What’s your favourite team ritual? Join the discussion and get a badge! ✨

[Dan Breyen]

At a previous employer, most of us were working remotely, so we had virtual Happy Hours to get to know each other without having to talk shop.

[Angelie Stephens]

Creating virtual spaces for remote teams is so important, and happy hours are even better! 🥂🥤🍹

[Emmanuel_A]

going out to lunch with the team at least once a week. 

Increases trust and friendship

[Angelie Stephens]

I love a team meal too! 🍕

[Dennis Liebenberg]

Hey  @Angelie Stephens  

We started a new ritual every friday where teams set aside one hour to properly decompress from their work. 

We do things like trivia , online team building games or even just chilling around a virtual fire and enjoying each others company. 

[Angelie Stephens]

This Friday ritual sounds like a great way to close out the week, Dennis! 😌

[Amanda Mateo]

Morning ritual, about a half hour in we meet to discuss boards. We go over new jobs first that were approved since the previous meeting and before we break into our own duties/jobs, we each share the recap of our day and what current jobs we hope to complete/start before leaving. 

[Angelie Stephens]

Such a great productive way to start the morning, Amanda! 🙌

[Sherilyn Tasker]

My team is based on site and we have a monthly birthday morning tea where everyone brings something yummy to share except those who have a birthday that month. 

We also have something called a Wall of Fame where workmates can nominate each other in one of 4 categories:  exceptional delivery of work, customer service, above and beyond and team culture, and once a month one of the nominees wins a voucher. I find it great for encouraging us to focus on the positive and appreciate each other more. 

[Angelie Stephens]

Wow the birthday morning tea sounds so lovely, Sherilyn 🫖 I absolutely love the sound of the Wall of Fame too! 

[Hans Polder]

For my previous team, it was about making sure that there was enough 'life' in the team. Most Mondays our dailies would start with some time to talk about last weekend, or going out of the office for a nice walk during lunch, and have fun!

One of the best Scrum Masters I've experienced really emphasized this, adding in a lot of joy and fun in everything she could think of. Making up impossibly fun nicknames for everything and everyone made everything more connected. ❤️

[Angelie Stephens]

Carving out that time for team connection is so important! 

[MJ Schrader]

Our team is fully remote, but we have a welcome Slack channel. and we all say hello when we get in. Weekly we have a sprint planning call and then a weekly checkin. I'd like to do more with the team but I'm not in the same time zone as most of them.

[Angelie Stephens]

A welcome slack channel sounds great, MJ! Maybe you can borrow some of the other async Slack ideas from this thread for your team to account for your different timezones? 😊

[Emily moulder]

We have Monday Must-Try, so when we're finished with our standup, we share a recommendation for something (food, tv shows, music) with each other, something we're excited to suggest to each other. 

[Kate C_]

Ooh that's a fun idea! 

[Kate C_]

My favourite, more formal ritual is the Rituals Reset play. As a global and remote team, we rely heavily on our rituals to keep us in contact with each other and track things like ongoing projects, important updates, and workload management. It makes sense to do a reset and check in with what’s working, what’s no longer serving its purpose, and what could be improved.

It’s so great to feel organized and have an open discussion with my teammates on our communication processes.🤓

But a less formal one is we'll share in gif-form how we're feeling at that point in the work week. Makes for some laughs and you get some insight into your team's mood and humour!

[carolyn french]

@Kate C_ I love Rituals reset as well!

[Monika Rani]

I work from the comfort of my home and we have a quick standup every day before starting work, we spend 3 minutes any questions to each other about anything related to weekend work, personal life, work life, or anything and due to this activity we all as a team feel so connected to each other.