With COVID-19 in full force, my engineering team has gone full remote.
In terms of working collaboratively, we're doing really well with a short stand up every morning, pair programming works well with VSCode live share and we have a "enginbeering" mini drink session at the end of the week.
But we want to make it better. One idea I have is to move some more of the engineering communication from slack to discord as I really like the always-on voice chat channels.
My question to you all is, if you're now remote or have worked remotely, did you have any unique events or things that promoted a positive "culture" to every from QA to PM's?
(eg - hackathons)
Top comments (5)
One thing that's important is to recognize different opportunities for work and fun in an async-friendly way because if folks are at home they may be in different "modes". Sync time is good but activities that are more async like sharing pics from folks lives, async online board games and things like "office pools" can be a lot of fun.
We're trying to establish better patterns around "hey, wanna hang out while we're working"... The "always on discord channel" is definitely an interesting concept here— but we also don't want to over-tool things so we need to meet in 100 different places.
Yea we don't want 100 different places either. If Slack had a voice channel it would be a good solution.
As we all in GMT/GMT+1 I might try suggest a morning google hangout session from 8:30 to 9:30 which is open to anyone to have their morning coffee/tea/walk and chat away.
We've played around with skribbl.io/ an online Pictionary game which was pretty fun and we created a Slack channel for dog photos which has been a success and in our retros we've used funretro.io/ which has been successful.
1) use gitlab / gitea / GitHub for coding. Git servers are new standard of collaborative working.
2) Good work - opensource project mgt .
3) use zoom etc to hold group meetings with some known personality at weekends.
we're using HeyCouscous! to celebrate the coworker's work. I think it's unique and fun.
see: couscous.bot/
Love this... We have a hackthon coming up so might get some of the team together to recreate something similar but with our company culture engrained in. For example, giving someone a work-related "meme" instead of couscous.