Attempts to Explain: New Manners™
Working from home, but with etiquette.
Over the last 18 months, it seems that every organisation has shared a think piece on WFH. And while we’ve experienced our fair share of ‘same, same’, our team has grown so much that our WFH has evolved too, bringing with it a whole new etiquette. We’re calling them New Manners™, and we’d like to share – because manners.
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Introductions
It’s been ages since we were all sent to our rooms, yet every call, no matter where you are in the Metaverse (or whatever you’d like to call the place between humans and screens is) begins with a bit of back and forth – “Oh hi”, “oh sorry, my Internet is fuc–I–mean–broken”, “how’s lockdown?”, “welcome to my bedroom, that’s where I sleep, this is where the magic happens” etc.
While sometimes exhausting, we’ve found that this is necessary, not just with new clients (ones that’ve never been in your bedroom before), but also in Stand-Ups with the team. Silence online is waaaay worse than silence IRL, but you already know that, experience hurts but we learnnn. There might be nothing worse than seeing someone laugh while they’re on mute.
New Manner #1
When making introductions, we recommend letting at least a third of the chatroom make a punishing comment like the above, but no more than half. We’re here for a good time, not a long time, all the time.
Routines and Rituals
There are some workplace rituals that’ll never die, and while you can’t hoot or holler as someone hands beers and wines around in person on a Friday, you can find ways to be just as loud in Slack. Take Flynn for example, he never misses.
We also make sure to keep our days as structured as possible, with regular time encouraged for tidying up, checking in and being left to y’know, do your job. Hot Patrick describes it as a meditation, a structure to come back to, loves a good system that guy *flaming heart emoji*.
Every day, at 9:45 AEST, we check in with a Stand Up, everyone shares their goals for the day, asking for what they need to (again) do their job. It’s kind of like calling the roll at primary school, except with cliffhangers.
HU stands for “Heads Up”, and this is a time in the morn (or the afternoon in NZ, or midnight in the UK) to review work, give and take direction in smaller groups. Bundling these two together (the combination of Stand Up and HU), means you can spend the rest of your day on focused heads down time.
We like breaking heads down time into two blocks of two hours, and if you like fractions do we have a technique for you, Simon swears by this recipe if you’re getting hungry. The tl;dr on that (the technique for time, not the recipe), is to divide your tasks into smaller manageable tasks, estimating them by 25 minutes of work with a 5 minute break. One of these is called a Pomodoro, so in 2 hours you can have 4 tomatoes – yum! Here’s an app.
Once you’ve done all your tomatoes, it’s time for Packdown. Packdown is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a time to tidy up files, share updates, request information and respond to Slacks and Emails.
New Manner #2
Structure your day, even if you’re working across different timezones. It keeps the team across how everyone is contributing and gives your life some order. There’s no need to be militant about the structure though; gotta be kind, make time to sit in the sun etc. We find that the common times we have together give us permission to focus without the worry of being interrupted.
Collaboration Tools
In even writing the term ‘collaboration tools’ we feel like tools. But seriously we use so many of them. Slack, for general chit-chat, Google Meet for regular meetings, Slack Huddles for quick questions, Whereby if you’re Flynn, and now Figma-audio. No, we obviously don’t use all of them all of the time, but everyone has their favourites. We’re open to one day using FaceTime for everything, but that’s a stretch goal.
Slack
As you’ll likely know by now, Slack is pretty much first choice for any modern business, we have two channels set up for each client - one for Internal chats, and one for Collaboration. This is a real game changer (indicated by bold), if you can coerce a client away from email. It means that anyone and everyone in the team can take accountability for information and ask questions. It also means that Ali can keep up with our in jokes.
Figma
We’ve been using Figma for a long time, as we say to clients it’s “where we design most of what you see for your brand, website, or whatever else. It’s also where we prototype, present, and give feedback. Think of it as a Keynote, a PDF, a website prototype, and Adobe Suite all in one.” Figma is bomb, and we love it - more on The System™ here. Anyway you can chat in it here too now, just by using “/”.
Google Meet and Whereby
While we all have different favourites for chit-chat, we’re all in agreement, we hate Zoom. It makes no sense, and makes all of our lives hard, and worst of all, embarrassing. Yes, I’d like to leave this meeting, no I don’t need to confirm that I’d like to leave.
Instead, we use Google Meet - you can spin up a link really quickly, and if you’re lucky, you can get one with a personalised name. Some of our favourites are “Bose King”, “Moby” and “Eat People”.
You can do everything you might expect, share screen, chat and one day (soon), live stream.
Whereby is similar except you can use your literal name as a meeting room, time box meetings and require people to knock before entering. Classy.
New Manner #3
All of these tools are great, and sometimes the opportunity strikes to distract someone in one by messaging them in another. Don’t do that. Or do, if you’re certain it’s going to be really hilarious, in which case, make a game of it.
And there you have it, New Manners™ for WFH, for the digital age. Use them forever, or return to the stone ages, no judgement.
Have you got any New Manners™ of your own? Get at us in the comments below.
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