Hello week — Our Monday morning ritual

Every week at Central, we start with the “Hello week” gazette. I post it on Slack before noon on Monday and everyone finds in it all the useful information to run the week smoothly. Hello Week is one of our rituals and it helps keep the team cohesive and encourages open communication and trust.

At Central, sprints usually start with a kick-off meeting with the client’s team. Alongside client sprints, everyone is also deeply involved in internal tasks like planning, marketing, sales and our initiatives like Umami Talks. With all these things going on at the same time, we needed to establish a clear plan for the week. To do this, we tried two popular methods: internal kick-offs after our client kick-offs and stand ups… But both of these broke our momentum and didn’t become habits.

One week, we had a lot of things planned across the company. To clear things up in my head I started writing down a list of everyone’s tasks for the week. I titled it “Hello week” and posted it on our Slack. Once I sent it out, everyone naturally met each other to discuss their common tasks. We all felt more comfortable knowing what each one of us was doing, and it was easy to refer to the list during the week if we got lost.

Over time, I tweaked the format a bit. I introduced a quick recap of the previous week and a preview of what was planned in the coming weeks, added reminders about planned meetings, said who would be taking days off soon, etc. It’s a very simple and adaptable list that anyone can send to the team if I’m away.

As a team manager, I find Hello week helps me tackle the coming work more comfortably. All our team members are more autonomous, can organize themsleves better and collaborate more easily.

Hello week is now one of our rituals. I realized just how helpful it was when one week I didn’t post it and everyone asked for it.

In a team, family, or geographical region, rituals nurture culture. They increase cohesion and make things smoother. You cannot just follow a recipe coming from a methodology, like stand-up meetings, and expect everyone to be 100% involved. It should come from your own needs. I believe successful teams are often the ones that build their own rituals.

Thanks for reading. I’m the founder of Central, a design consultancy that helps organizations elaborate successful digital products. Follow us for more articles about our company culture and digital product design.

Thanks to Marie van Boxel for copyediting.