how do you facilitate coffee break/after work beers/etc creativity?
- office hours: this is not a meeting ... it’s just a team dialed into a hangout or other voice chat for an hour. Totally optional. Folks can talk while working, talk about work, talk about not work, whatever. Just share the virtual space for a bit. This can be really helpful for “serendipity”, building trust and depth in interpersonal communication, cross-training, and otherwise just de-tensioning if you are involved in a high-stakes activity.
- BOF/hack-a-thon/quarterly on-site... basically, everyone meets somewhere in meatspace for a week (Monday PM to Friday AM). Good things to do during this time: planning, team-building, demos, tech-talks, bring in an outsider or trainer, etc. Lots of larger OSS projects do this.
At a previous job we had good PMs who were skilled as “agile coaches”. I hate to call them that, but I think it’s probably the closest thing that would be generally understood. They would help organize and host some excellent sessions on how to make our retrospectives and planning sessions go better.
I’ve also worked with sales engineers from key vendors to come in and do a hands on about new features, if I can schedule it. It’s usually low or no cost training. Making better use of tools you pay for can be huge.
Ps. Would love to hear more about others experiences with outside trainers coming in for hands-on sessions.
Keep it worksafe, but otherwise anything goes. Best thread we had was on at-home storage options, how to hack synology to do [X], people sharing code for said hacks, etc.
Daily chats and people bringing discussion topics on the regular really helped with team cohesiveness.
I quit after a while.
We've also found that there is some informal coffee talk with people who get to our occasional video call meetings early. Other members of the team have just started doing random 1:1s with each other to replace "coffee collisions".
Our culture at FS involves something called "RAEB" (the redundant array of expensive brains) and we'll often just drop half-baked ideas into slack with the expectation that nobody _has_ to evaluate it, but it may occasionally spark future work. We will also go back from time-to-time and search thru Slack history to see if there was anything that popped up that we should dig into more deeply.
I think that creativity just takes on a different form in a remote team.
https://en.boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=carcassonne
You can watch others play, if you're curious how it looks: https://en.boardgamearena.com/gameinprogress?game=1&all