How We Stay in Sync as a Distributed Team: The Buffer Daily Pair Call - Founder Chat Friday

Key Takeaways

hey guys as a distributed team one of the things uh maybe if we've invented it but that sounds weird we've come up with is we call it the daily pair call and uh it's a it's a wave to you know for because everyone is in different place where you know team of you know maybe like 21 people across 14 different cities and five different continents or four different continents five five four travels here oh yeah and uh it's a way for us to all stay connected uh as a team uh especially because you know sometimes you might go with in in a day where you not don't talk to anyone and that can be make you feel quite isolated maybe you can talk a little bit more about how the daily pair call actually works yeah so how it works is we have an algorithm um and each week you get paired with one of the person in the company it could be across any of all the areas you can it could just be any one and so you're paired with that person for the week and then so five times that week you will have a call with them about 20 20 minute call and you'll just catch up on what you've been working on kind of that day or the previous day depending on the time that you do it and then you also talk about your self-improvements which is one of our key values of away yeah that works really well on a weekly basis you can if you sync up every day and it's like for this week i might wanna you know really improve my sleep time i only get seven hours i wanna get eight hours or people have you know really cool cool things that you know people wanna learn to meditate people want to uh you know the ones that i'm most inspired by when i see or when people tell me about it's like character improvements people say hey i feel like i want to stop saying this makes people uncomfortable or i i'm not that happy i want to work on you know trait character traits yeah the most interesting thing about the pair call i think is is that you know oftentimes you have like stand up and it's like team wise right you have a product team that has a stand up and you know the product and all the engineers interact with each other the pair call with us is like it can't be anybody with anyone like it can be you know some a happiness hero from you know support team with an engineer that can be you know joel as the ceo with the person that started yesterday and i feel like it really makes for a good mix of you know not you know overvaluing any of the departments yeah the other cool thing is that it's not focused purely on work it's almost 50 500 and more like on the personal side of things i think that's really key right because um anything going on in your personal life or just improving in general as a person will make a huge difference for your work exactly i always mention i think when i spoke speak with people i always mention it's great if within a year you're able to become a 10 better engineer right that's a good outcome right yeah it's nothing you can't argue with that at the same time if you can help someone become a 10 better person you know that's a massive difference in terms of what what that person can achieve and things they want to accomplish further down the road yeah awesome cool i think that's everything about the daily pair call a quick tip about you know if you working in the distributed team maybe try it out and see if it helps you stay connected yeah um the algorithm we use is called the round robin algorithm yeah it's the same algorithm used for when you have a tournament and you have all the teams and they say you have 20 teams and you want them all to play against each other it's the round robin tournament algorithm so that's what we use it's been working yeah it's been awesome yeah let us know