One of the big questions facing professionals right now is how do you, as a CEO or a business leader, maintain the company culture and keep your team’s morale high, when everyone is working remotely?

This is a critical question since culture — as fundamental it is for a company‘s success — is a fragile thing.

In an Upwork survey , 30% of hiring managers reported reduced team cohesion as one of the biggest issues with remote work.

Even though culture and team cohesion might not be high on the list of priorities during a crisis, I believe they are absolutely crucial to ensure that productivity stays high in the long run.

I have always been proud of our culture at Slido , and for many team members it’s one of the key reasons for working for the company.

So here the five tactics I’d like to share that we are currently using to maintain our culture with the team of 140 across 10 time zones.

1. Host special virtual get-togethers for the team to socialize

In a recent internal survey we ran, 30% of our team marked ‘loneliness ‘ as one of biggest challenges they face, right after not being able to unplug.

As the numbers confirm, people long for social contact when working from home. It’s important for leaders to recognize this need, and make the social element an important part of day-to-day business.

There are a few ways we go about this at Slido.

First, individual teams have set up their regular weekly meetings where the only purpose is for people to get together and socialize. They make them a permanent fixture in their calendars.

For example, our marketing team hosts their Coffee/Tea(m) Time on Tuesday afternoons, where they catch up on all the missed office talk with a cup of their favorite drink in their hands.

Secondly, we scale a similar concept for the whole company and organize a bi-weekly virtual happy hour to get together and chat. To kick things off, we host a virtual quiz about the team members to break the ice, and get people into a socializing mood.

And lastly, inspired by Zapier and their Pair Buddies initiative , we encourage cross-team partnerships by having weekly random pairing with two to three people. We use Donut for this, which is a Slack app that randomly groups two-three people, and motivates them to bond.

2. Send monthly pulse checks on how everybody’s doing

‘We care’ is one of our core values, so knowing and caring about how our people are is paramount to us.

On the surface everything might look fine, but there may be things boiling up under the lid. Especially with everyone working remotely now, it’s even harder to know how everyone is doing.

To get feedback from the team, we run monthly employee pulse checks to find out how they feel about their job, and learn about their remote experience.

The pulse check is a very short, two-minute survey, with five quick rating questions and two open text ones. Collecting people’s insights in this way is invaluable for our organization.

Since it’s on a monthly basis, it allows us to keep track of different categories over time, and see if we need to zero in on anything.

Nowadays, one of the very important categories that we track in the pulse check, is our employees’ remote experience. It’s actually so important to get the remote setup for people right, that we have made “Become a truly remote place” one of our company’s key objectives.

For your inspiration, here are some of the questions that we ask in the survey:

After everyone submits their answers, our head of internal communications, Daniela, shares the results with respective team leads who go through them with the rest of their teams and discuss the important points.

3. Run strategic meetings to bring everyone together

As Krisp reported , nine in 10 remote employees say that video conferencing helps them feel more connected to their colleagues. One of the most important ways to keep people in touch with company culture is through all-company meetings.

That’s where you can align and connect your whole team.

To achieve this, we run weekly ‘ Monday Morning Meetings’ that we call simply ‘MMMs’. These are great for kicking off the new week and keeping everyone on the same page. First, we share the previous week’s highlights and numbers, and then we move on to the current week’s priorities.

Another VIM (Very Important Meeting) for us, is our monthly all-hands meeting .

This is our primary avenue for fostering our company culture. Aside from sharing business updates and people updates, all-hands meetings are also moments for us to celebrate our team, and remind everyone about our company mission.

Take inspiration from Trello. Each Trello Town Hall opens with a review of the company’s values, priorities, and employee anniversaries. Then, new hires get to introduce themselves.

For us at Slido, one of the most important reasons for running our all-hands meetings is to open up a discussion with our team. We spend as much as one third (30 minutes) of the whole meeting on Q&A. And people appreciate it. Time and again, they rate it in the feedback as the most valuable section of the meeting.

4. Send out internal newsletter to keep everyone updated

Apart from meetings, we keep people in the loop by distributing a regular, weekly newsletter that our head of internal communications sends out every Monday.

The aim of our newsletter is to summarize all the important news of the week and to make sure everyone’s aligned on what’s going on.

And people truly read it. It has an 80% open rate.

In it, we share:

The previous week’s most important business numbers

“If you read nothing else section,” where we share the most important message of the week

Product updates

People updates (newly hired colleagues/people leaving for parenting leave, etc.)

Who’s birthday it is this week

A couple of the last week’s best photos found in our Slack channels

Some notable resources, like memos, blog posts, or meeting recordings

In the newsletter, we also give space to the departments like marketing, success, sales, or development, to share noteworthy news or details of their latest projects.

5. Create shared experiences across Slack channels

Bringing culture to life is all about those little things that people say or do, that are unique to each company. For us, Slack has become that virtual space where culture happens.

To me, it’s three channels in particular that are essential. #thankyou — That’s where we spontaneously post shoutouts to our colleagues who have gone an extra mile, and we want them to be publicly acknowledged.

#customer_love — We care about our customers as much as about our team. In this channel, we share testimonials and messages of appreciation for the extra support, constantly reminding ourselves of the company ‘we care’ value.

#random — Here, it’s a place for pictures of our team’s newborns, homes, or just random funny GIFs or memes. I’d say it’s the most human and intimate of all of our channels.

So remember

Each company has a unique culture, whether they know it or not. At some companies, culture just happens and is a result of people, leadership, and every day decisions.

But great companies are very intentional about their culture, knowing that it’s the key to their success.

And despite other challenges, culture is more important than ever. Its purpose is to keep the team’s spirits high and navigate through this crisis — not only as a company, but also as individual human beings.

Did you know we have an online event about the future of work coming up? Join the Future of Work track at TNW2020 to hear how successful companies are adapting to a new way of working.

How to teach yourself computer science: A developer’s 100-hour journey

I wondered for quite a long time: does only knowing the basics of computer science help to become a better developer? And could it bring value to a developer?

If you ask yourself these questions as well, and you don’t want to invest time (yet) into learning computer science, here’s the story of my experience. In this article, I’ll answer the following questions:

Why learn computer science?

What was my study plan?

What resources did I use?

Did I learn something useful that can be transferred to my day to day job as a developer?

I began with this fantastic list of resources: teach yourself computer science . It’s basically a guideline on how to study computer science as a software engineer, without spending a lot of money trying to enter MIT.

So, why learn computer science by yourself?

That’s a simple but important question: why would we do that in the first place?

For every project which requires a good amount of motivation, I try first to define proper goals :

Computer science 101: the study plan

I’m not interested in trying to read every book about computer science. It should at least provide me some sense of understanding.

That’s why my study plan focused on memory retention, understanding and building a quick reference about what I’ve learned, to be able to come back to it easily.

I’m trying to apply some active learning principles by doing as many exercises as I can, and asking myself questions while reviewing my mindmaps.

Revisiting what I learned from one week to the next is really, really beneficial to improve my memory retention and my understanding.

What I’ve done so far

Here what I’ve precisely done during these (almost) 100 hours of computer science study, in chronological order.

I. Programming (32 hours 55m)

The article titled “ teach yourself computer science ” specified that I should follow “roughly” the order of study they propose, beginning by the programming field.

Main Resource: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)

This book is considered by many as the bible every developer should read. It’s free and you can find the best epub and PDF versions here .

You can find the solutions of the exercises here .

I succeeded to do almost all exercises till 1.2.5 Greatest Common Divisors .

Complementary Resource: Berkeley Videos

The videos are available here . The notes of the course are here . If you search some sample exams from Berkeley, it’s here .

These are a very good complement to the book: concepts are explained without asking you too much about Mathematics, in contrast with the book. If you want to study the SICP but your mathematical background is not strong enough, simply follow this course. My notes and exercises are here .

What I’ve learned from SICP so far

The beginning of this book is very interesting to really understand the roots of functional programming and recursions.

It defines a lot of terms programmers use every day, in a very precise manner. Perfect to be even more precise during technical discussions.

The book pushed my analytic and solving problem skills with its exercises.

What can I use in real life?

The whole discussion about recursion in the book helped me quite significantly to easily write them. It’s a topic I’ve always struggled a bit with. Now it’s a breeze to go through any problem I want to solve with recursion.

What difficulties did I encounter?

This book is not for math haters. It was written for MIT students who have already quite some mathematical knowledge. Without this prior knowledge, the exercises can be pretty difficult and frustrating at time.

It was the cause of another problem: I spent too much time on the exercises. I could solve most of them but it took me hours in some cases.

I decided from there that I would not spend more than 30 minutes on the exercises to keep the frustration low without discarding the huge benefit of doing them.

II. Discrete Mathematics (50 hours)

The more I was reading SICP, the more I found the exercises difficult, especially since it was dealing with some mathematical concepts that I was not aware of. Therefore, I decided to move on and to begin to studying the Mathematics subject.

Main resource: Discrete mathematics and its applications

Teach yourself computer science advises you to read the lecture notes by László Lovász, freely available here as a ps document . I converted it to PDF here for those who don’t know what a ps document is. I didn’t know either.

However, I’ve chosen another main resource of study, apparently more beginner friendly: Discrete Mathematics and its Application by Kenneth H. Rosen. It’s a pretty big book, quite inexpensive in its earlier editions.

In 50 hours I was able to finish the first chapter (propositional logic) and achieve 54 exercises.

Complementary resource: MIT 6.042J mathematics for computer science, Fall 2010

These videos from MIT are more advanced courses about Discrete Mathematics. Again, they assume that you know quite a bit in Mathematics. Nevertheless, they are very interesting even though I had difficulties to follow them.

In the worst case it will at least give you a good glimpse of what Discrete Mathematics is all about.

One teacher (Tom Leighton) has better teaching skills than others. However, they all have a very deep knowledge of their respective subjects.

What I learned so far

The book taught me the basics of logic, a very good skill to have as a developer. After all, our work is based on proper logic.

Propositional logic with quantifiers and rule of inference. Basically it’s the way to write logical statements, verifying that logical statements make sense and proving their truth values.

Basics of sets and graph theory, thanks to the videos. It’s very interesting and it’s pretty useful for a lot of things: state machines, networking…

What can I use in real life?

Truth tables can be very useful to sort out complex conditional statements or to refactor them.

Recently I could apply DeMorgan laws to improve the readability of some conditional statements.

Expressing confusing and short specifications with predicates, conjunctions and disjunctions (the language of propositional logic) can show contradictions and the details missing. It can summarize very succinctly complex specifications precisely. It can be a good bridge between the specs and the code itself.

What difficulties did I encounter?

Understanding how to write a mathematical proof is hard, especially when nobody can’t help you or correct your proof.

I still lacked of some basics in Mathematics, especially needed for the videos from MIT.

III. Return to the basics of mathematics (11 hours 15)

After having some other (minor) problems with my Mathematics knowledge in Discrete Mathematics, I decided to come back to the basics.

Another important reason which guided my choice: I really enjoyed doing some Mathematics. Without that, I would have not continued to study computer science.

Don’t be confused: the Mathematics related to computer science are different from the one you studied (and maybe hated) at school. I would advise you to give it a try.

At that point I decided to alternate between studying Discrete Mathematics and the basics of Mathematics.

Main resource: How to learn basic arithmetic fast

This video of 4 hours is really good to refresh a lot of things, from the sums and product through the percentages, exponents, logarithms… It covers a lot of ground very quickly with a lot of exercises.

The tips given are very good as well to understand and solve basic problems quickly.

You can see on youtube an hour long preview of the video. If you like it, you can buy it on Vimeo .

What I learned so far

My mental calculation skills improved very well. If you have difficulties to calculate quickly percentages or even doing simple multiplications without a calculator, this course will help you a lot.

Basics to manipulate fractions, exponents, square roots, logarithms and so on.

What can I use in real life?

Being able to calculate mentally is very helpful for a lot of things in real life. Calculating quickly promotions, roughly how expensive a full shopping cart will be…

I can apply all this knowledge while studying computer science.

What difficulties did I encounter?

After studying the SICP and Discrete Mathematics, it was very relaxing to finally understand everything with a bit of work. I didn’t have many difficulties.

My advice for beginners in computer science

If I could come back to the beginning of this adventure, I would have studied the different subjects in this order:

I. Basics Mathematics

II. Discrete Mathematics

III. SICP

I would have studied Basics and Discrete Mathematics in parallel and then moved onto the SICP, trying to get the Mathematics knowledge I still missed along the way.

Learning computer science: What’s next?

I will continue to learn the basics of Mathematics and Discrete Mathematics for at least 150 hours:

The little I know about it already helped me quite a bit in my daily developer life.

I feel (and read) that it’s a foundation for every other field in computer science.

I enjoy studying it! Again, it’s an essential component to stay motivated.

In short: a very good experience, underlying a many of my weaknesses but as well teaching me solid fundamentals I was missing.

Keep in mind though: if you expect to be a super wizard programmer by studying computer science, you might be disappointed. Computer science is hard to study. It has strong theoretical sides and even if I already found some use of it in my daily work, it’s not mind-blowing at all.

Going through this journey asks for work, patience, and dedication. Having clear goals, a concrete study plan and enjoying the process are mandatory.

This article was written by Matthieu Cneude and was originally published on The Valuable Dev , a blog focusing on the important and timeless concepts in software development. You can read the piece here .

Here’s how to do PR when your product is a SECRET

The inherent nature of working in public relations is communicating with the public… hence the term “public.” However, in a strange twist of events, we’re sometimes asked not to communicate (but to also communicate). That can be challenging, but it’s not without merit. This paradox comes into being when there are projects that must remain a secret until launch.

The trick here is creating a public relations plan that maintains the necessary secrets while still creating enough brand awareness that when the secrets are no longer so, they are able to garner the appropriate level of attention.

While there are companies that must hold initiatives a secret, the most common situation, and one I can detail from personal experience,  is when you are working for a startup that is launching a product in stealth.

Prior to a public beta, there is plenty of PR to do, but it has to be done in a way that allows your company to complete the project without actually revealing the project to the public. We dealt with this when we recently transitioned our company from an enterprise solution to launching a consumer app.

While on the surface it would seem that this would create a circumstance in which there would be little to do from a PR perspective, that would be a misnomer and an assumption that doesn’t benefit a single soul.

Constraints require creativity

Brand awareness is the main mission when the project needs to be kept secret until launch. Those handling PR may feel like their hands are tied.

You can’t talk about the product at all. You can’t pitch it, you can’t write about it, and you can’t even allude to the solution it offers in casual conversation.

The focus then has to shift from the product to the company . The entirety of your PR at this stage is to lift your company up to a level of market respectability, without revealing exactly what it’s working on. Some of that will inevitably be derived just from the resumes of the founders, but no one will know for sure until the beta launch.

The artful approach here is to rethink how to publicize your company. Instead of focusing on the product, focus on the founders. Focus on backgrounds and knowledge.

This may seem limiting, but your company is just as important as your product — perhaps more so. It’ll make it that much easier to pitch a product or service if your company and its founders are already recognized as experts in their fields.

Mindful messages in thoughtful pieces

The strongest way to put your founders out there is through thought leadership articles. There is always something happening in the world that could use their expert opinions. It doesn’t always have to be directly related to the thing they are working on; in fact, it helps the secrecy of your project if it isn’t related.

As the gatekeeper here, your job is to mind the messaging. That is, you must pour over every written word to be sure that the habit of talking about one’s own projects doesn’t slip into the text.

From metaphors to direct cause correlations, the habit of permeating one’s own writing with one’s own work is a hard one to break. This is where both your creativity and ingenuity come into play.

Thought leadership articles are nothing new in regards to PR outreach and building brand awareness. There is a general rule not to speak about your own company when writing about pieces.

What is not usual is not just adhering to that rule, but speaking in a way that doesn’t reveal what you yourself are working on. That takes some massaging of the messaging, so that your founders are still regarded as industry experts, but aren’t giving away the farm.

This is where we in PR stand, as editors of the secrets we must keep. There is always another way of saying something if the direct way doesn’t work. We just have to find the right words.

For instance, instead of saying what you are working on as an example to a solution to a problem, move it to a higher level and suggest an alternative solution that still arrives at the same conclusion. Here, it’s about teaching the audience the issues facing a particular industry and offering advice on how to solve them in a way that would better the industry or even society as a whole.

Speaking out and getting quoted

Since you don’t have a project to promote to the press, but you do have founders and a company to promote, then it’s time to land them some speaking gigs.

There are plenty of industry events that offer speaking opportunities, even more now that the market has wholly moved to a virtual setting. Considering the virtual aspect, these are generally low-cost events that give your founders the chance to expand on their knowledge base and gain fans.

Another way we in PR can get our founders and companies into the press — in a way that highlights their background and experience, rather than current projects — is through a more subtle sort of media outreach.

Offering our subject matter experts to journalists looking for expert input enables them to be quoted in articles relevant to their area of expertise. This is a no-cost, simple way to build founder and brand awareness.

Being in PR doesn’t always mean we’re spending our days filling up journalists’ inboxes with pitches. Often, especially in internal PR, the daily missive is to make sure the messaging reflects the current state of operations. That sounds like some buzzword bingo phrase, but that’s the gist of it. Being able to separate the company from the projects it is working on goes a long way toward building brand awareness.

That’s the hook. We often define companies by the products they launch, or by the services they provide. When your company is stacked with knowledgeable experts, brilliant engineers, or highly-educated founders, then you do a disservice to them if your focus is solely on the thing they make. Take the time to lean on their knowledge, and promote that knowledge as part of what makes your company great. Your brand will be better for it.