We’ve been working from home for years. Even then, we were unprepared for how different it’d feel as we shifted our routines to protect ourselves and the ones we love from the coronavirus. Mandated work from home isn’t the same, and it means that the routines that we’ve built up also have to change.
I was listening to the episode of the podcast Pivot with therapist Esther Perel as a guest, and she discussed how peopler were being affected by the changes in our work routines. She shared the daily check-ins she did with her team, and how they made a rough situation better.
The science behind it is that by doing check-ins you help teams rebuild their mental models of how they do work, in addition to fostering connections between team members since they can't in person anymore. It dawned on us that as many companies moved to Slack, a Slack bot could make check-ins easier for teams.
We started thinking about what questions could help during this time, especially for teams that were new to working from home. Teams are not only experiencing being remote for the first time, but also under an extraordinary situation. Which is why, honestly, even teams that are used to being remote could also benefit, because no one is used to a pandemic.
Since we already had the infrastructure to make Slack bots for our main project, Ovvy, we could fast-track Kiki. We built Kiki using strategies we’ve learned over the years, and research we’ve been doing to help build resilience in a trying time. This is our way of trying to help.
We know that we are going to get through this, and that we will come out more adaptive and stronger than we were before.
