What are some ideas to keep up team morale remotely? Are there specific or structured adjustments you've made to counteract burnout/keep up productivity and mental health?
drawing inspiration here from your quotes in this recent article, hoping to elicit some more helpful feedback from Pulse's community. https://www.cio.com/article/3544612/remote-work-tests-cios-soft-skills-amid-coronavirus-crisis.html
At a previous company, I worked two levels below Bask, who played a significant role in shaping the department's culture. His lessons proved effective during the pandemic, given that we were a geographically dispersed company even before the pandemic. (80+ countries) Most of our projects involved working with colleagues in other locations, and we adopted some of the practices he recommended in his article, such as virtual open door and lunch-and-learn sessions with leaders from IT and the business. The key is to stay proactive and adaptable, as the world and the workplace are constantly evolving. What works for remote productivity and morale improvements today may not be effective in 2024.
I enjoyed your contributions to RSAC wrt supporting cultural alignment within your organization in this difficult environment. Hoping that we can encourage some additional ideas on this thread...
We also tend to organize some gaming tournaments and announcements in our Slack when someone pushes to GitHub with failing CI (kind of like a swear jar penalty) and it's really fun.
Once we go back to the office I am thinking of implementing an actual toy that shoots you in the face with a soft bullet if you push with failing CI
Can you share more details about the mechanics you have put in place?
Sure. Since my team is formed of different individuals with different activities ( An IoT engineer, an intern & 4 different developers ) to have this fully working in place I set up a sprint that lasts 2 weeks, for every task the team estimates in the sprint and works on every task, the mechanics goes as follows:
For every task done within the sprint - 1 point.
For every sprint done for each team member - 5 points.
If any team member completes ALL of their tasks within a sprint - 10 points.
Any member of the team who at the end of the sprint has correctly carried out their planning of the tasks of a sprint - 10 points.
For every new team member that joins DEV & are new in the gamification leaderboard - 5 points.
We have a weekly ice-break question asked by one of the team members, the person who asks the question - 1 point.
At the end of the ice-break question cycle, the person who by votes had asked the best ice-break question - 5 points.
Anyone who provides a disruptive innovative idea, which brings a positive impact to the DEV team - 10 points.
I keep 2 leaderboards, the first one belongs to all earned points related to the specific sprint we are in & the second one is a leaderboard with all gained points thru all sprints.
All this have increased highly our performance for the last 2 years.
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Elevated self-control over scheduling0%
Increased frontline pay0%
Increased/introduced new bonuses0%
Improved frontline discretionary benefits0%
Extended paid leave opportunities0%
Enhanced stability of work0%
Expanded wellness benefits0%
Other (comment below)0%
Not sure0%
If that is correct, then it can be extremely hard to price.
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organized a virtual escape room via https://www.puzzlebreak.us/ - even though his team lost it was a fun subtitue for just a "virtual happy hour"