This week we continued our new tradition of ‘Donut chats’.

At Parabol, we are fully remote, and have been since day 1. While pre-pandemic, we would periodically meet in person, that hasn’t been possible for more than a year. Only a handful of us have ever met in person. How do we build personal relationships in a situation where it’s nearly impossible for everyone to get together? 

Our team is spread across the globe in different time zones, ranging from the West coast of the US to China with several in between. We’ve adjusted our quarterly retreats to collaborate virtually, away from normal work, and we share experiences during fika, but something was still missing. Enter: Donut. 

A couple of Parabol members stumbled across a tool to help facilitate remote connections among our employees. In our company culture, anyone who has an interesting idea is welcome to propose it, and see if teammates jump on. With Donut, we’ve been going strong for 6 weeks.  It’s not mandatory, but basically everyone has opted in.

Donut gives us a unique opportunity to learn about one another in an unstructured small-group environment. 

While we all have 1 on 1 meetings regularly with our respective team leads, we were lacking the chance to have personal conversations with coworkers outside our teams or people we didn’t directly work with. 

Our newfound donut chats pair us randomly with a new co-worker every other week, so we can interact with others we might never have had the chance to get to know, similar to passing each other in the hallway, or swapping weekend anecdotes at the coffee machine. 

In a company that is entirely remote, and living in a world where remote work is quickly becoming the norm, our collection of eclectic individuals have found a way to come together.

This week, Traffic numbers are still finding their new, real baseline after the error we corrected on May 14. It’ll take until July 15 to have a clean month-over-month comparison.

Activity seemed to drop, both the number of meetings ran and MAU’s were down slightly. This could potentially signal the beginning of a new-new-normal as teams come back into the office.

…Added 120 new icebreakers. We’ve had a lot of requests to add more icebreakers, now users will have even more variety to start their meeting. It’s also the first PR for our Senior Growth Marketer, Gareth!

…Shipped v6.14.0. This version introduced the new icebreakers, a dns-packet change and fixed a couple of bugs.

…Continued our brand refresh work. Our new Growth Designer, Alicia, has been working to develop new brand themes, stories and visuals.

…Kicked off 3 new batting practices. Hiring is always ongoing, we had 3 candidates start their contract phase for ISR positions.

…Published a post on Four Steps to a Daily Scrum That Doesn’t Suck.

…Wrap up Sprint #80. 

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