Fostering connection when everyone is remote can be tricky. Wind back to four
months ago-- it was easy to high five a coworker, give surprise birthday cakes
outside of meeting rooms, and hop down to the juice shop downstairs for a walk
and talk. Shelter-in-place restrictions pose new challenges that inspired our
people team to think of creative ways to keep the team connected.
Our initiatives centered around the following dimensions:
- Social Connection - How do we facilitate interaction
- between people across different teams and departments?
- Wellness - How do we encourage people to take care of
- themselves and remain mentally well during uncertain times?
- Alignment - How can we keep teams aligned, engaged, and
- focused on company-wide goals and objectives?
For the purpose of this blog post, we chose to highlight and share our
social connection initiatives. We are happy to share these ideas with other
companies looking to provide employee social support.
Wellness Programs
The pandemic threw a curveball of new work environments, screen-focused
social interactions, along with uncertainty around the current economy. To
help our employees prioritize their health and well-being, we launched a
wellness program. We created a space for our employees to participate
together, foster camaraderie, and not feel alone in their personal wellness
endeavors.
April Wellness Program: Building Healthy Habits
Details of the Program
The program reminded employees to track key health criterias to build
healthy habits. In a two-week span, participants recorded if they met the
following criterias:
- 7+ hours of sleep
- Drink 64 oz + of water
- 20+ minutes of exercise
- 10+ minutes of mindfulness
Social Interaction
We encouraged social interaction through a leaderboard, seeing how we stack
rank against each other. We also had a slack channel dedicated to this
challenge to share knowledge with each other and asking, “Does tea count
towards our water intake?” We could also commiserate on the channel about
how drinking a lot of water was difficult.
We ended the challenge with a virtual celebration highlighting winners for:
- Highest consecutive points
- Category leaders
- Week 2 leaders (to motivate late joiners) while celebrating everyone who
- participated
Overall, the participation rate was 20 percent of the whole company.
Gabby Zetino, our
sales development representative, shares her experience with the challenge:
May Wellness Program: Bingo Board and Scale Sponsored Events
Details of the Program
This month, in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, we assembled a mental
health bingo board which highlighted a list of activities employees can do
at their own pace. If an employee completed ten of the activities, they were
entered into a raffle.
our Pilots & POC lead, shares how the bingo board pushed her to reflect
on wellness habits along with the Scale-sponsored event:
Social Interaction
We had a column dedicated to social interactions: “Stay Connected.” Also,
Scale sponsored events on the bingo board’s first row:
- Stress Relief Workshop + Guided Meditation - we brought in a self-care
- coach and meditation instructor for a 15-minute workshop on how to relieve
- stress and 15-minute meditation to regain balance.
- Yoga with Scale - we brought in a yoga instructor for a quick 30-minute
- session in the morning
- Scale’s Creative Time- we set aside time to hang out and work on something
- creative together (paint, write, dance, bake etc)
Scale Themed Trivia Nights
Scale Trivia Nights were born out of shelter-in-place and is one of our
highly attended events hosted by our workplace operations team,
Monica Breton and
Details of the Program
The program administrator prepared questions in advance, selected employees
into groups randomly and sent them off to their breakout virtual rooms.
Similar to regular trivia, each team had a lead and a team name. The trivia
administrator gave category questions to the leaders via slack and the teams
in their
Then within the breakout rooms, teams discussed and laughed about the
answers they’ll give and relayed the answers back to the program
administrator.
Social Connection
Hannah Moreno, our
marketing operations specialist, shares a few words on her experience with
Trivia Night:
Speed Scaling
To play on the words of “speed dating”, at Scale,
Margo Wheeler, our
people operations manager, hosted a networking event, “Speed Scaling” for us
to connect with employees across different teams with fun icebreaker
questions.
Details of the Program
To do this remotely, Margo broke us into different breakout groups and
posted the questions to us in real time. We popcorned around in a circle
answering questions. Our answers organically led us to unprompted
conversations. When we had all spoken and experienced just the right amount
of awkward silence, we moved onto the next question to continue learning
about each other.
For quarantine edition, we also included these questions:
- What are you most looking forward to doing once Shelter-In-Place is
- lifted?
- What’s the best meal you’ve cooked (or someone’s cooked for you) during
- Shelter-In-Place? … or baked if you’re a baker
- What is your Go-To Quarantine Snack?
Social Connection
Guido Maliandi, our
engineering manager, had attended both the live and the remote Speed Scaling
sessions. He shares his experience with both:
Small Groups Scale Socializing
Socializing remotely could be difficult for a lot of people, especially in
larger groups. To foster a genuine connection, smaller groups of one-on-one
or groups with no more than four were scheduled by Eileen Ho, our program
manager for Scale Socializing.
Details of the Program
We sent a survey out to the company so that anyone who chooses to can opt in
to socialize. There are logistical nuances we consider such as:
- Who they want to meet (new hires, cross functional team members)
- How often they want to socialize
- If they prefer one-on-one settings or groups of three.
- In addition to donut integration
- we’re already using, this initiative facilitates further connections for
- employees.
Social Connection
Our field engineering manager,
Shaun VanWeelden has
participated in several of these virtual coffee chats. Shaun shares his
experience with Scale Socializing below:
Slack Channels and Prompts: Scalien Share
Slack is one of the main sources we use to keep in touch, so it only made
sense to take advantage of it when we started “Scalien Share.” Similar to
“Show and Tell” it is a fast way to take a step away from work and open up
about ourselves. In addition to “Scalien Share”, we keep track of our
interest-group slack channels for new hires to join. Most of these groups
are grassroots-led such as #thebookclub, #cats, and #scaleai-women.
Details of the Program
For Scalien Share, the Workplace Operations team wanted to kick off a series
of questions sent to our #social channel on Slack. Some prompts include
“What has been your favorite indoor weekend activity?” and “Share a photo of
your go-to mug!”
Social Connection
While our design manager
taking an intentional break from design work and managing his team, he also
has been a facilitator of culture at Scale. We keep our interest group
channels engaging with prompts like “What did you cook last week?” in
#cooking or “What are you bumping?” in #music. Jeff shares his reflection on
social connection through Slack:
Learnings
While transitioning events to a remote setting, we couldn’t always smoothen
out every detail before launch of the program. We take some of the areas of
improvements as opportunities to learn and improve our future initiatives.
Balancing Competition with Participation
Our first wellness challenge emphasized competition over participation.
Looking back, in addition to the competitive aspect, we would ideally reward
those who were just participating. Focusing on competition only rewards the
top individuals. Wellness programs shouldn’t always be about winning or
performance.
Encouraging grassroots participation
As the people team rallies to foster connection, we could’ve also encouraged
employees or given ownership to them to drive some of these initiatives. For
example, asking an employee to lead a Scalien share prompt would potentially
ensure that these prompts are not always coming from the people team but
also inspired cross-functionally from other teams.
Finding balance between being structured and unstructured
Lastly, finding the balance between structured connections and organic
connections is challenging. For Speed Scaling, we messaged out the questions
in timed intervals to keep the group moving to the next question. In
retrospect, we realized that some groups want to stay on one question longer
than another question. Giving all questions in advance would allow the
breakout groups to talk more organically, feeling free to stay on a
particular discussion point that they were interested in lingering on.
Remote events and programs posed new types of challenges, but we’re grateful
for Scale giving us the space to experiment ways to keep our employees close
during these uncertain times.