Comment by starwatch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by starwatch | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a strong believer in minimum viable process when it comes to team management. As teams grow, processes need to grow with them. But imo every process - stand-ups included - should be introduced as an experiment. The experiments should have a clear hypothesis, and a period of evaluation. The evaluation should be conducted by anyone who is expected to participate in or benefit from the process. If process experiments don't work - take lessons and throw out the process.

Our current stand-up has evolved[1] to people posting their done/doing/blockers in Slack each day. We still have a daily 15 minute zoom meeting - which was once a stand-up - but it's changed. Now it's a time-boxed meeting where we shoot the breeze, or play small multiplayer games [2]. The rules are simple - no work chat, no politics. We meet in the middle of the day so people have the morning period to get work done.

Our stand-up wouldn't work for all teams. We've specifically hired people that would work well in our team - and they're thus more inclined to work well with the processes we've developed.

[1]: I wrote a bit about this at https://blog.getchinwag.com/posts/calling-all-remote-teams-s... - though our stand-up has continued to evolve.

[2]: Assembling jigsaws has proven to be quite fun in recent weeks - we use https://puzzlegarage.com/

Out of curiosity, how does a "no politics" rule work in a scenario like this? Unfortunately we're currently in a scenario where a queer person saying they had a great time with their husband/wife/partner over the weekend can be stretched to be a violation of that rule by mean spirited people (to put it mildly). I'm not saying this is the case, but I'd personally be uncomfortable sharing in environments like that because of such rule.

That said, having a scheduled 15 minute "hello" meeting every day sounds great! I feel like seeing my coworkers and saying hi is the most value I get out of daily standups, so your team's approach sounds great to me.

We've got people of all religions, nationalities, etc. and it's very rarely a problem. How we hire and the effort we put into curating our team culture goes a long way in helping with that.

Sometimes we do fall into political conversations though - politics being a massive part of being human after all. But when we do someone says something along the lines of "alright guys, this is starting to sound a bit political so let's talk about xyz instead" where xyz is your favourite funny cat video or similar.

Cool! Thank you for clarifying.

> no politics.

This in itself is an achievement.

I instituted the same rule in our slack. No politics. It helps to do it early on in the company.

We’ve (so far) never had a political debate. Hope it stays that way Forever.

We did have some political discussion but agreed it wasn't a net positive contribution to the culture we wanted to form. So we experimented with a no-politics rule and it stuck.

So glad to see more companies do this.

How do/would you respond to the counter argument of “everything is political”?

I would argue that it's a cynical way to look at the world, and it doesn't foster an environment for collaborative, clear-thinking problem solving.

Most things we do simply aren't political (at least not intentionally, not saying they can't be interpreted by others that way), they're just things we do from being on autopilot most of the time. And I strongly want to give people the benefit of the doubt unless it's quite obvious that they meant some form of malice by an action.

I still have no idea what most of our employees' political leanings are. What is important to me is that they are (genuinely) kind and respectful to each other, have a desire to work together, and that we are solving problems and helping our customers every day.

It's important to me that people have one place they can go to, where we work together as a team to focus on the problems we and our clients face, and come up with solutions to those problems in as objective a way as we can, as fellow human beings. That's the kind of team I would want to work with. And since it's in my control, I'm making it happen.

Not saying everything's perfect obviously, we're all still human, but we do aspire to preserve that aspect of our culture.

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