Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals

147 pointscodemac145 comments

Hi HN!

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.

View on HN

Blood sacrifices and invocations to see who can summon the cutest and fiercest beast. You show your demon to the camera and get votes on it and on the chants you did to bring it from the depths. At the end of each sprint.

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.

Where do I send my resumé? :)

> 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 and then HR banned it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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.

The goat has to be sacrificed at an Equinox gym for that to work, duh. Why do you think they call it spring equinox?

Are you people hiring?

> Blood sacrifices and invocations to see who can summon the cutest and fiercest beast. You show your demon to the camera and get votes on it and on the chants you did to bring it from the depths.

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.

...and we only do it if all tests are green, obviously.

I picture the collective hackernews nodding in unison, muttering 'obviously.'

Having worked remote for more than 10 years I feel most of these rituals as imposed after the pandemic by the managing layers and people obsessed with work culture. I accept any non mandatory activity and might participate sometimes. But boy, I hate that my week is filled with meetings.

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>

>> but I prefer to fill my social needs outside of work

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.

It gets way too much airtime.

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.

I am definitely more on this side of the fence. Fill your social calendar however you want to fill your social calendar. But social media, and HN in particular, is filled with people saying that you should basically only contact your coworkers via work channels for work purposes during work time and anything else is wrong or rude and is bad and you should feel bad.

Agreed. I’m curious why young, fresh out of college grads who move across country (and have few / no friends in the new local area) make it their employers responsibility to foster friendships?

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.

> I’m curious why young, fresh out of college grads who move across country (and have few / no friends in the new local area) make it their employers responsibility to foster 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.

> I’m curious why young, fresh out of college grads [...] make it their employers responsibility to foster friendships?

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.

As long as I can also choose to leave the office early and not go drinking, I have no problem with that.

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.

The absolute worst to me is team scheduled events that go past 5. Like if you want team mandated bonding, plan for it in the sprint, schedule time for it, and make it a part of the work day. If I'm expected to stay to 6 or 7 or 8 to hangout with co workers AND were going to have to work harder the next day to make up for that lost time then you are actually hurting the team, not helping.

counter rant:

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 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.

I think it's hard to classify that as anti-human when that has been the same for the entirety of our existence as a species.

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.

The entirety of our existence, and I mean all the way back when we were single-celled organisms, it has been work or die. It isn't until relatively recently that any other option generally represented itself.

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.

Want to layer onto this as someone with a similar, but slightly different perspective. I have a very active social life, and most of my leisure activities are group ones.

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.

Pre-pandemic, I had a fairly active social life, and I want to get it back (life changes happened, too, where my wife and I used to play soccer and other sports, and had social outlets there, but we hit an age where that became too tough on us) - so I agree with what you are saying. The thing is, there are different types of people you end up socializing with. Outside of work, it tends to be more people like us, with the same interests, same kind of humor, etc. At work, I get to socialize with people that I don't normally get to socialize with - especially with remote work. On my team now are people from different religions, nationalities, backgrounds, etc. People I never would meet usually, or at best, rarely. They think differently than me, and that's really cool and interesting.

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 agree with this and I've also been remote for more than a decade. The only time I have seen folks try and start implementing these things has been in meetings with folks who are managing teams that have recently become remote.

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.

> - Posting once a week about what I did for fun over the weekend, usually with photos.

Honestly, if I heard about this during the hiring process I'd see it as a red flag. Especially the photos.

I once had this terrible VP who was a horrible micromanager and an all around a-hole. For every weekly meeting he'd go around the room forcing people to share what they did on the weekend. It was under the guise of "team building" but it was really him just being the type of person who'd later use your personal stuff against you. It was very possible that you'd say something and he'd immediately see that as a red flag and your career progression is over in that org.

I share my personal life with people at work that I trust. I don't trust everybody on my team and I've never trusted everyone on my team at any of my jobs. I can trust somebody to do a good job with their deliverables while not trusting their motives outside of that.

Sharing aspects of your personal life should come naturally and never be forced. I think the role that leadership/management has to play here is to lead by example. A healthy work environment acknowledges that everyone has lives outside of work and encourages people to keep work and life in balance. As a manager, if I share details about my personal life it encourages others on the team to do the same. The opposite extreme is where leadership never shares anything and creates a dehumanizing environment where work and delivering results takes precedence.

>As a manager, if I share details about my personal life it encourages others on the team to do the same.

It works if you are a good manager and the sharing happens naturally. The manager I referred to would always share details of his personal life that were really bragging, which of course created a horrible environment for sharing.

A good manager would share and then see which employees want to share back and which did not. They would shape future discussions accordingly.

As an employee, I've had some managers who like to talk about their personal life and others who do not. As an employee I've never started my 1:1s by sharing my personal life every single time and expecting my manager to do the same when it's clear they don't want to talk about it. But due to power dynamics, bad managers can do that sort of thing and be oblivious to how uncomfortable their employees feel about it.

I suspect a lot of folks have some trauma from past bosses that inform how they view relatively tame things. When I start a new job I set myself as away on slack and never change it to active because I had a boss who would message me if I was away for more than 5 minutes during COVID. The green/gray circle is pretty big brothery and feels crazy to me but everyone accepts it.

I think I'm hyper sensitive to this because of my old boss, like you are more sensitive to sharing what you did over the weekend. Bad managers suck and can cause issues that impact you for years.

This sounds exactly like a manager I had before. We called him "Fart" behind his back. He was definitely one of the top-three worst managers of my 30+ year career.

I think anyone who aspires to me a manager should ask themselves, "Where does my leadership 'power' come from?" The answer is NOT:

1. Title/position. 2. Company org chart. 3. Experience. 4. Education.

The "power" of leadership comes from the people you manage. If you treat them right, you will have their loyalty, respect, and good work. If not, you can be King of the World, and nobody will follow you willingly, because you're a dick.

Yes, you can wield your company-power to fire people, similar to the way dictators keep people in line via the threat of physical violence or imprisonment, but that isn't leadership. It's weak and cowardly despotism.

Yup. This guy used to fly off the handle and lose his temper all the time. Probably had to apologize 1 a week to an employee for saying something nasty just because he couldnt control his emotions.

You're talking about something very different. I agree - forced socialising like this is terrible!

I think the word "ritual" indicates it's forced. Maybe not forced by management, but if 80% of the team is doing it, there's a lot of pressure on people to do the same.

I share details of my personal life with my team, but it definitely isn't a ritual in any sense of the word. People share when they feel like they want to.

I always find "What did you do over the weekend?" type stuff insanely boring. I imagine a website that generates random plausible answers to this question - how much time would I spend generating and reading random responses? Answer: Enough to see whether and how well it worked, and then never again. Why would I care about what my coworkers did over the weekend? It's like using that website for fun. When people ask me this question I always say "I didn't do anything at all" and then fall silent. My hope is that the awkwardness of this response will encourage them to stop talking to me.

In my view this over-familiarity with coworkers is partially a consequence of individual atomization in society. People who have moved across the country to a new city where they have no friends or family try to find surrogates in their company and companies, trying to encourage worker loyalty and sacrifice, promote the idea of being friend or family like. I don't think of my coworkers as friends and certainly not family. My coworkers are strangers who happen to work at the same company. I have to interact with them to do my job but that requires only polite communication about work. I don't need to know anything about their personal lives and prefer not to know.

Yikes. Some of us are just friendly.

Small talk enjoyers have the advantage that they can nonconsensually initiate small talk and it's rude for small talk dislikers to even express their dislike. I don't see how unilaterally engaging people in an activity that only you like is "friendly".

How about because an individual puts themself out there to try and build a relationship around shared values, activities, joys? If it's not reciprocated they try something else, or eventually move on.

I think you're using "small talk" pejoratively, but all big and deep things start off small. Example: I met my wife of 20+ years eating lunch at a picnic table over casual conversation, so I'm all-in on small talk.

I met my wife when we were both posting on a forum about how we wanted to get married and have kids. We didn't start off with small talk and are now married and have kids, so I think that disproves your notion of "all big and deep things start off small." Perhaps always starting small is one approach, but it's not a universal one.

As another example, I'd point to this conversation. You and I don't need to engage in small talk here to share our thoughts on some subject. I directly state my opinion and you state yours and we can discuss. At no point do I need to ask how your day was, about the weather, or what you did over the weekend. I am interested in discussions (that's why I participate in them online) but I don't care about any of that banal stuff. I hope your weekend was great, but I don't need to know about it.

You're missing the point of small talk, which is largely nonverbal. Is it wise to assume an API that returns an empty message body is broken, or to look for useful information in the response code and the headers?

> - everyone on the team writing up weekly summaries.

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.

> 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?

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.

>Daily standup is not a time for summary.

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, ...

Most my coworkes are introverts. We do not do anything above. Unexpected enough? And we are lean and mean highly functional team. The most helpful for my team is let people be themselves and not force rituals.

So... Your ritual is no rituals?

Who talked about "force" here?

And 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.

> Rituals that are expected

That sounds kinda forced

Rituals are mandatory by definition, so everything we're talking about is forced

I would have assumed the total opposite. A ritual to me is something that is generally observed but not enforced.

> everyone on the team writing up weekly summaries.

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.

> Waste of time unless you’re an obsessive micromanager. Other team members either don’t read these entirely or just skim them.

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 am one of the most senior members of the team I am in.

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.

Seems like your place of employment have a bunch of cultural and work process issues to sort out, to be honest.

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.

> Seems like your place of employment have a bunch of cultural and work process issues to sort out, to be honest.

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.

Interesting read - I love questioning “the process” and drilling down in ways of working.

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!

> Waste of time unless you’re an obsessive micromanager. Other team members either don’t read these entirely or just skim them.

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.

> Waste of time unless you’re an obsessive micromanager. Other team members either don’t read these entirely or just skim them.

Try daily summaries, which is what we do. Glad to know this screaming "micromanaging" wasn't paranoia from my part though.

> Don’t do this shit. It’s a great way to have everyone reserved rather than relaxed with free flowing ideas.

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 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.

> Other team members either don’t read these entirely or just skim them.

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 work thrives when you optimize for asynchronicity. The things you've listed do the opposite of that and sounds like a massive productivity sink.

"Lots of 1:1s" is a red flag for a team that can't work remote well, imo. Fewer 1:1s, optimize async communication (code review, short notes and docs, IMs or emails, a culture of respecting silence or delayed replies), that's great remote.

I had a manager earlier in the pandemic who could not work remotely and could not manage the team remotely because they wanted tons of 1:1s and only communicated through video, synchronously. The team struggled with this, because we couldn't get any work done (it was like being in a conference room all day) and the manager didn't have the technical comprehension skills to follow our IMs, code reviews, and technical documentation so they scheduled more 1:1s, more video calls, etc. It was terrible. The team came close to celebrating when the manager left.

I think "lots of 1:1s" sounds great but is pretty draining to implement. I love chatting with my coworkers 1:1 - I feel like people can't/don't talk as much in group meetings so the 1:1s are nice to maintain a connection with coworkers you haven't met in person.

But! At the end of the week when you realize you spent 6 hours in 1:1s as an IC on top of your regular meetings, it feels very unsatisfying. It takes a lot of time from your work that you're still expected to get done.

I agree with this (and that manager sounds awful). But want to note that having a successful remote/async team has a few prerequisites:

(1) Skilled, engaged contributors. Most high touch management processes (frequent 1-1s, agile ceremonies) exist in order to motivate, guide, and create accountability for mediocre/disengaged employees. High performers can execute successfully in a process vacuum (in fact, they often do their best work with maximal freedom), but unfortunately not all teams are composed exclusively of high performers.

(2) Team members need to have shared values and a baseline level of trust and respect for each other. If they don't trust each other, disagree about technical approaches, or there are power struggles within the team, frequent meetings are often necessary to resolve disagreements that can otherwise spiral and bog everyone down.

I'll also note that I think it's difficult for managers to transition from managing mediocre teams to high-performing ones. The job changes from "telling people what to do and making sure it gets done" to "advocating for my people and empowering them to execute independently." And some managers struggle to recognize that, feel superfluous, and double down on what they know (Jira! Scrums!) in order to feel effective.

- Meetings are remote first. If at least one person is remote then the whole team video calls in. There is nothing worse than being a person on the virtual end trying to understand a mic grabbing voice from a room full of people.

- 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.

If someone sends me just “Hi” in slack, they’re still waiting to this day.

Or "Hey, quick question."

Ask the damn question then.

you should check out https://www.nohello.com/ Some folks at my workplace have been using this to explain their point of view to people who just send Hi/Hello

These "slack farts" really irk me. The first time someone does it, I usually respond with the nohello.com link and a brief note letting them know that the niceties aren't necessary - you can just ask your question.

>There is nothing worse than being a person on the virtual end trying to understand a mic grabbing voice from a room full of people.

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.

The pandemic has made it more challenging. I've worked remotely for over eight years and managed teams for 4 of those years. Engagement feedback has dramatically shifted, with people feeling disconnected and needing more social interaction. Before the pandemic, people leveraged their local social networks and didn't need work to be their source of community.

One of the rituals on my team that has stuck for years is an hour block every two weeks for the team to simply talk. No plan, no forced games or activities, only conversation. It gives us a chance to learn about each other freely. No discussion (within reason) is off the table; we talk about anything from food to astrophysics.

Unstructured conversation has been the only thing that consistently keeps people excited that it's on the calendar. It's a chance for everyone to see the authentic side of their teammates and learn who they are.

I couldn't agree more and funny enough I created a conversation app at frenemy.live that helps with just this.

Interesting, we’ve found unstructured conversation pretty much impossible on Zoom. No one liked the open ended happy hours, so they stopped. Games actually got people talking.

If common interests aren't found during the unstructured conversation, the manager should be probing for commonalities during 1:1s and using them to spark the conversation. Once the conversations start happening, they will snowball from there. Like anything, sometimes it needs an icebreaker.

We have a weekly standup with detailed notes, a 30 minute 1:1 with the engineering manager, and a 1 hour shoot the shit meeting midweek, and a 1 hour all-hands every other week. We post a sentence or two daily on what we're doing every day. It's pretty ideal in terms of cutting the fat on meetings, but our team is growing crazy fast, and I don't really feel like I know anybody. The casual meeting is usually dominated by a few talkative people. This is fine! It's a normal dynamic, it would happen IRL to some extent. But it would be nice to figure out how to do more casual 1:1 conversations remotely. Haven't come up with a good idea for that. I've been thinking about reaching out for a casual 30 minute lunch chat or a coffee thing, but I also don't want to interrupt anyone's work.

> - record every video conference

This is dumb. My last company didn't allow recording for the most part due to data retention, which is as good a reason as any for me, but my new place does and I don't understand it. Recording a meeting means that the best way for information to be shared is in a meeting, and I fundamentally disagree with that. Most of the meetings I go to could have been an email. Of those, the email could be pretty short. If teams are communicating in smaller, more frequent chunks, meetings, and the recording of them, wouldn't be necessary. Besides, it's not like you can interact with a video, but you can with a Slack thread or email. Don't force recording culture. It's dumb.

I worked remotely for five years before the pandemic, and helped people adjust to being remote since I was seen as an "expert" at doing it when everyone suddenly stayed home. The biggest aspect to my success, I would argue, is that I don't treat it like remote is different. Of course it is, and there is something to be said for being together, in person, but high quality audio and video make for a pretty good replacement for most of the interpersonal interactions from before. So my ritual load didn't change, just the means of participation. We still have daily standup, we still chat a lot, and instead of sitting around a table in the office working, we sit on a Zoom - and we don't record it. It works as well, if not better, than before since people can work the hours they want without the drain of a commute.

> 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.

Please god no.

>> Setting up longer phone call 1:1s where both attendees are walking.

> 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.

Not directly a software development team but also consulting grouped by location and/or project.

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.

You said you weren't a software development team. What kind of functions do you have?

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?

Would rephrase it to not only SW team but also consulting.

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.

Sometimes, especially if you're on the senior side, you need to set up a meeting so that you can answer questions. Junior folks don't always feel that they should be doing this, but being remote increases the friction of the usual solution of "asking when they bump into me at the water cooler" (though text chat is of course still available, in practice there is a class of things that it just isn't used for).

I've been mentoring a new team member hired during the pandemic, and one of the most useful things is that I set up an additional weekly 1-1 for which that new member "owns" the agenda. If they don't have anything to discuss, they just tell me in text chat and we don't have the meeting. On the other hand, it presents a great opportunity to raise those back-of-mind things

Cameras are optional for meetings except once a week when the whole team gathers and syncs up. The day is known in advance so even people who don't like cameras have time to "tidy up". Once every two weeks we discuss team/process related issues. If the agenda is empty we still have the meeting but instead talk about community, volunteering, or just do games/current events.

Why have cameras at all?

> Posting once a week about what I did for fun over the weekend, usually with photos.

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.

I'm a manager. (Sorry.) I do a weekly Friday "Ask me anything" on Zoom that's basically a free-form training session where people reporting to me (or other teams are fine, too) ask about how to do something or how we should be doing something, and we walk through it in video.

One reason I started this is we had a mix of junior people, people who came in from acquisitions, and people who had changed tools and weren't sure of best practices. This stuff was supposed to be documented in wiki pages, and a lot of times it was, but when we'd run through it hands-on, we'd find details that weren't documented or had gone stale.

Another reason is that formal written-in-advance training sessions are overbearing for everyone involved. They take too much time to prepare, too much time to give, nobody pays attention because they don't like being talked to, and if things go off script, the presenter has to scramble to adapt. It was better for someone to say on Monday "I need to know more about how we're supposed to be doing GitHub PR reviews" and then on Friday, I'd have a post-it of notes and we'd fire up a browser, go through a fake PR or look at an old one, and maybe talk about pain points or what isn't working.

Also, we'd record these and store them for posterity, and so people in other time zones could catch them later.

How often would someone watch them later?

Seldom, except when we on-boarded new people. This was mostly to counter when the folks on one continent would feel left out when folks on another continent were given custom training, and the feeling that institutional knowledge was being hoarded by different teams.

(In reality, they were doing a lot more off-boarding than on-boarding in my last year there. And thanks to agile and daily releases, nobody had any free time to do less important things like training, days off, or sleeping.)

I don't think we do any of this... we have a 24/7 open group video-call, people can join and leave when they want to have a chat, or want to ask something to the group or are looking for assistance. In depth technical talks will then usually migrate temporarily to a second/third channel. We do our daily standups in the main channel to keep it alive and active. Besides that we have many (signal) text-channels for every group/team/technology, so people can get contacted easily.

Helpful ritual: not having zoom meetings half of every work day. Went from a remote company that did this to one that didn’t and I am way more productive and less burnt out.

Also helpful: no forced online hangouts and discussion of current events as if it’s necessary to do at work.

I'd rather work on a team that simply wants to get things done as opposed to conducting various rituals. Accomplishment is probably the ultimate team building exercise.

I used to think that social rituals were bullshit, but I've completely changed my mind. I think they are just often done poorly and distract the team from what is important. I'm sure there is room for improvement and YMMV, but our current process is working really well for us:

- 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.

> 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).

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.

You have too much stuff tacked onto a friday. If you want happier employees just let them have the early weekend instead of doing a "quiz" or "board game". I come to work to work, not be forced to play games with colleagues.

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.

In design, but fully remote for the last two years in both a IC and manager role in different teams. Some of the rituals that've naturally evolved (key word, naturally):

- text chat is huge and where the main form of socialization happens rather than verbally. I gotta admit - to somebody that has bad hearing, it's been a boon.

- sending each other "good morning" gifs a few times a week. It's endearing. :)

- so many gif responses.

- friday music chats.

- "private" watercooler channels with the immediate team where the suits (aka my boss) aren't allowed in, as well as more public ones where they have read/write access. both are needed for very different reasons. not that you want to commit to text anything you wouldn't tell your boss, but sometimes there needs to be an area where you can be snarky about a suit's (bad) presentation and there's no fear.

- I was more hands off at the beginning of the pandemic but really have taken a point to schedule 1:1's depending on the bandwidth of the other person and it's been the glue that holds together the team tbh.

I am not a big friend of rituals. They feel artificial to me.

I have started to call people on Teams like we did when we had only phones. No planned meetings, no “do you have time for a call?”, just call in the same way I would walk over in the office to chat with somebody. Others have started doing this too and it feels way less formal. I also have told people stop saying “sorry for interrupting “ when they call. It’s my job to help them and I get paid for it.

As scrum master I tend to repeat all the time that the number one duty of everybody is to notify me when they run into a blocker they can’t resolve themselves. Or even better, call the person who can help. Call them now.

All in all, I try to create an environment with direct communication so things get resolved quickly. I feel with remote work there is a temptation to formalize every interaction into a planned meeting so things that could get resolved in a five minute chat suddenly need days of going back and forth until people talk to each other directly.

I've been working full remote for over a decade, at multiple companies, many of whom have tried many things. What seems to be less obtrusive is daily sync meetings, where the only purpose of the meeting is learning if anyone is stuck and needs help. Beyond that we are in constant communication via discord (internally) and slack (clients).. Using discord audio channels to simulate people in the same room helps with onboarding too, because the new person can just speak as if the experienced staff is in their room with them. One company wanted a daily "what did you do" email, which was just a waste of time, as nobody read them, they require real time to write, and they became a joke people knew nobody read.

> everyone on the team writing up weekly summaries

Borderline micromanagement and something to be padded and gamed.

I’ve really seen this go both ways. As an individual contributor working remotely with a mostly in person team sending a weekly summary was one of my most effective tools for getting my work seen and getting people to address issues that were impacting me. As an individual contributor on a fully remote team I saw many of my peers treat the weekly summary as a chore and put minimal effort in, which meant the content wasn’t very useful, which meant no one bothered to read it and the whole exercise just became a waste of time. This type of thing can be incredibly valuable, but it really depends on team culture and buy in from the participants.

We do this. Some people write "I made the X", others go into detail about what they're doing. It lets everyone on the team have a _very_ rough idea of what other people are working on.

Team of 6 in UK, 1 in Italy, 2 in India, 1 in Japan

- 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.

We have:

- Daily standups (10-15 mins). On Mondays there is often an additional 5-15 mins added to the start of this where we discuss what we've done over the weekend.

- Bi-weekly retrospectives (~1 hour) which give us space to reflect and make sure that everyone's still on the same page.

- For people working closely together: a lot of work-focussed 1:1 audio calls (with screen sharing where appropriate). Which range from a 2 minute quick clarification to several hour pair programming sessions (with regular 5-10 minute breaks).

This is effectively not much different to in-office interactions.

Our team is just doing a regular scrum. Two-week sprints; daily scrums to synchronise and plan the work for the day; regular backlog refinements and sprint plannings to determine which tasks should be worked on next; a sprint review; and a retrospective to find out the pain points from the last sprint.

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.

Just here for ideas. One of the things i always felt would make my life easier as an employee is if I knew my manager's way of working. Like does she value speed over precision, how early in ideation can i approach her for feedback, and so on. Probably makes her life easier too if we knew what she wanted. You learn that in office through iteration and a lot of casual chats - where you get to know others - but how do you accomplish that in remote? Are there teams which have done something around this?

Have you tried talking to your manager?

Right now I am working on something of my own, so don't have that exact problem. Hence I said "here for ideas". Was just curious if people do have come up with something, because it seems like a recurring and wide ranging problem, solving which can make office work easier. For a manager to tell me how they work, there are better ways than 1 on 1, since it would be same across the team. Same goes for teammates.

Our fully remote 10 person team has a very brief daily standup, and 20 minute standdown. We also have a biweekly demo to which we invite leadership.

I sent out an anonymous survey recently, and everyone wanted to keep doing each element of this, and thought it was very beneficial. People also said they wanted more planning, more pair programming, and more context given in people's standup/standdown updates. Only one person said they didn't want more collaboration.

We recently introduced doing some planning every 8 weeks; plan is fly to the home office, spend a week having those spontaneous in person conversations that are hard to replicate. We've done two of these ad-hoc, everybody liked them, so we decided to make it a thing.

Every day we choose stand down ordering by answering some random dumb question with a unique answer and the rule "un-serious answers only", e.g. "What is your favorite color? RGB values only", answer "#FACB12", "My favorite color cannot be represented via RGB." or and then arbitrarily ordering it, e.g. "alphabetized by third letter in answer", or "most pedantic response", or whatever. It adds some human flavor without forcing any Bonding™. It's a nice light touch way to give the opportunity for banter without forcing it.

> We recently introduced doing some planning every 8 weeks; plan is fly to the home office, spend a week having those spontaneous in person conversations

You plan to have everyone fly somewhere for a week, every 8 weeks?! Wow. Really glad I'm not on that team.

Every 8 weeks seems quite frequent and exhausting, but I recently met colleges from the wider company in person for the first time and I loved it. I recognise there's value that comes from that!

Sure! Pre-pandemic, my company used to bring people together a couple of times a year, and I agree there was considerable value in it. But every 8 weeks? Maybe that team are all young, energetic, and family-free, but at my stage of life I would find that pretty gruelling.

Yeah, I'm 33 and I'm wondering if I'm going to find it too grueling. The detail I'm omitting is that half the team already lives in NY, most of the rest live in driving distance, so there are actually only two of us flying in, and we have the clear option not to fly in. I bring a woman I'm seeing along, we go see plays, it's pretty pleasant. If I had kids I think this would be no fly, so to speak.

I have daily standups with 2 teams. Weekly status reports writing. BiWeekly sprint planning with weekly sprint retro. Weekly 1-1 with manager and one coworker (I don’t know why I). Weekly knowledge sharing session. Daily project statuses (besides the standups, of course). And last, ladies and gentlemen, weekly virtual happy hour on Friday in which everybody feels awkward and just talks more about work. I’m getting out of here.

Daily

-----

Daily standups 15-30 minutes.

About 2 hours of Adhoc Teams calls.

Lunch - I have to book this into my calendar or else they book meetings and sometimes they still book meeting over this 30 minute period.

Weekly

------

Multiple multi hour refinement sessions up to 3 per week.

1 hour meeting with PO every week.

30 minutes catchup call with all the PE's (some seniors) every week.

Bi-Weekly

---------

30 minutes Status meeting with Head of Dev / Principles on current project every week.

15 minute Scrum of Scrums.

1 hour sprint Review.

30 minutes Sprint review Prep.

1 1/2 hour sprint planning.

1 hour call with CloudOps / DevOps.

Monthly

-------

1 to 1 with my manager.

Quarterly

---------

Company All hands.

Company Engineering conference.

Company COO conference.

I think that's about it but there's probably something I've forgotten.

My team is distributed (1 us west coast, 1 us central, 1 us east, 1 Europe - me) and we have had the same set of rituals pre/post pandemic.

- 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.

> record every video conference

Why? I think that's useful for onboarding sessions; or presentations about architecture, methodology, ect.

But no one's going to go back and comb through presentations like this. It's more time efficient to take good notes.

> Posting once a week about what I did for fun over the weekend, usually with photos.

I'd rather talk about my weekend in the pre-post meeting chit-chat.

---

What I think is important is that:

1: Everyone is on the same page about time management and running effective meetings. Once the "meetings as procrastination" culture sets in, that can be extremely hard to break.

2: Periodic face-to-face meetings. How this happens will differ dramatically by company. For example, if everyone lives ~90 minutes from the office (or co-working space,) you can have a soft requirement for ~1-3 days a month face-to-face. But, if people have to travel by plane, you can have 1-3 annual trips to a central location; or 1-3 annual trips to the main office.

Somethings we do in our weekly meetings in our nascent startup (no claims on the efficacy of the rituals):

Open the meeting with a group clap. This one was started by a much younger and more social member of our team. My immediate reaction was aversion. But over time I have come to like this and it I chalk it up as our gratitude journal. As a startup, there _is indeed_ a lot to clap for each week.

What each member did the last weekend. Again my initial reaction was to get on with the topics at hand. But over the last 20-or-so weekly meetings, it has helped me get a more composite view of a colleague's life.

Ending with two puzzles/riddles (I can be a fruit, person or bird. What am I?).

My meta-learning is rituals are helpful as bookends. They perform the role of normalizing/flattening everyone to the same abstraction, removing the relative seniority or variance in roles performed.

I find them useful.

I'm on the west coast, and working with colleagues mostly in NYC and Europe. Any "fun" online team activities are scheduled so they usually impact on my core working hours. As a result I tend to avoid movie nights, quiz nights etc. It's a pity, but I'm here to work, not hang out with friends.

All in-person and all remote are much easier to make work than hybrid. Meeting dynamics are in favor of people in the room.

If you have a hybrid work environment, one thing that works is to get everyone on the video call whether they are in the office or not. That puts everyone on equal footing.

> everyone on the team writing up weekly summaries.

We don't do that, what purpose does it serve?

I had one EM who took notes during daily standups but it wasn't helpful for anyone except him.

> record every video conference

This is about timezone diff where not everyone can attend at the same time but would like to watch and keep up. It's also useful when you plan to onboard new people to a project (although it usually requires other supporting material)

> have lots of 1:1 meetings to maintain relationships

Nothing beats being face to face with someone for real. Forcing 1:1's is not effective in my experience.

The rituals that are expected are the bottleneck of truly embracing remote work.

Sure you can write A&Os (Achievements and Objectives) type of status updates, but that's largely on a team by team basis.

Recording every video conference is annoying and wasteful. Do you plan to record every talk you have and assume you're actually going to revisit it one day? 99% of the time my answer would be no.

Having lots of 1:1s screams lead or line manager. If it's your job, then sure! If it's not, then don't force it upon people. Not everyone likes 1:1s because they are hardly used correctly as a tool.

Let's normalize letting people do their job and having their own individual lives outside of work. Let's not let the corporate fun committee creep into everyone's preferred work life balance.

We have a group optional eod meeting daily where anyone with any last minute questions can ask them to anyone attending, but also if no one has questions socializing is welcome. Friday people talk about their weekend plans. Monday people talk about their past weekend. Sometimes people actively show off their pets. It’s fun and the fact it’s optional (like truly optional, someone who rarely attends them just got promoted) makes it best of both worlds imo. Rarely lasts more than 15 min, and fun convos can take 45 with people dropping when they want.

1:1s.

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.

I usually understand WIP to mean Work In Progress but what does it mean in your context?

Is this one of those "the fastest way to find the right way to do something is to post the wrong way to do it" things? :)

None of the "expected rituals" sound like good ideas, though the walk-and-talks sound interesting.

Boxing off time _during the work day_ to play multiplayer games is something we're looking at for team building (which is 10x easier in-office, but doesn't work for the distributed team).

So when is actual work done among all those meetings?

Daily:

- brief write up of work done yesterday + work planned for today in slack

Weekly:

- 1-1 with manager

- monday meeting to plan for the week

- friday "presentation" of the work that was done this week, not actual slides, just going over what was done, results or didn't work etc

Occasionally and optional:

- game / trivia meetups in the afternoon via zoom

- team lunch

Thanks to my manager I'm not in a lot of meetings besides our team specific ones, which frees me up a lot.

We have an optional daily 30 minute meeting (happens during my morning, different for others in different time zones) where we chat about everything sipping coffee. Absolutely non-formal, work items come up for discussion usually once per week.

This works quite well for people to better know each other. The best thing is that it's optional.

> rituals have been helpful for your software development teams

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.

"Ritual", as well as "ceremony" as it's prescribed by some team methodologies, are both attempts to submit the team individual into a supposed greater order, where there's none.

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.

> 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

What would you recommend over zoom?

We're big Jitsi users around here. For me the main reason is how WebRTC integrates with my audio visual setup - for teaching music or live jamming there's a good link to my Linux audio environment via Carla and talking to OBS studio. You can get 48KHz almost lossless links over a good connection. That's also great for recording both sides of a podcast interview and stuff like that. Both my partner and I do sensitive work and need good security, so we can spin up our own server and not have to worry about whether Zoom, Google or Microsoft are MITM confidential conversations or selling data that would expose our clients.

Thanks!

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).

I believe 1:1s are counterproductive Why wouldn't be anyone invited to a productive conversation? Or is it to keep secrets or extinguish promises? Not everyone will be in every open meeting, but things closed doors isn't great.

Depends on team size and topics. If the whole meeting is to clarify or explain some topic about the task one person is doing, inviting a whole team and spamming calendars with niche discussion is also counterproductive.

I don't have an answer but I'm interested in the topic since I've been self-employed for the last... 2 decades, almost. Things aren't going too well and I'm on the lookout for a remote job that lets me work when I have the energy and will and not work when I don't, because when I do I get things done fast and well and when I don't I'm just wasting time not getting ahead much or at all.

What you write, weekly summaries would be a 100% no-go for me. I like to work but I don't like management overhead, that's what machines are for. Also daily meetings would absolutely be non-tolerable for me. There are better alternatives that don't involve waste of time video communication.

I want to just work and not deal with co-workers or anything around or in between. Are we there to have a coffee chat or to work ffs? (overdramatic reaction)

We do the "post a fun photo" thing through Geekbot but for me the best ritual that helps in many ways is that we do work outs on Zoom 3 times per week. Besides the obvious health benefits, it is a nice way to bond the team.

Well, it wasn’t unexpected since we intentionally did it, but one ritual we do is that we don’t have internal meetings. At least nothing preplanned, and nothing longer than 15 minutes.

In Developer DAO we have daily vibe sessions.

A group voice chat at 7 pm (my time at least, lol), where members talk about what they did, what they wish to accomplish at the DAO etc.

The DAO is quite big, with thousands of members, hundred of them actively working on dozens of projects. So, it's quite nice for new members to get some guidance in where to start.

We also have regular health and wellbeing calls with an expert in that field. Here members talk about their problems and fears and get some pointers in how to cope with them in a more healthy way or solve them.

Then there are a bunch of open voice rooms, where music plays and some people talk while they each of them do their work of the day.

These probably aren't that unexpected or unusual but here:

* 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

We've been doing a once-a-month game night where we all get on video conference together and play some games on boardgamearena

Optional weekly gaming nights in Mario Kart.

Factorio sessions would be cool too

Tri weekly Gather.town happy hour/hangsouts have helped the remote teams I've worked on a lot.

what size? we have daily coffe slot, but we are too few (10) and the chance to meet someone is rather low. any idea on how to have more sociality (not strictly related to work) is appreciated here

All the usual stuff plus the occasional mid day nap

Sounds horrible lol

I'm a director-level, fwiw. Very little has changed for me with regards to going remote.

I do mostly weekly 1:1s with my reports. I say mostly because I really leave it up to the individual to decide how frequently we want to do it, with a floor of once a month. There doesn't seem to be much of a rhyme or reason as to why some folks want weekly, others want bi-weekly, and the one wants monthly.

My 1:1s are my favorite parts of the week, but I'm keenly aware that not everyone likes them. I try to keep them as productive as possible, and if I think they aren't going to be productive for whatever reason, I'll cancel them ahead of time, or if I think there's something that would make it really productive, I give a head's up so they aren't caught by surprise. Generally speaking, my team seems to enjoy talking with me. It's a mix of small talk and business. The more senior the person, the more likely we are to be talking big ideas and how to solve big problems at a high level, and the less senior, the more likely I am to be helping with specific code problems. And I have folks that do both at different times.

We do have daily standups, although we mix up whether it has to be via Zoom or via Slack, and that usually depends on how autonomous the team can be for a given project or how much risk there is against an on-time delivery. I don't believe in deadlines, but we do have target dates that we try to hit, and if we don't think we're going to hit them, then I want to know ahead of time so I can message that appropriately to the rest of the business. And if we're behind, maybe we'll sync up a bit more often "in-person" just to smooth out any blockers.

I will say that my teams at my current company have the smoothest and most pleasant standups that I've ever had before. I'm sure it's a little annoying for them, but our productivity has shot through the roof, and it's allowing us to work on cooler stuff instead of being constantly behind all of the time. I hope they see that. Something to communicate more...

We never record video conferences. One of my core philosophies as a leader is that as far as the company is concerned, the smallest unit of organization is the Team, and that means everyone on the team needs to be able to do their best without fear of being targeted individually for whatever mistakes may happen. We document our work fairly well, but any extra-team communications explicitly do not mention engineers by name. This is mostly to protect their time by having all requests route through the EM/PM, instead of the biz going directly to certain engineers and asking for requests. This process seems to be working fairly well. Individuals do get shout outs at all-hands meetings and at other team meetings, but when it comes to tickets and code, we try to get the rest of the org to think of it as a single Team and not a group of individuals.

As far as "what did you do this weekend" type things, I keep my work/life pretty separate, but I am the kind of person who loves to learn more about people and share things that I've learned, so a lot of our conversations (especially on Fridays) tend to center around social stuff: what are you doing this weekend, what did you think of Squid Game, did you know the guy who sold all those sea monkeys was actually a Nazi, what languages do you speak, etc. We usually have these kinds of conversations after the business stuff is done, so anyone who doesn't want to talk can just drop off. No judgments either way. But this tends to be a fairly interactive and fun experience for everyone, and participation rates are pretty high. Given that these teams are fully remote, I'm pretty happy with how these turned out.

As far as other rituals go, I think my company has too many all-hands meetings (4 per month with hundreds of employees at each), and I've been pushing for fewer of those, but so far I'm losing that argument.

What would I like to see more of in a remote work environment? I'd love to see some optional remote social activities. Games, trivia, Ted Talk-style events. I like seeing people do demos of their work -- especially if they're super proud of it.

And I think perhaps the thing I'd like to see most of all is for the business to recognize that the world has changed, and that we don't always have to be in the same place at the same time in order to be wildly successful. I love being in the office, but I don't think I want to go back full-time. Hybrid or remote is the future, and we should embrace it.

My two cents.

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