Practices that made our team productive, efficient, and happy.
When it comes to running a happy and healthy team, I find it crucial to establish and maintain good practices and processes that can flexibly guide - not control - the team members.
Over the past few years, I've been working with our designers to shape practices that make us more productive, efficient, and happier. Here’s a look at some of them:
🤝 Monthly 1:1s
Regularly check-in with your manager to discuss your performance, growth, strengths, weaknesses, hobbies, and everything in between. Aim to flesh out agenda items before going into the discussion and leave with an action plan to make the most of it.
🌴 OOO
Mark your calendars with upcoming time off. Send the calendar invite to team members who would benefit from knowing your schedule in advance. Bonus? Drop a message in relevant Slack channels.
📒 Group Hugs
Give a group hug to a teammate by teaching them something or learning something together. E.g., Read a book or listen to a podcast together. (Borrowed from Avi Agarwal.)
🌤️ Fulfillment Fridays
Book a 2-hour slot every Friday to focus on learning a new skill or building what brings you joy. Consider the exciting ideas you've always dreamed of exploring but never had the opportunity to. These could include new approaches, completely different visuals, or delightful microinteractions. Brownie points if your idea makes it into the shipped product!
🎬️ Take 5
When solving a problem, aim to share five diverse directions for review and explain which one you recommend & why. ‘Diverse’ here means distinctively different solutions and not ones with tiny visual dissimilarities.
🎙️️ Host & Learn
Participate actively - not attend - in external learning sessions given by industry speakers. Come prepared with questions and make the most of the learning experience.
🦩 Flamingo Flag
Use this to highlight exclusive or discriminatory language at work in a friendly and non-confrontational way. When you see behavior that is not inclusive, react with a flamingo emoji on the Slack message or in the huddle to let them politely know. Better yet, help your teammates understand why by dropping a short explanation. (Borrowed from Accenture Song.)
💻 In-sync Async
Get in the practice of sharing designs or asking for reviews asynchronously to save your team time. Your new best friends are written explanations, screen records, voice notes, and the like.
🕰️ Office Hours
Set up 1 hour a week for people to come to you for design-related questions, discussions, help, reviews, or more. When hosting office hours, change your Slack status for the extended team to see and put it on your calendar to make your schedule more predictable. Use office hours to deflect unnecessary calls throughout the week and maintain undisrupted flow states!
☂️ Design Explorations
Meet up with your team once a week to discuss anything cool you’ve discovered recently. Use this time to talk about things you’ve found, things that fascinate you, projects you want to improve, or feedback you want to gather. This is dedicated time with other design minds at your disposal; use it well!
✂️ Papercuts
This is a way for devs and designers to flag the small yet painful cuts or inconsistencies between developed screens and designed files. Drop a comment with “Papercut” in your files to mark the tiny details as you discover them and bring your files to par with what’s actually deployed.
🪩 Please Standup
Make standups exciting and ensure participation with a question of the day. Managers, keep this unrelated to work. Team members, answer your hearts out with memes, gifs, and whatever else you want. For instance, a question like "Who would play the person who replied before you in a movie about their life?" can spark engagement and creativity. Remember to keep it light and enjoyable!
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