#283 – Life Events

This week we prepared for another one of our co-workers to go on parental leave. As our company continues to grow it’s become more difficult to keep track of the events taking place in everyone’s lives. It’s especially difficult when we’re on different teams or in different departments.

Since I started working at Parabol in February 2020 we had coworkers welcome new babies, get married, buy houses, lose a loved one, move to a different country, and I myself just got engaged.

We wanted to be able to recognize life events in meaningful ways and wanted it to be easy to raise a company-wide signal. Our Operations team came up with an idea to spread awareness: If anyone would like to broadcast an important event we can simply fill out a form to notify our Director of Operations.

For any significant event, good or bad, it can be helpful to have support and acknowledgment from peers. Perhaps a team member is in the middle of a move and they need some help picking up time-sensitive work that’s causing extra stress. Maybe a family member has fallen ill or passed away. Something as small as a personal note or gift could lighten their mood.

At Parabol, our members are not “cogs in a machine” – a phrase commonly used by workers who feel they’re insignificant to their company or organization. Everyone is human and deserves to be treated with love, kindness, and empathy. If there’s even one tiny thing we can do to provide support to someone or brighten their day, we should take that opportunity.

The decline in web metrics has leveled off this week after the holiday drop-off. We’re inching closer to the 200,000 registered user mark although MAU’s took a slight dip. We’re excited to see the weekly meetings rebound back up close to the pre-holiday mark. We expect this will climb again next week as everyone gets back into their meeting cadences in 2022.

…Continued our hiring push. One of our newest team members, Teresa, has been hard at work sourcing and interviewing candidates for our Principal Engineer and DevSecOps positions.

…Published a blog post. Scrum vs Kanban: 5 Differences Between Sprints and Flow.

…Created & posted 3 new TikToks.

…Continued working on our Gitlab integration. We’re currently in the testing and review phase.

…Welcome our ExCo back from their retreat in Los Angeles.

…Kickoff sprint #95.

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Leave a public response here, or write to us.