Stories to Keep Everyone Engaged While apart
By: Svend Court-Payen
Tags: Team Building, Teamwork, Remote Working, Remote, Stories

At Once, we want to change the way businesses connect with their audience using the power of stories-on-the web. But the recent crisis and shift to remote working raised some questions. All company events, (team building, talks, conferences…) that relied on our stories for announcement and organization were suddenly cancelled. So this got us thinking, how could we quickly adapt to this unforeseen situation?

At first concerned, we quickly realized that remote working could unlock new value in Once, strengthening the way teammates communicate with one another. In the same way companies have flocked to Zoom for videoconferencing, Notion for documenting, and Slack for instant messaging, they can now turn to Once for visual storytelling.

Once stories are particularly suited to remote working. They’re designed for two-way communication. When a teammate opens a story, it starts a dialogue. Once stories are visual. They add context and warmth to plain text. And they’re also short and impactful which makes consuming content easy and fun.

In short, stories are a unique way to keep teams engaged and connected. That’s been the consensus at eFounders, the Paris-based startup studio. Their team has been making the most out of Once stories to communicate during the lockdown. We asked Solène, Office Manager at eFounders, to share how they have leveraged Once stories during remote working. Here’s her response.

Checking the team’s engagement

To gauge our team’s engagement and morale, we send out a Once story (check it out here!) on our confinement dedicated Slack channel. The goal here is to assess how everyone’s week went and to suggest ideas on how we can do better in the following weeks.

Submissions are anonymous so everyone can feel free to be transparent about what’s working and not working for them. We’ve been loving the story format, it’s much more relaxed than a traditional survey but still gives us all the data and metrics we need to make sure that we’re accurately evaluating our team’s engagement.

Preview of our story to check on your team morale 💪

Challenging Ourselves

If one thing this lockdown has taught us is that we have some serious Chefs at eFounders. One of the most successful confinement initiatives has been the eFounders Masterchef Challenge.

Every Friday, we announce the cooking theme of next week’s challenge on Slack. It can be as simple as pasta and as advanced as a vegetable in different variations. Who knew you could make 8 different variations out of butternut squash? Yes, 8!

On Wednesday, people get to post their state-of-the-art creations on Slack. And a few days later, the whole team gets to vote using a Once story. The story recaps everyone’s dish with a visual reminder of each dish, and people can cast their votes in the different categories (presentation, originality, relevancy to the theme, etc).

It’s been a great way to keep the team spirits up even though we’re all apart. And we’re definitely all looking forward to tasting some of the goods once the confinement lifts!

Who knew you could make 8 different variations out of butternut squash? Yes, 8!

Team-wide quizzes

To keep the conversation going on our Slack channel, we regularly prepare fun quizzes on Once for the team. Just recently, I created a ‘Guess Who’ story with team member’s baby pictures. Seeing your colleague’s cute baby pictures is definitely one way to stay close!

Ever wanted to know what your team’s latest Netflix binge is? We did. So we’ve asked the team for their Netflix recommendations using a Once story. And to get over the lockdown blues, we’ve asked everyone for their “feel-good” tunes on Once. We then compiled the songs and created a Spotify playlist. Best listened to in the morning, to get you started!

Seeing your colleague’s cute baby pictures is definitely one way to stay close!

Onboarding with care

Joining a team in this environment can be pretty stressful. Not being able to meet your teammates and not knowing when you’ll get to meet them in person is definitely far from ideal. So to add a bit of warmth to the whole onboarding process, we created a Once story to welcome our new teammates. We send it right before their first day to get them excited about joining and it includes a short presentation about eFounders. We also link to our onboarding Trello board where they’ll be able to find all the information they need to have a great first week.