Step 3 - House Rules' examples 🗝️

This list shall serve as inspiration for your own house rules. Why? Research shows that teams who clarify joint behavioral principles perform better. And while a physical office gives you cues on how to behave, moving into an online office can be confusing. Happy co-working!

Our Work Context (tools - what to use how)

• We use Teemyco for internal oral communication (Slack for writing & files; Google Meet for external calls; emails for external written communication)
• We all use an avatar picture so we easily find each other in the virtual office

➡ Rooms & Behaviors

• Room layout: We may all add rooms & amend all rooms except for the ones below. Never-used rooms can be erased.
• Rooms that may not be changed or erased without checking with the team: Lounge, Focus Area, Open Workspace, Dev Room, Team Room, Founders Corner, Gone Fishing.
• The person adding a new room explains the purpose & behavior in the room description field
• For important or sensitive discussions we lock the virtual room (signaling do not disturb)
• “Crashing” into social areas such as the Kitchen or Afterwork bar is always allowed
• Being in the Kitchen does not mean one is lazy, it means the person is open for a quick break. We encourage social breaks.
• For Thursday Lunch roulettes we meet up in the Kitchen and split into smaller groups & rooms. We encourage participation in Thursday lunch roulette but it isn't mandatory.
• All other rooms may change names temporary (by anyone!) as long as the description field explains the expected behavior or purpose (nonsense welcome!).
• We synch group remote Gym or Meditation sessions on Slack beforehand & pre-schedule them.
• We do not have so many rooms that one must scroll in the main view, as orientation of who is who then becomes too hard.
• Anyone may pin a link into a room. Pins that shall not be removed are marked with "keep!" in the link title. E.g. our House rules and/or the Games.
• We encourage nonsense rooms & experimentation.

🤝 Meetings

• Internal Meetings: We all use individual cameras in meetings; also if two of us are co-located
• External Meetings: We only share room links of rooms specifically marked as external meeting room. If in use Zoom / Hangout we use the phone booth
• For Daily Standups we use the Dev Room, Customer Room & Founders Corner.
• The weekly team meeting is mandatory & happens in the Team Room.