It's all in the name!

I've often been surprised by how powerful labels / names can be. Changing what you call something can make a huge difference in understanding, and hence outcomes.

Here's a personal example I really loved - at @freshchatapp we renamed a status type on JIRA from "Ready for QA" to "Dev Tested", and that made a huge difference in how many bugs surfaced at the QA stage.

Developers could just finish coding and claim it was "ready for QA", but they would feel guilty if they moved it to "dev tested" unless they really tested it.

Of course, the expected process was always for developers to test it before passing it on to QA, but the "label" made all the difference in their behavior.

Another example I recently came across is when the “Implementation and Onboarding” team at Pando was renamed to “Value Delivery”. The change instantly clarified what their objective really was! Smart move. cc @NitinJkrish

Now, at @RocketlaneHQ, we have our weekly "All Hands" meetings on Thursdays (on Zoom, of course). We're a small team, and a passionate bunch. One glance at our slack account will show you how active, involved and caring this team is.

Somehow, the energy did not translate into active engagement in our all hands though! A few of us seemed more engaged, and the rest appeared to be too shy on a live video meeting format.

The pattern was: if your video was on, you were more engaged, and if your video was off, you fell into the shy category and often kept silent in the meetings.

So today, we changed the name of our weekly "All Hands" to "All Faces"

And we had an engaging session today. All videos on! Maybe now that you’re already on video, the inhibition to participate is reduced? Maybe it’s something else. Either way, we loved it!

And of course, in this "remote world", seeing our colleagues from time to time should create a stronger personal bond within our team, and help us work better, together.

Lastly, I thought I’d close this train of thought with a picture from our “All Faces” meeting today. At the bare minimum, I think you'd agree that this made for a better picture than a screenshot with our initials on it.