How Synthesis — and its product team — nails working from home
By: Victor Huang
Tags: Humans Of Synthesis, People, Company Culture, Covid 19, Work From Home

Tea is the liquid of life

2. Pro — Duck — Tea — Vi — Tea

Our resident abang (Malay for ‘brother’) and full stack engineer, Arif Rahman, introduced a daily water cooler talk to our team when we started working remotely. You heard that right. A company approved water cooler talk. We call it the “productivi-tea” session, where we combine technical discussions (productivity) with casual chat (spilling the tea) for 30 minutes each afternoon (and management is okay with it!?!)

We chat about topics from the serious to the causal, like

How we should store a certain type of document in MongoDB

How we should spend our weekends

Specifications about our new React Component

Specific details about the interesting news, or ‘tea’, going on in our team and the company

While I found it pretty surprising at first, having an official water cooler chat isn’t such a crazy idea. Just Google the term ‘water cooler chat’, and you’ll find plenty of sources supporting its benefits for both companies and employees.

Not only do I get a chance to bring up the technical problems I’m currently facing and get advice, I also gradually became very comfortable with reaching out to my teammates to collaborate and ask for help outside of the productivi-tea meetings.

Additionally, the meeting has also served as an opportunity for the team to sync up on common terminology and also have a place where miscellaneous questions are permitted, which improves our team’s communication.

The meeting got me involved in the company’s culture and conversations, even though our team is remote.

Homemade cookies and a good read

3. Weekly Showcase & SNACK BUDDIES 🍇🧁🥤

A weekly company showcase is a pretty common practice. It comes with numerous benefits: helping employees understand the overall trajectory of the company, highlighting the work that others are doing, and fostering company culture.

However, there’s one easy way to make any meeting even better and boost employee morale… (drum roll please… ) and that’s through food.

At Synthesis, the Snack Exchange is the most sacred event of each Friday. Once the roster has been generated, it becomes your solemn duty to provide your snack buddy with suitable sustenance for the weekly showcase. This usually involves a quick chat about what food they like, before choosing some snacks to be delivered to their doorstep.

This simple exchange of snacks allows you to get to know another person in the bigger company for a little while. Waiting for the food to arrive is also rather exciting, as you aren’t sure what exactly the other party got you!

There might be a bit of a Pavlov’s dog situation going on here, but I’ve found myself looking forward to the weekly showcase every week. Enjoying some snacks while learning about the interesting things done by other teams in the company makes it all the better.

Aside from the upbeat vibes, this is also a platform where interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration occurs.We often have data scientists bringing in a unique perspective (and possibly new innovations!) on the work strategists present.

And for the product team, showcasing our work gives us valuable insights on our product designs and features from our strategist colleagues who work directly with our business partners.