The One Weekly Meeting at the Heart of Our Remote Team
Last month, our team held a small office-warming party for our new co-working space in Copenhagen. For years, we’d operated as a remote-only studio with team members based around the globe. This meant that on top of the typical challenges that come with remote work, our team was accustomed to coordinating work hours across multiple time zones. By the time one portion of our team was logging in to start the work day, another was half a world away, prepping to clock out and spend time with their families.
We’ve since expanded our official footprint so that team members in Santiago, New York, and now Copenhagen, have a dedicated space to work out of — if they choose. But crucially, our workflows are in no way dependent on having these shared workspaces. They’re simply an added bonus.
What we learned throughout our years as a fully remote company is that there are simple ways to cultivate a positive “office” culture within a digital-first environment. Too often, companies try to model remote work based on traditional office environments. Others feel they must force or incentivize employees to return to in-person settings in order for any work to get done. What those companies miss, however, is that it is more than possible to run teams that deliver high-quality work remotely while also fostering an environment that values them as humans, and not just employees.
We hardly claim to be experts in developing remote or hybrid workflows for companies of all sizes. But the concept of designing thoughtful, efficient, and effective systems of work is core to our studio’s DNA. We’ve written extensively about the field of product design’s need to modernize the way we do business. In our case, we’ve found success in tailoring processes to fit our teams’ needs through a weekly meetup that we’ve developed over the years, known affectionately as “Funday.”
The anatomy of Funday
It may seem surprising that a core part of a team’s culture would rest on a sometimes two-hour-long meeting each week, but for us, Fundays are sacred. The formula for the meeting centers on one portion that’s hyper-focused on work planning, sandwiched between two blocks of lightly-structured social time for us to casually hang out. (Originally we held the meeting at the start of every week, which led to the name “Monday Funday.” We eventually moved our meetups back a day, but the name stuck around). The broad weekly agenda goes something like this:
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Open-ended catch-up time
The initial “fun” part of Funday is very simple: we go around and chat about what we did over the weekend. We hear about the outdoor BBQs with friends and family, the guitar pick that a team member caught at a recent concert, the travel adventures from remote parts of the world, or the pains of nursing a killer hangover. There’s no time limit to how long we spend catching up each week; instead the open-ended conversation has space to feel organic and low-stakes. -
Project-planning for the week
We take a highly structured approach toward how we plan out our weeks. We want to capture an as-accurate-as-possible overview of our various projects in the works, while also making sure we’re prioritizing what’s important. A lot of this analysis is human-centered as well. We aren’t just focusing on project timelines and deliverables for clients — we also care that our team has manageable workloads and support when needed. -
Work-related fun
We end each session with a final dose of fun. The format changes with each meeting, but oftentimes, it’s an opportunity for team members to see what their colleagues are working on. We can prepare for product launches or practice a cold run on presentations. Other times, we use the final portion of Funday as a window into what the day-to-day looks like for different parts of the team.
Fundays are sacred for a reason. We never cancel or push back the time, even for important client meetings. In many ways, the consistency in holding Funday at the same time every week offers an important stability for our team as we navigate remote work. It sets a tone around what our priorities and values are as a company.
What we’ve found is that in order for our team to feel empowered and able to coordinate remotely from opposite ends of the globe, we needed a system that was clear, consistent, and transparent. Rather than try to tightly manage how our team spends their time through daily standup meetings or intricate project management software, we instead found success through developing our weekly priorities and agenda together as a team. In fact, the basis of Funday is a very simple Google Spreadsheet that we use to track our projects (more on that below).
How we track projects
Our team tends to approach projects with a design engineering mindset. Instead of separating our staff by discipline — where designers are in one corner, engineers are in another, and the two rarely interact — we believe in designing through code in a single, continuous process. Cross-collaboration between team members who specialize in design and engineering is vital to our practice. And so in order to make our projects run smoothly, we need to provide the team with concrete ways to coordinate regularly.
That’s how we began developing our Project Overview spreadsheet (you can download a template here). Nothing that we’ve established is mind-blowing or revolutionary; the spreadsheet is simply a tool that we have carefully honed over the years to help foster an office culture centered on work/life balance. In the past, we tried monitoring projects through various time tracking or project management tools and software, but we found ourselves preferring a much simpler approach that was tailored to our specific needs.
Each week we go over the following sections, together as a team:
The spreadsheet gives visual cues around how likely we are to land a new project — the higher the estimate, the more the cell turns green. Less optimistic outlooks range from orange to red.
Assess new client leads
We start out by going through a list of potential new client projects. The items on the list often vary in size and scope, ranging from proposals that are awaiting a response to informal relationships that we are actively cultivating. We like to deliberately include our team in this process, even when they’re not directly involved in selling our services. For each lead, we try to give an estimate on the likelihood of it coming to fruition. The estimate is adjusted on a scale of 0% to 100% each week.
We track the targeted amount of time we hope to dedicate to a project or activity (column B). Then we keep tabs on Drift (column C), which highlights whether our team’s work output is higher or lower than our targets.
Workload tracker: Balancing client projects and internal work
The bulk of our focus during the meeting centers around tracking each project that we’re actively working on and the amount of time spent on each. There's always a mix of team members dedicated to a single project and each person is often balancing several different projects at once. We found that it’s beneficial to have a bird’s-eye view of each employee’s workload so that we don’t overload them with unrealistic tasks without even realizing it.
In order to stay on top of so many moving parts at once, we created a table that consists of two sections: one tracks the amount of work we devote toward each client project on any given week; the other focuses on our internal activities.
The internal section lays out everything from time spent in team meetings to the amount of work devoted toward maintaining our internal tools and company website.
Each team member has their own column (columns E and up) where we estimate how they divided their time between projects. The spreadsheet then adds up the cumulative hours for each project to give us a sense of whether we’re hitting our target hours, or drifting away from our goals.
Estimate time spent on each project
For each client project, we start by reviewing the broad targets from the previous week, where we had estimated the number of hours each team member should devote to their work. Then together, we go through the list and compare those estimates to how much time each person thinks they actually spent on those projects in the previous week.
The time estimates are an informal self-assessment — the goal is to never micromanage how each person spends their time. Instead, we care about balancing work and priorities together as a team. Obviously, it’s important that we stay on track with delivering our projects. But just as obvious to us is the importance of ensuring that our team is managing a healthy workload where they are well-positioned to do their best work. If anyone is in need of additional support, the tracker is one way to quickly address potential roadblocks standing in their way.
Up next: Project status updates
We don’t have product managers guiding our timelines; instead we designate a project lead from within our team. It’s important to us that the person with the most hands-on knowledge of the project is able to meet with clients. That way, we can rely on their expertise and avoid potential pitfalls of creating too many divisions of labor where important context gets lost. The team lead is meant to act as the point person for communication and they ensure the rest of the team is aware of any additional updates or feedback from the client.
Each Funday we go through our list of projects and the point person updates the group. To help guide us through this process, our team developed a list of prompts:
- What happened in the previous week?
- What do you expect to work on this week?
- What are the big milestones in this project?
- Do you have any blockers/issues?
- What/when is the next communication with the client?
- How many hours should be assigned?
One important learning that we found while developing our remote work routines is that it helps for the team to have visibility on all projects, even when individuals aren’t directly involved. Having the extra context around projects and goals enables our team to rely on one another for help and support. It’s one subtle way to create an open dynamic that fosters collaboration.
Estimate hours for the upcoming week
Once everyone has an understanding of the priorities for the upcoming week, we go through the list and estimate how much time we should devote toward each project. We want to be realistic about expectations and to set weekly goals that are actually feasible.
In order to plan out our week in ways that balance our workloads and obligations, we implemented several formulas in our Project Overview spreadsheet that help guide our decisions.
The spreadsheet adds up the total estimated hours that our team plans to spend on each project. It lets us know when we’re under target by lighting up in red.
Keep project timelines on target
We want to make sure that each project gets the love it deserves. Whenever we kick-off a new project, we plan out how much work we have committed to each client, with clear deadlines and deliverables. We then stay on top of those timelines by closely monitoring our target hours and comparing them to our weekly estimates. The spreadsheet will automatically notify us when we’re either over or under target, which gives us an opportunity to adjust work assignments accordingly.
We use colors to designate the division of labor. “Team leads” are blue, and “core” project contributors are a lighter blue. Column D tracks how many team members are working on any given project that week. When there’s only one person, it highlights the cell in orange.
Adopt an informal buddy system
We found that it can feel isolating if someone is working on a project all by themselves. This is especially true in a remote work environment. To solve this issue, we make an effort to assign at least two people to a project at any given time. In the spreadsheet, we created a column that tracks the number of people working on each team (column D). That way we know if there’s only one person assigned to a project that week. This not only seeds the opportunity for cross-collaboration from the outset of each week, but also provides employees with a built-in support system to know who they can reach out to for assistance or as a sounding board if they need.
We typically target for 40-hour work weeks, though oftentimes that varies depending on holidays and time off. So we created a system that can account for variations in workweeks while still highlighting in red when a team member has too much assigned, or yellow when they have too little.
Avoid overloading team members
Many of our team members value having agency in being able to weigh in on their workloads. We found over time that it’s easy to assign new tasks each week without realizing that our team’s bandwidth is already maxed out. The spreadsheet adds up the total estimated hours that each team member has divided between different projects and internal responsibilities. When they have too much on their plates, their total hours are highlighted in red.
This simple visual cue is an easy but important way for us to know right away that our estimates are off. This is also where we see the side benefits of setting up a transparent system where everyone knows the latest updates for each project; team members have the context around our goals and are therefore able to advocate for extra time or resources in order to get us to where we need.
Funday, notably, is a constantly evolving process that has changed over time. A lot of the evolution has been driven by individual team members advocating for what they feel are strong solutions. We don’t expect our system to work perfectly for companies of all sizes and industries — our culture relies heavily on trust, maturity, and mutual respect from each member of our team. Still we operate on a set of guiding principles that we believe can be applied in a number of different environments. We want the type of atmosphere where our processes are constantly building on the team’s dynamic, and not something that’s imposed from leadership. Oftentimes, the best results involve taking deliberate steps to make time for each other, both as colleagues and as human beings.