by
Tracy Chou
February 22, 2023
Years before COVID forced us all to figure out remote work, Michael Seibel at Y Combinator gave me some advice: You can make a distributed team work, but it has to be one of your top three priorities, right alongside figuring out your product and business. It’s your choice if you want to make that one of the things you worry about when you have no shortage of things to worry about.
I still chose to build Block Party as a distributed team from its pre-pandemic beginning. Intentionality about culture and way of working would be critical, but I’ve always believed culture to be foundational and I intended to invest the effort anyways.
I started by identifying the good things that co-located teams get for free (like social banter, and ambient awareness of what’s happening throughout the company) and trying to replicate where possible in our environment.
But the more fun and rewarding challenge has been to design our culture and processes to take advantage of our setup. Rather than trying to match an in-person team and coming up short when technology can’t bridge, we instead have advantages specific to how we work (like better working hours coverage with a geographically distributed team, and written records in Slack and Google Docs by default for documentation and easier context sharing).
All of this is a work in progress, but here are some of the rituals and ways of working that help us to be productive and stay connected as a remote team:
In a typical week, most members of our team have four or five regular recurring meetings: Team All-Hands, Product, Growth, Engineering, and Design. These touchpoints create an operating cadence for the team that helps to define the rhythm of the week. Although we can do a lot asynchronously, it’s important to have these meeting blocks that focus the team’s attention on one topic at a time and allow for live discussion and feedback. With consideration for the span of time zones on our team, we guard standing meetings carefully and try very hard not to reschedule them. We are, however, quick to cancel or end early if there’s not enough agenda to fill the allotted time.
Daily standups are a common feature of modern tech teams, but our twist is doing them asynchronously. Due to the variances in time zone and working hours, people are in flow at different points throughout the day and we want to avoid awkwardly breaking up everyone’s day with a 10 minute live sync just to read out status and blockers. Instead, we use a dedicated Slack channel for people to post their daily updates whenever best suits them, marking tasks with ✅🟢🟡🔴 (done, on track, in progress, incomplete).
Verbal updates can be nice for building camaraderie, but they’re sometimes easy to forget if you’re zoning out (not that anyone ever does that 👀). Getting updates in writing makes it very easy to review history and see progress over time. Slack’s threading also allows us to follow up on someone’s updates with comments or questions and dig into details when helpful.
A newer ritual for the Block Party team is informal meetups over Zoom for anyone who’d like to have some company during a work block. Typically someone will turn on some quiet music, everyone will mute themselves, and we’ll all work on our own projects, while occasionally sharing thoughts or funny Tweets in the chat. It’s surprisingly satisfying!
Although we have core working hours when everyone is online, the extended Block Party team is distributed across time zones, and so we log in at very different times. Inspired by the natural way people wave hello as they come into an office, we have a ritual of posting “good morning” in the #social channel on Slack when we sign on, and it’s a nice way of letting people know when we’re online and working.
Somewhere along the way, someone introduced the practice of including an emoji with their daily greeting, and now #social boasts a steady stream of 🌅 and ☕️ and 🌱 as the day progresses. Our custom emoji game is understandably very strong. (I personally love adding new emoji and I trawl Slackmojis.com the way other people trawl vintage stores, always looking for quirky cool new pieces to add to our collection. Latest find: a kitchen sink flashing in the disco rainbow fashion of party-parrot.)
The team’s enthusiasm can’t be contained by a mere single #social channel, so we’ve carved off additional spaces for themed chatter: everything from #social-fabric (where the sewists and embroiderers of the group congregate) to #social-funny (so many Tweets) to #social-books (self-explanatory). It’s like having the interest clubs that gather at lunchtime in unused conference rooms!
It’s unfortunately difficult to grab a colleague for a walk to the neighborhood coffee shop when you’re 3000 miles apart, or really any number of miles greater than 0. But we can use the Donut app on Slack to match people up weekly for a virtual “fika” in the Swedish tradition of coffee catch up, and it ends up working out even better in some ways. The random assignments introduce more serendipity and connection than what people would likely default to in an office, where people usually settle into a comfort and convenience zone with a handful of work or desk buddies. With our fika tradition, and still a relatively small team, everyone has the opportunity to meet socially with everyone else. We include contractors and consultants as well, even part-timers and those on hourly contracts, because the fun and social cohesion for the team is worth it.
Ok, yes, they’re a bit old school, but we love them anyway: icebreakers get everyone talking, laughing, and sharing little tidbits about themselves that we might otherwise never discover. We rotate through icebreaker responsibility and each week the assigned person brings a prompt to the team all-hands, where we popcorn the icebreaker around the Zoom room to start the meeting. Here are a few recent favorites:
On special occasions, we’ve done more involved icebreakers like Telephone Pictionary on Gartic Phone. This is a particularly hilarious game when you are playing with people who are not at all artistically gifted, like myself, as you have to try to guess what people’s poorly drawn scribbles are meant to be. It is also an activity that has the nice property of being a better experience virtually than in-person!
We end every all-hands with another round robin: everyone shares a highlight, lowlight, kudos, or gratitude for the week. In theory we only pick one each, but sometimes there’s a lot of kudos to go around. And if we run out of time, we throw them in Slack, so we don’t have to miss our weekly moment of gratitude.
When possible, we invite people in the final stages of our interview process to join a few of our regular team meetings to see for themselves how we work. It helps candidates decide if they can be successful in our working environment, and it’s just one of the ways we set new hires up for success before they’ve even signed an offer.
Product and growth teams often talk about a process of continuous iteration and improvement. I like that ethos for how we work as well. As Block Party grows, as the team changes, as our focus areas and priorities shift, of course we should also update our practices and traditions to make sure they’re still serving us.
Relatedly, I’m always curious to hear what other folks are doing and scouting for new ideas to try out with the team. I’d love to hear – what are the best (and worst) of your remote work rituals?
