Zetanauts of ZD: A Zeta Design initiative enhancing team-wide bonding
Handbook to know each other and build strong bonds at work
The year was 2018: Chai breaks, water cooler conversations, and evening gaming sessions had become the norm. For those of us who hadn’t joined Zeta yet, we hear this and feel we missed the fun. After all, who wouldn’t want to experience the fun times spent chilling and working in the same room at the office yet again. We often wondered how lively the time was back then in the office and how each one of us craved to be together. Be it our get-togethers, lunch-break gossip, mafia sessions, design meet-ups, after-work night outs, or team outings — we were recalling all the happy days in the office. When asked to recall, what some of us loved the most about being in office, they said something like:
“I really love the way we used to go out for chai-breaks at 4pm everyday.”
“Umm, what do I love the most? 🤔 Honestly, I love being in the office and having fun while working for our design meet-ups.”
“One thing that I love the most about the office is pranking with each other and playing board games and mafia.”
But all these things transformed into memories when work from home came into existence. For the first few months, it felt like a blessing in disguise for most of us. Almost like being in a wonderland in our own comfy spaces: Most of us would wake up late and rush for the morning sync-up call. We would stay in the comfort of our pyjamas while taking important meetings throughout the day, while also managing house chores parallelly. It felt amazing!
However, soon the enthusiasm faded and we began missing our happy times in the office with our small family — our design team. With this came the realisation that the remote working environment had brought too many changes for all of us — be it the ones who had been here for a while and had worked together in the office, or the ones who joined virtually in the past two years. The only way to meet each other, work together and have fun was through webcams and Zoom: There were no more random jokes, design meet-ups, parties, or budding friendships at work, making us lose sight of who we were as people. Gradually, vanishing the REAL US. Be it our favourite dish, colour, movie, heartbreaks or any other little fact about them, we knew nothing at all!
It was as if the world had turned upside down. This virtual space had created a room for hesitation and awkwardness, making it hard to build rock-solid bonds, know each other and interact well. Sharing our secrets, heartbreaks, and life journeys on chai breaks was no longer our thing.
Bringing back the fun!
Way back during early 2020, we were barely a group of 15 designers. Fast forward into 2021, we now have designers, developers, and writers — together making us a mini-army of 57! Bonding together while building kickass products and solving real-life problems often brought us into the limelight. However, with the team expansion, we felt like we were losing the limelight.
As a result, the creative minds felt the need to reinstate the spark which our design family had lost all this while. To let the friendships bloom and get to know each other more before the office reopens, we thought it’s time to get some facts and secrets revealed.
Hence, we at Zeta Design, took it upon ourselves to bond and care for our team’s betterment, despite being confined to our homes and decided to run an initiative called ‘Zetanauts of Zeta Design (ZD)’. We were so excited to kick start the journey towards this exciting initiative!
Introducing Zetanauts of ZD
‘Zetanauts of ZD’ is a handbook highlighting each and every member of the design team. It is the go-to collection of some facts and secrets about each of us that will help to build new bonds and friendships and even improve our communication within the team.
As designers, after identifying a problem we didn’t stay calm till we found a solution to it. With each passing day, we wanted to find a way to bond better, till the office reopens. As laying strong foundations helps in making a product more efficient and consistent, we began by laying out our objective and defining the user personas for better clarity.
The objective was to create a go-to place to introduce our design team. The final result could vary based on different personas with each having their respective user stories:
- As someone from the design community or outside Zeta, I may want to know more about people designing Zeta.
- As someone from Zeta, in addition to the above, I may want to understand a few other things like what BUs (Business Units) are they part of, know designers in my BU better, understand their strengths, etc.
- As someone from Zeta Design, I would want to learn, engage and make friends with other designers based on matching skill sets or hobbies. The idea was to improve communication amongst the design team members, to a more personal level.
With this let’s dig deep to know about the approach we followed to bring Zetanauts of ZD to life!
Our approach
1. Understanding the problem from the team’s perspective
We conducted a communication survey in order to empathise with our teammates and understand their pain points when it comes to communication and bonds within the team. The agenda of the survey was to analyse the status of effective communication and have a broader picture of how the entire team felt about their communication within the team.
Our hearts believed that we share strong bonds and we know each other pretty well even in the remote setting, but the survey results amazed us. To our surprise, we found that except for the weekly learning sessions, we hardly used to meet or communicate with each other on a regular basis. To mention a few of the findings from the survey results:
- Working in different business units (BUs) refrained us from interacting with others adhering to our busy schedules leading to less interaction. That is if we were not related in terms of work we hardly used to connect with each other.
- Hesitation and busy schedules were the major reasons behind ineffective communications within the team.
- At times, we didn’t have conversation starters to spark a conversation during a one-on-one with a new joiner.
- Catching up only through webcams and not in-person meetings also proved to be a hassle for some of us during communication with our fellow teammates.
- The majority of us weren’t satisfied with our communication level within the team.
2. Brainstorming on possible solutions
Before we began with brainstorming, we used the findings and results to understand the pain points and serve multiple purposes like:
- Understanding the objective itself, i.e, figure out what exactly does a designer need from looking at another designer’s profile.
- Finalising the type of content which would be useful and would even act as conversation starters, if needed.
- Understanding the privacy criteria of folks, i.e, how comfortable they are in sharing their personal and professional details within the team, organisation, and in public.
When asked to collaborate more, a few folks were keen to share their experiences and insights on the same. Those conversations and their valuable insights and expectations helped us validate our questions and details which we had planned to add as data in our Zeta Design Team’s handbook — Humans of ZD.
3. Sharing the questions with the team to collect their answers
Here are a few of the questions we had added in the form we had designed to share with the team:
Starting July 2021, we began collecting the answers to our questions for every member of the team. It was a set of 25–30 questions that revolved around the personal and professional front of every teammate. Since the questions were deep and needed proper time to be thought of while answering, the team took time and answered every question very sportingly. Kudos to everyone for being super supportive and for sharing all their answers with complete honesty! 🤗❤️
4. Converting the raw data into a consumable format
After a series of iterations and discussions, we decided to ship Zetanauts of ZD in two releases depending on the audience and the content.
- MVP (Release 1): Only accessible to Zeta Design Team
- Final Product (Release 2): Accessible publicly within and outside Zeta
With the finalisation of the approach of releasing the handbook, came up a challenge on how to begin building the MVP version. After researching on what tool to use, we discovered Notion. Notion provides the functionality to publish our database on a web URL. With the experience of using Notion for a while, we knew for a fact that Notion will restrict us to some extent. But as designers, it’s in our nature to make everything visually appealing despite the constraints on our way.
We documented all the gathered data on the Notion board and added a few visual elements in order to make the design pop. With the additional visual assets, it seemed to be a product made for the designers and by the designers, rather than just a boring board filled with information. Until we landed on our final version of the handbook on the Notion board, a number of ideas and approaches were tried and discarded. Finally, we could build the best possible solution within the confined walls on Notion for our MVP release.
Unraveling the first glimpse of our Handbook
Here’s a sneak peek of the result of our ongoing efforts for the MVP:
We, the design team at Zeta strive to bring a sense of humaneness, clarity and spark joy with the products we design. We are a close-knit, collaborative group of people, who are ardent believers in iterative user-centric design. By combining data and thoughtful critique, we strive to bring warmth to our meticulously crafted products, created through diligence and discussion. We are a jovial, light-hearted bunch who pride ourselves on the bonds we share as a unit. Our diverse backgrounds, from the world of architecture, fashion, journalism, mathematics, and engineering (to name a few) help us put our best foot forward in tackling all things design!❤️
The MVP release was shipped on 13 October 2021, and with that, there was a flurry of excited messages. Everyone was excited to move out of their comfort zones and hesitation, in order to bring in some new friendships and allow bonds to bloom within the team. It showed us a way to initiate conversations, and carry them forward into the office setup.
So whenever we get rid of these webcams and meet each other in person, we’ll actually know each other. There won’t be room for awkwardness and first conversations, it’ll be just us creating new memories together.
This was our journey, from hardly knowing anyone to knowing the team, a little better with the first release of Zetanauts of ZD. We still have a long way to go, to develop better bonding at work and communicate well within the team, but this was our first step in the right direction. Till we come back with our next blog, please do share how you and your team are communicating and bonding with each other. 😊
A huge shout out to Rishabh Kapoor for being the important pillar in this initiative. A big thank you to Ramakrishna V for giving me the opportunity to drive this initiative; and Lavanya Gopalaswamy and Kshitij Pandey for the constant support and feedback for this blog. And kudos to Aakansha Menon for the amazing illustrations.
