Cross-teams collaboration (& fun)

This internal page is maintained by @Joanna Ciecierska (Head of People & Culture), @Florence Chouet (People & Culture Manager).

There is no doubt that cross-teams collaboration brings the diversity of knowledge, experience and skills to the table. If you add on top of that the ownership mindset of our colleagues and the willingness to have a real impact on the change, you get the best possible components for the bottom up engagement initiatives we have at HelloBetter.

The Working Group (WG) evolved out of the Guilds that were initially created as a result of company-wide retro (Feb 2022). From the beginning, we aimed to enable cross-team collaboration to work on company-wide initiatives with the goal to deliver a specified outcome. With each new cycle, the framework has evolved a bit. Please find the current version below👇🏼.

The general setup of the WG is supposed to allow for quick, smaller-scope projects that can deliver results within a timeframe of 6 months overall, with 4 months of active Working Phases.

This clear beginning and end of each “WG cycle” makes it easier for employees to commit to a set timeframe, rather than a bigger project with multiple smaller initiatives within it and an open-ended timeframe.

With each new WG cycle, new WGs form and employees can decide each time, which WG they want to join.

At HelloBetter the Engineering and Product Team are working together in cross-functional teams called Squads and Chapters.

Squads are formed to tackle product and engineering initiatives, which allows its members to focus on one objective at a time. They are largely self-managed and have ownership over their workflow and rituals (such as daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and product&tech refinements).

Our squads promote cross-collaboration between different roles to develop the best solutions to our business problems.

Each squad contains the following roles: 🧑🏽‍💼  1 PM (Product Manager) 🌐  1 or more web developers 📲  1 or more mobile developers 👩🏽‍💻  1 or more backend developers 👨🏿‍💻. 1 QA engineer

In addition, we have some people that are not part of a single squad but support multiple squads at once. For example, our PD (Product Designer), our Engineering Manager, and some chapter-leads attend multiple squad rituals.

Chapters at HelloBetter are made up of people working on the same platform (mobile, web, backend, QA). They align on engineering standards and address platform-specific issues.

At HelloBetter, we also strongly believe in the benefits of knowledge sharing amongst all our employees. For this we have introduced some time ago Thanks God it’s Tuesday sessions open to all. During this meeting, we aim to share knowledge or skills that will help others to learn something that it’s outside their scope of daily responsibilities. Thanks to this we foster the culture of cross teams knowledge sharing. We also gain a better understanding of different teams responsibilities. We learn skills that help us to be more effective in our work and to adapt quicker to the future needs.

Last but not least, TGITs are a great opportunity for networking and celebrating diversity. With the broader knowledge we can support each other even better in any challenges.

👉🏻 Learn more about TGIT here: Rituals and events

Online games

Check here for our favourite online games.

Social activities & groups of interest

With diverse teams come also a variety of interest & hobbies. If you a passionate about sports (#hellosports), you are a food-lover (#hello_butter), or you simply adore animals (#hellobello) - you will find at HelloBetter some fellow colleagues sharing this these interest with you. Check our dedicated slack channels and join some cool activities at work or have some fun together after office hours.

HelloBetter Playlist

We created this for our Series A party, but it’s also a nice playlist for any other occasion: