Team rituals help maintain healthy communication, boundaries, and expectations between teammates and as a team. Our rituals can and should evolve as our team evolves. It is welcome to iterate on and experiment with our rituals.
In order to stay in touch throughout the week and support each other, we share the following in our #customer-support-chat Slack channel...
- Weekly planning. Every Monday we take some time to orient ourselves and then share with each other our intentions for the week.
- Daily captain's log. Every day as we go about our days, we share things we learn/read/hear that are important for us to all know. Yes, we are all in the same channels, but a lot happens in Slack every day and this is how we collectively stay on top of things.
- Weekly reflection. Every Friday we take some time to reflect on the week and share a summary with each other.
- As-needed what you missed compilation. When someone is not working, before they are out, they share a doc for the rest of the team to populate with anything we want to be sure they are aware of from when they were away
In order to get some purposeful face-time in with each other, we convene synchronously over Zoom each week for...
- CS team planning and retrospective where we consider what is going well vs not, discuss, brainstorm, and share important information
- Cheers round table to gather and share something we are thankful for to end the week
In order to maintain healthy communication, we...
- We populate and refer to our team README to orient ourselves for working with each other
- We use otter.ai when we are on Zoom with each other to make it easier for everyone to follow along with the conversation
- We honor that not everyone writes/speaks English as their first language and use Grammarly and HemingwayApp to help make sure we are saying what we intend
- We rotate who facilitates our weekly planning/retro session so that we normalize hearing each other and noticing when someone isn't getting a chance to talk
- We take turns each month auditing our section of the handbook to make sure it's current and accurate
In order to keep the air clear with each other, we do the following:
- We honor our Sourcegraph values, code of conduct, and team ethos
- We make it clear when are committing to do something, we make it equally clear when we cannot, and we adjust and communicate accordingly when life happens
- We let each other know immediately when we are feeling like it's anything other than feasible to get done what we have committed to doing
- We let each other know immediately the moment we realize something we committed to doing may be at risk somehow
- We let each other know when we are unavailable by posting in our #customer-support-chat Slack channel, setting our Slack status, blocking our personal calendar, and marking the CS team calendar
- When we are out for more than a day or two, we create a "what did I miss" doc in our shared drive folder for our teammates to populate with things we need to catch-up, be aware of when we return.