Weekly Practices to Strengthen Hybrid Culture

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One of the many challenges that companies who have shifted to hybrid work face is how to keep their employees connected and engaged. It’s so important for companies to know the difference between meeting and connecting. Employees who feel connected to their colleagues are more likely to be aligned with their company’s values, mission, and purpose. That’s why at Centaur Labs we bring our team together with culture-building traditions that fully embody our core values. These values are: 

‍Create Change

Act with Integrity

Keep Learning

Every Voice Counts‍

These rituals and traditions enable us all to build more meaningful connections with each other and to create a positive and inclusive work environment, whether we’re working in-person, remote, or somewhere in between. Take a peek below at some of our favorite weekly rituals and traditions!

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Weekly culture-building traditions that connect our hybrid team

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1. TED Talks

Every Wednesday, an employee takes the proverbial stage and teaches the team about any topic that interests or excites them - specifically a topic outside of work. Some recent examples include favorite restaurants, Wordle, 6-string guitars, living in an RV…the list goes on. Not only is this an opportunity for our hybrid team to get together to learn something new, connect with colleagues, and celebrate our diverse team, but it’s also a great way to encourage everyone to truly be their authentic selves at work.

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2. Daily health check

Every day, we have a Slack reminder that goes out to all employees asking each employee to reply with one healthy thing they plan to do for themselves that day. It’s a dedicated Slack channel to remind us all to check in on ourselves and each other mentally, physically, and emotionally – we want to develop a culture where it's clear that employee health always comes first.

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3. Learning from others

Every Friday, an employee shares with the team something they have learned from another company, organization, friend, conversation, etc. that they think could be useful to the whole Centaur Labs team. We are always exploring to bring great ideas and inspiration from outside of our team for us to keep learning – we are constantly curious! We all want to learn from each other to improve ourselves, each other, and the company – collective intelligence is part of our core product after all.

At Centaur Labs we are all about celebrating the contributions of our team, so we wrap up each week with a few traditions to do just that: 

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4. Demos

If an employee has something they’re working on that they want to share, we call that a demo. And we love to see them! We encourage everyone to be proud of the work they accomplish and to not be afraid to show that work off to the team. Demos help the team remember that every task, ticket, and project – big or small – that each individual contributes to matters!

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5. Employee of the week

At the end of the day, our success as a team is dependent on the contributions, hard work, and impact of each of us as individuals. At the end of each week, we ask everyone to nominate one employee who has gone above and beyond – based on both the work they contributed, and how they worked with the team to get it done. We spotlight that employee in our weekly wrap up meeting with our Employee of the Week award because it’s so important to recognize and thank everyone for their hard work.

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6. Weekly Team Photo

Before we send everyone off to the weekend, we snap a picture of the entire team via Zoom and caption it #fridayteamphoto! This idea was brought to us from our investor, Steve Loughlin at Accel, who showed us a flipbook of his team photos at RelateIQ (the company he built and eventually sold to Salesforce). We loved the idea so much, we adopted the tradition and have been capturing the growth of our team via photos ever since! Our team is constantly growing, and we know we'll only continue to grow over the years – we're excited to see all of the photos when we're hundreds of employees strong!

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While we can’t predict everything about hybrid work, we do know that creating and maintaining workplace traditions is central to our approach – we hope that you can take away some fresh ideas from our traditions to share with your team!