The #family channel
Years ago, when an Allovue team member was expecting his first child, we created a #family channel in Slack as a repository for baby pictures while he was on paternity leave. As our team has grown and evolved over the years, the #family channel has remained one of my favorite bastions of our corporate culture.
Importantly, the #family channel leaves “family” open to interpretation. Diversity and inclusion are celebrated company values, so everyone’s definition of family is a little different.
In the #family channel, we share the joys of life milestones big and small: graduations, weddings, babies, haircuts, piano lessons, first days of school, vacations, meltdowns at the dinner table, science projects, new homes, workouts, renovation projections, pet snuggles, and all of the silly just-because moments that make us feel grateful and loved every day.
Because life happens, the #family channel isn’t all happy moments. We also share moments of grief: a death in the family, a relative in the hospital, a friend diagnosed with a terrible illness. While I welcome the daily dose of cute children and animals, the more somber updates have convinced me how critical the #family channel is to our work.
I’m not sure anyone has ever successfully siloed their “work life” and “home life”; it’s all just life. And frankly, why should we want to? To pretend that these categories exist in an emotional vacuum is to ignore the basic humanity of our coworkers and deny our team the opportunity to connect and empathize on a higher level. Our company culture is richer and our work is more fulfilling because we get to know our colleagues not just through their professional skills and contributions, but also who they are as parents, spouses, friends, siblings, caretakers, and fur-parents. We grow to understand each other as whole people.
The #family channel makes us better colleagues and managers. We subscribe to Kim Scott’s philosophy of Radical Candor – a management approach that exists at the intersection of caring personally and challenging directly. It’s naïve or delusional to dismiss the impact of personal matters (good or bad) on someone’s productivity at work. As managers, we must care about who people are outside of work and understand the circumstances of their lives in order to support and grow our team members to their full potential.
If your team doesn’t already have the equivalent of a #family channel, I encourage you to start one. Come for the cute pictures, stay for the meaningful connections.
