We’ve been instituting some fun new ways of staying connected, and making sure we’re taking care of our health, mental and physical. Here are a few things we have found truly useful in keeping us all engaged and collaborating.
Daily stand-ups.
We don’t want to miss out on the experience sharing we have face-to-face so our teams are checking in every morning to help them stay aligned and ensure we’re supporting each other. In addition to our Monday and Wednesday all-team meetings, we have also added a Friday all team check-in so we can wrap up the week together.
Staying Creative
When we’re remote, brainstorming and engaging our team is even more important. We’ve been trying breakout sessions on Zoom with collaborative Google Docs. When we’re done with our brainstorm, we bring the full group back together to present on what we came up with. If you’ve got questions on how to do one, feel free to email us and we’d be happy to talk you through it.
Our Wellness Challenge
As a team, we decided that ramping up a wellness challenge, both physical and mental, was timely. We have folks meditating, drinking water, and headed out for social distance runs. Give it a shot!
Staying Focused
To reduce anxiety, we did set up a Slack channel for all COVID-19 news, so people who need a break can mute it and come back to the news when they’re ready.
Virtual Happy Hour
We miss that casual down time we had easily in the office over lunch or at the end of the day. To create a little bit of that, we’ll be gathering via Zoom every Tuesday afternoon to share a beverage and do a couple breakout sessions to stay connected during the chaos.
Sharing Resources
We have a diverse team all transitioning to working remotely. We have parents juggling homeschool, work and the general chaos of the current situation. However, with folks now spending long periods of time with roommates, partners and pets. We all come across resources specific to another’s experience and we are happy to regularly share the resources we come across. From creative teaching ideas to free home workout sessions and meditation apps, we are all working together to keep each other healthy and informed.
Remote Work Reflections
We are learning and innovating our remote work experience. To continue to check-in on how things are working, each day our paid media team enters some remote work notes in a document to share how work went for them, how they’re feeling, and if there’s anything they’re noticing.
