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A Game of Telephone

Friday Ship #325 | November 18th, 2022

Image Description: Three laughing women looking at a mobile phone.

I’m a firm believer in remote work.

It saves commuting time, makes it easier to achieve a life-work balance, and, most importantly, allows you to work in your pajamas. 

But remote work is also not without disadvantages. The main one is that it makes it harder to bond with your co-workers. Team building can be a challenge. When you’re not talking about the latest episode of Andor in the elevator or discussing your weekend plans by the coffee maker, how do you make sure that you still make connections with your teammates?

At Parabol we have several answers to that question. We’ve talked in the past about our tradition of celebrating fika, having donut chats, or taking part in retreats. But since October, we’ve found yet another way to do team building.

Team Building with our Monthly Social

The idea behind our Monthly Socials is simple: we get together and play a game. This is a great opportunity to get to know each other outside of a working environment. In October, we played a virtual game of Taboo courtesy of Confetti

Image description: a screenshot of a Zoom meeting where you can see 16 people smiling at the camera and having fun.

As far as team building goes, it was a resounding success, so we decided to repeat the experience in November, this time playing Gartic Phone. For the uninitiated, Gartic Phone is like a game of Telephone and Pictionary in one.

Image Description: An animated gif. The first frame says: “A student wearing a backpack on the first day of school.” The second frame shows a stick figure with a red backpack walking to school. The third frame says “A kid going back to school with a red backpack.” The fourth frame shows a person with a green backpack walking toward a building that has a USA flag next to it. The fifth frame says “Person going to the immigration office.” The sixth frame shows a stick figure next to a building.

The best part of this game it’s that the worse you draw, the more fun it becomes, as people scramble to figure out what a bunch of stick figures and colorful shapes are supposed to represent.

We had a lot of fun playing Gartic Phone. Thanks to it, we discovered that our CEO Jordan is pretty handy with the Paint Bucket tool, or that Taylor, our Data Architect, has a very shall we say… peculiar drawing style.

All in all, we had a blast, and I’m dying to see what December’s Social will bring!

Metrics

November 18 metrics

We’re seeing a bump in our user metrics, but a decline in monthly web sessions and weekly meetings.

This week we…

moved forward with Terraform’s stack and module.

attended FounderCon and had meetings with several VCs.

Published a blog of 11 Seasonal Retrospective Ideas.

Next week we’ll…

publish a job ad for a Full Stack Developer position.

welcome a new Inside Sales Representative to the team.


Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Please write to us.

Teresa Salazar García-Rosales

Teresa Salazar García-Rosales

Teresa specializes in tech recruitment. She has interviewed all kinds of candidates, from web developers to quantum computing experts. Before joining Parabol she worked at start-ups, mid-sized companies, and even at a research lab. She lives in sunny Spain. In her free time, she sings karaoke (badly), plays board games, and does escape rooms.

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