Lets Hang and Code
I was invited to a meeting titled “Let’s hang and code”; it was for 2hrs and out of curiosity, I attended.
This meeting was an idea by the Tech Lead of a startup that I am currently working with. This is a startup where the entire team works remotely and the purpose, I learnt was to foster relationships between the team members and support people who might need help with the task they have picked up for the current sprint.
This meeting also helped with sharing knowledge with other team members; people that worked on specific areas of the code base could decide to share their screen and get real time feedback from their team members.
I really loved this session and I thought to share with you; there were moments during the 2hours where everyone just worked in silence with the occasional banters. People joined at any time during the 2hours and there wasn’t any pressure to stay to the end of the 2hrs timebox. I shared this with a group of Professional Scrum Trainers and someone asked if anyone took note of people who joined and probably left early - No, I could infer that it was very safe environment from what I observed.
Guess what, everybody had their video camera turned on. In my coaching and consulting engagements, people ask me for ideas to improve the culture in their remote first organisation. My go to has always been “golden hour” which is a set time in the day where people kept their diary free and without any meeting; The golden hour was set aside for the team to sync, help each other regardless of the time zone people worked in.
This was way better than golden hour idea. You might want to experiment with “Lets hang and code (work)” and it will be great if can come back to share your experiences or blog about it. Hopefully some else is as excited as I am after trying this out.