Company Culture: Zoom with Pets
How a remote-first company engages their team and promotes a culturally positive remote-work environment; this time, with animals.
Building Remote Culture
On Friday afternoon, the Squared Away team hosted their usual all-hands meeting. This time, we included 10 of our teammate’s pets on our agenda. The result? Read on, my friend.
We’ve seen time and time again questions about how to build an engaging and supportive remote work culture or any remote culture for that matter.
Volunteers?!
At Squared Away, we have a rule; we’ll try anything once as long as we morally and ethically agree with the idea or plan. When we posted the opportunity to intro your pet on our team call, we had ten volunteers within 3 minutes. I have never seen our team move so quickly.
The Agenda
We always share an agenda on our team’s #announcements Slack channel. We placed the pet intros at the end of our team call. We had two reasons for this:
- We want to respect our teammate’s time; if they’re joining for the critical updates, we don’t want to hold them up from handling their work and life.
- There were some critical updates we needed to share, and it was fun to end an updates call on a fun note!
Pet Intro Time!
We had a total of 10 pets joining the call. The team pet call was new territory, so we had loose guidelines for introducing your pet, anything fun facts about them, and the team sharing comments/questions on the call (taking themselves off of mute), or in the chat portion of our Zoom platform.
I discussed the plan with our CEO, Michelle, before the call, with plans to help everyone get back on track if necessary (wrapping up the current conversation and introducing the next teammate). We didn’t need these; our team worked well together to allow everyone time to share their pets.
I had a list readily available of who we were going to intro, and the team was aware of this before the call (they knew when they would be up).
1. Polly and Alison were first, and they shared their dogs.
2. Savannah and Katherine were up next to share their dogs. Savannah’s daughters excitedly shared their dog. Katherine shared her rich experiences with her pup, Flounder.
3. Tera’s basset hound was a crowd favorite, and Krista’s pup Shadow made his grand appearance in the most recent Squared Away Newsletter.
4. Hayley showed her new puppy and Kelsie matched her bulldog!
5. Kelsie was matching her English Bulldog.
6. Kinsey was sharing Gremlin and Bo!
7. Last one! Caroline and her Australian Sheppard & Chocolate Lab, along with Shane and Fleet.
Are you ready for Zoomies?
If your team has pets, it’s a great way to get to know your teammates better and have them share a piece of their lives with your team. Team calls with pets are the remote version of bringing your pet to work day!
If you have a team without pets, consider talking with your local shelter to see if they can set up a Zoom meeting with one of their shelter animals with your team. The Human Society of Broward County offers this as a service, Schedule Your Zoomies! This is not sponsored; I genuinely believe in therapy dogs’ effectiveness and the positive presence of animals.
Squared Away is comprised of military spouses who are your trusted assistants. We help CEOs, VCs, executives, and startup teams get their time back. US-based. #SquaredAwayLife #ChiefExecutiveAssistant
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