What do teams share on Jotto?
Examples of how you can use Jotto to build shared understanding.
Examples of how you can use Jotto to build shared understanding.
Investment: senior leader, 3 to 5 hours per month
Jotto is a great way for team leaders to share what is going on, and far better than email. Teams need to understand where they are going, why, and what kinds of progress is being made. In our experience, Jotto posts vastly outperform email in terms of readership levels, engagement/discussion, and "findability" after the fact.
Investment: entire team, 15 minutes per week
Every week, each member of the team writes a little description on something they learned that week, with supporting images, attachments or links as relevant.
Investment: 20-30 minutes by two team members
This is a rotating spotlight of one teammate each week. Sometimes it is easier to be interviewed (or interview and take notes) than to write an article. This structure is a great way to get ideas out of people's heads (especially the quiet ones!). Mix up the topics. You can ask about work progress or challenges, thoughts about the company or team, personal interests and hobbies, previous life or work experiences, etc etc.
Investment: 15 minutes per week
If you are tracking OKRs on a weekly basis with a quadrant board (see Christina Wodtke's book Radical Focus for more), you can store and track progress easily by posting a photo/screenshot of your board, and notes from your OKR update meetings for the people who were not there.
Investment: as needed
Sometimes the team makes a process breakthrough and wants to turn a best practice into something that new employees can learn and existing teammates can look up. In our experience, Jotto is a better home for this information than wikis, because people are visiting it more regularly. Best practices are a search query away (or a click if you decide to make this a custom collection). Tag the most important things with the "Onboarding" collection, so that new employees can find it easily.
Investment: 30 minutes, as desired
Add some fun to the mix! Jotto supports drag and drop of images and videos, so the next time you host a team event, toss the photographs into a Jotto post. Or walk around the office one day snapping pictures and post a "day at work" photo essay. If your team is remote, run an occasional photo theme where everyone takes a selfie, or a picture of their hometown, or pet, or whatever inspires, and then have someone compile the submissions from everyone into a fun post.
Investment: as needed
One of our favorite uses of Jotto is to apply the collection tag "Onboarding" to all of the key articles and policies that a new employee needs to read. Simply point them to that collection on their first day. You can then either update those posts as policies evolve, or post new articles so that you can track the evolution over time.
Investment: new employee, 1-3 hours in their first week
When someone new joins, the entire team has a marvelous opportunity to get a fresh perspective. Ask the new employee to talk to their colleagues and discover either 1. something that needs to be fixed, or 2. a new opportunity that could be addressed. They should then post a short article on it by the end of the week. It's a great way to show new team members that the group is fearless about constructive criticism and cares about constant improvement.
Investment: 25 minutes by an existing team member and new employee
Every time someone new joins the team, have someone interview them for 20 minutes about their interests, their life, why they joined, what they are excited for, etc. You can have a fixed set of questions or mix it up. The interviewer should take no more than 5 minutes to clean up their notes and post them, ideally with one or two fun (new or old) photographs of the new person.
Investment: 30-60 minutes per team, every 2 - 3 weeks
If you are using Jotto across multiple micro-teams, for example with a multi-team product group, ask the leader of each team to post regular updates on their work every 2 or 3 weeks. Don't be surprised if you need to send reminders, but it's a great way to keep everyone on the same page.
Investment: 30-60 minutes per post
Invite the team to share anything that interests them, even things that might be orthogonal to the business: interesting trends, new technologies, whatever. On or off topic is less important than encouraging discourse and vibrant intellectual sharing and bonding.
Investment: 15 minutes per post
Sometimes the little things are the most interesting to discuss. Encourage your team to ask the questions they have hesitated to ask, either because they thought the question was too small or too silly. It can be about the culture, the work, careers, the future, whatever!
Investment: a few seconds
When a teammate reads something that they want to share with the team, chat can be a great place to share the link, but Jotto is a much better place to actually host a discussion. We are planning on releasing a slack helper to make this easier, but it can be done manually right now.