Nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room? This is how our team does it.

According to Leadership Choice on The Power of Good Communication in the Workplace, The ability to communicate effectively is critical in every setting where people interact. In the workplace, however, effective communication is essential to the company's long-term success.

One of the key factors that made our remote work transition is our team retrospectives. It is an avenue where we take time to sit down as a team and make our ideas, concerns, and feedback be heard.

So, how does this work?

Since we’re working remotely, we do our team retrospectives on Zoom. A facilitator conducts the session to discuss the topics that are raised.

We voice out our concerns, ideas, and thoughts through Parabol. It’s a web-based tool wherein we input our thoughts or ideas into 3 columns: “What went well?”, “What can we do better?”, and “What still puzzles me?”

The facilitator can set a time limit to make sure that things are moving forward. After the topics have been raised by our team, the facilitator then groups similar subjects into categories. Then, our team gets the freedom to vote for which subject or topic that is relevant to discuss within the entire Symph team. Once the voting ends, the topics will then be sorted from highest votes to lowest. Everyone in the team will then have the opportunity to discuss the top-voted topics that were raised.

This is an example of a “Questions/Concerns” card that was one of the top-voted cards in Parabol. Even interns can suggest and raise their concerns for the whole team.

After discussing each topic, there will be a summary of what was talked about and the goals moving forward. Everyone is encouraged to freely voice out their thoughts. It’s more than important for us to check in with the team and know each other’s concerns and ideas. Seamless collaboration, communication and constant flow of information are vital factors to a company’s success. Especially for companies with remote work set-up, Symph Retrospective eliminates the feeling of isolation, makes everyone feel heard, and addresses concerns.

Check out Symph’s company culture and get to know us better here.

Story by Jep, our copywriting intern :)

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