A list of curated values and ideas to maintain a motivating and positive culture.
All employees/employers across the world can add their own ideas of an awesome culture and soft skills which helps us understand each other more.
Each individual having their own thoughts and ideas is what makes us move forward. We only become better by allowing others to challenge our ideas in a constructive way. Everyone is encouraged to raise issues for any points they disagree with and everyone can post their opinion about it.
- Always cater for all employees'/colleagues' dietary requirement and make it your priority when doing team lunches or bringing in sweets. Some of the popular dietary requirements are vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, dairy free, halal meat, halal chicken. If you're not sure about their requirements, ask them politely. If you can't reach them at the time being, include vegan options.
- Prepare a set of questions for newcomers and give it to them. They can take their time asking those questions. They can choose to post their answers publicly so that their colleagues would know their likes/dislikes, or they can keep it private with their HR. Those questions may also include dietary requirements so when a company lunch is scheduled, their needs would be taken into consideration.
- Appreciate new employees when they merge their first Pull Request (Engineering)
- Have a map of the office with the names of the employees on it and their roles. It's probably already hard for newcomers to interact with new people in the company. What makes it worse is that they don't know their colleagues' names and roles.
- Have a clear list of values that employees can use as a reference.
- Ask new employees about their dietary requirements just to make sure you cater for them during lunches
- Organize a game of mafia or other social deduction games across the whole company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werewolf_(social_deduction_game))
- Create a meaningful award system where employees feel that they're actually special in a specific area. Awards can be related to technical or soft skills.
- Reduce context switching as much as possible. Usually employees get frustrated when they have to work on 10 things at the same time. If there's no way around it, employers have to appreciate that employees are doing an extra cognitive effort and ensure them that they understand their struggles.
- Allow employees to contribute to work outside their area of expertise. For example, software developers working on UX or UI design.
- Create a roster that will split office tasks across employees. Tasks can be as simple as cleaning up, time keeping, managing the fridge, picking up mail. This roster will change every month so that different employees always have different tasks.
- Embrace asynchronous communication and make meetings your last resort
- Always reply to people when they post comments on communication tools (Slack, Trello, Jira ...). What is sad is for a person to spend time writing a message and nobody replies or even reacts to it. If you don't know the answer point them to someone that might know
- Ask about the weekend on Mondays and the plans for the weekend on Fridays