Among Us
Maintaining human connection throughout remote working.
Roughly a year ago, I wrote some tips on how to stay connected with our loved ones while working overseas, far away from where they are. What I did not expect was how pervasive the struggle to maintain human connection would be, so much so that we began to lose that human touch with the people we typically spend most of our time with: our colleagues.
I began noticing this around the 3rd quarter of 2020. Superficially, it looked like business as usual; everyone was busy working towards completing their sprint tasks and goals, and every day we would see our “burndown chart” steadily charting our progress. However, I could sense that something was not quite right, that interactions with my fellow teammates felt more curt and transactional, and all conversations began with the need to extract some information from the other party. For a while, I pondered the reason why this was the case until the obvious hit me: whereas the office setting catalyzes impromptu casual conversations (whether through accidental bumps along the hallway, tea breaks in the pantry, or lunch breaks), remote working meant all interactions were confined within the remote working tools we were using (Microsoft Teams and Webex), typically accessed only when we are deep into our work.
The question, then, was how we could bring back those catalytic moments into our remote working setup, and the answer to that question for our team was a combination of an online collaboration tool and a tinge of fun.
Inspired by a sharing done during a Friends of Figma Singapore Meetup, I decided to adopt the idea of an “emotional scale” into our team. At that time, the online multiplier game Among Us was taking the world by storm, and I thought what better way to incorporate fun than to design the avatars based on the Among Us characters. Within a few minutes, I whipped up a prototype on Miro and showed it to my manager.
The above board is a duplicate of the one we actually used in alternate Daily Scrum Meetings, but the principle is identical. Each person within the team is assigned an avatar (they are allowed to customize the color insofar as no 2 people end up with the exact same color). At the start of the meeting, everyone will log onto the platform and move their avatars onto the scale in the middle based on how they are feeling that day, with 1 being the worst and 10 being the best. The meeting facilitator (in our case the Scrum Master) will then facilitate either (a) an open forum for everyone to chit-chat for a few minutes and share their feelings or (b) dedicated sharing time for each person. The idea was for the Board and the sharing session to become a substitute for those casual conversation moments that happen in the office.
The idea was approved and we are still doing using the “Among Us” Board up to this moment. Personally, I found an open forum to be a better format than a dedicated sharing time for each person, as the latter is bound to feel obligatory and routine-like. However, an open forum brings forward the challenge of encouraging everyone to speak, instead of just a handful of people. My manager found it useful to actually graph out the ratings given by each person in order to deduce some patterns, and hopefully intervene when necessary before it’s too late.
Should you wish to give this a shot with your team, I have made a version of the file available for duplication in Figma. I sincerely hope you find it useful in navigating this new way of working!
