How to not stress out your team
Tips on how to make sure your communication helps instead of stresses out your team
Hi there,
Being a founder means I am thinking about Bunch many times on the weekend or in the evening hours. I constantly have ideas and insights and realizations. My partner calls this “ 🐿 squirrel mode” it means I am moving around and quickly collecting nuggets (ideas, learnings, insights) and piling them up in my notebook or somewhere else. Unfortunately, this mode turns on often during “downtime”, e.g. on the weekend, during evening hours, or early in the morning. The time during which my team typically rests. In the past, I was not aware that me writing things down in Slack or in shared chats or even emailing ideas through during that time stresses out my team until asked a few people and they jokingly said things like “yeah when I get those emails from you on the weekend, I start thinking about Bunch and then I can’t shut off anymore, but it’s ok, I know you don’t intend to stress me out”. I was shocked. I was not expecting them to think about work at that time, I was just jotting things down and sending around my nuggets whenever they came to me (in the spirit of transparency I did not want to keep it from the team if I had an important realization). But I could not have been more wrong. Instead of inspiring ideas and contributing to creative flow I caused stress and contributed to my teammates’ struggles of not being able to “shut off” during downtime (since we are very mission-driven as a team and that comes with an inability to shut off work during rest times).
So I dug deeper and found a few relevant resources on how to be a more considerate leader and how to support your teams’ rest mode during downtime:
How to not stress out your team 💪
👉 The Curse of Off-Hours Email by Vanessa Bohns (Professor of Organizational Behavior at Cornell University) and Laura M. Giurge (Research Fellow at London Business School and PhD in Management)
Top Takeaways: The sender of a work email during off-hours is not expecting immediate replies, however the receiver still feels the pressure to reply immediately, leading to stress in time when rest is in order.
👉 Channel Hygiene: Simple Boundaries for Remote Teams by Murat Knecht
Top Takeaways: Reading emails and Slack during off-time is a no-go since it disallow from disconnecting (which is what off-hours are for), however exchanging pictures about each others’ lives on Whatsapp (which encourage everyone to share things outside of work).
👉 Slack etiquette guide by holopod
Top Takeaways: Did you know that by using public channels over private DMs when working on projects together will help the rest of your team to stay informed? While DMs is a great tool to build relationships, e.g. by warning someone before adding them to a channel.
News from Bunch
Join our next AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Jay Signorello, Co-founder & CTO at Backstory and ex-VP Engineering at Zillow, on October 6th at 6 pm CEST, 12 pm EST, 9 am PST right in Slack! 🎉
Jay will share his lessons learned from his time at Zillow, as well as his experiences as a founder and what he is up to next with Backstory. Bring your all your questions 🤓
Download the Bunch AI coach to get access to our exclusive community if you want to join Alex’ AMA. It’s free and awesome.
Once you download the AI coach, you’ll get the link to join the community in our Welcome email and also get the link to join the AMA directly in your Bunch app.
Tips from the Bunch AI Coach:
Check out this week‘s tip “Well-being boundaries” by Arielle Tschinkel, Writer at Business Insider and Refinery29 in your Bunch AI coach’s Explore Tab (search for “Boundaries”).
Stay calm,
Darja
PS: