It’s day 16 of Blogvent, where I blog daily in December!

Something that that a few of my teams have done well is introducing themselves asynchronously. It can be a hard thing to do! When you’re on a fully remote team and you’re seeing everyone’s face on Zoom for the first time, it’s a little nerve-wracking to figure out how to present yourself, how to “bring your whole self to work,” and not be a total weirdo.

What my team at GitHub does (and what I’ve seen at a few other orgs now, it’s catching on!) is we have a repository of “Human User Guides” full of details about each other.

It’s casual, but it’s helpful. We include things like:

• Time zones/availability
• Communication preferences (Slack vs Zoom vs email vs phone vs something else)
• Things folks might misunderstand about you
• Things everyone should know
• How you prefer to get feedback
• Things that you like to talk about, work-related and non-work-related

It’s really useful for getting to know your team, and giving your team a baseline to start with before that intimidating first call.

Some teams just call them “intro pages”, again at GitHub we call them “Human User Guides”, but I like the term “Talk to Me pages” to encourage actual chatter. I love being able to see that someone on my team also likes certain board games of mine, or even learning what not to bring up with someone. It’s really helped me jump into early conversations much faster.

If you like the idea of this and want to get started, here’s a template for a Talk to Me page that you can use yourself!

Also, one last note, you can totally implement this with an existing team, not just for new folks. I did this retroactively at one of my previous companies and it was actually really nice to have a “source of truth” for schedules and to learn/unlearn how certain people wanted to communicate who weren’t sure how to bring it up before.

Toodles!