Examples of Team Guidelines for Using Gather

Riley
Riley
  • Updated

Gather works best when your team has a shared understanding of expectations for using it. For example, where should people go when they want to co-work? Do most people talk with video on or off? When you step away for lunch, what should you do?  

Establishing some basic norms early on can be helpful while figuring out the tool together. We recommend documenting them in Notion, as a Google Doc, or wherever your team keeps internal documentation. Here's a Gather Onboarding Guide template you can copy/paste. 

‍To give your team a starting point, here are some guidelines we’ve heard from other teams on Gather: 

  1. Move all meetings into Gather, so you’re not hopping between video tools. 
  2. Keep Gather open while you’re working, close it when you’re offline Your presence in Gather provides visibility to your coworkers about when you’re working and available to chat. Need to focus? Use Do Not Disturb mode, so colleagues know not to bother you.   
  3. Use the wave feature as a lightweight way to start a conversation. It signals that you want to talk, but gives your coworker time to pause what they’re doing before you actually walk up to them and start talking. 
  4. Move your avatar around the office as another way to show your current work status. A few ideas: 
    1. Sit in a coworking zone when you’re craving connections and available to chat. 
    2. Sit at a focus pod when you’re heads down on something so others know not to disturb you. 
    3. Sit in the cafeteria when you step away for lunch or a snack. Having a place to show that you’re taking a break can promote healthy work/life balance and encourage others on the team to follow suit!
  5. Don’t walk into a meeting uninvited if it's behind a closed door. If the door is open, however, that means it’s an open coworking session. 
  6. Need to have a private conversation? Lock the meeting. This will prevent anyone else from joining the conversation unless invited in. 
  7. "Here’s how we use the office:" To complete your guidelines, include screenshots or a video recording of different areas of your office explaining specifically how your team will use them. This is especially helpful when onboarding new hires to your team, so they understand where to go for what in the office. 

As your team gets settled into your virtual office, it’s common for these guidelines to change overtime as you learn how you like to use the space. 

Keep these guidelines documented somewhere that’s accessible to the whole team and available to new hires. This will help onboard them into your team culture and share the virtual norms they can expect while working for your team!

 
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