Companies have become more siloed than they were pre-pandemic. We’re seeing that now — one year in — even close team interactions have started to diminish. — Harvard Business Review

 

Recess was built to solve one of the leading problem that all teams have been feeling since the pandemic: “How can we connect as a team in isolation?”.

The new normal of working from home, no longer allows or provides the casual bonding time which is so critical to developing team chemistry, relationships and resultant productivity: morning coffee walks, snack bump-ins, lunch chats, and commute conversations.

Through Recess, we redefine what team bonding means, what it looks like and how it works.

The founding team includes: a founder, two engineers, and myself, as the design lead.

Recess is part of New Product Experimentation (NPE) at Meta. At NPE, we get to test and build quickly in an agile, start-up like structure.

Our goal is to find product-market fit that resonates with our mission of giving people the power to cultivate more genuine connections at work.

 
 
 

People first, work second.

🐻 Recess is your daily mini-break. A place where your team can meaningfully bond on a myriad of subjects — from childhood dreams to favorite foods. From thought provoking to whimsical prompts, our question selection, sequencing, and design stem from behavioral science research on improving rapport and trust within teams.

Recess is directly woven into your team’s existing workplace chat platforms and tailored for ease of collaboration, comfort level, and flexibility without feeling like another to-do.

 

The very initial sketch for Recess as a product. It was inspired by a podcast talk from an astronaut who described his mission in the space as what we are facing now in the workplace - isolated, uncertain, lonely.

Proving hypothesis: “We believe a quick interaction prompted by a daily question can improve team connection.”

Once our team worked out the initial direction, we created a pilot of “10 days of micro-activities”. We ran an internal pilot with 8 NPE teams to assess the relevance, appeal, and impact for team health. The MVP for this pilot tested hypotheses and uncovered foundational insights on team bonding needs, preferences and goals.

Results

  • Getting to know teammates on a more personal level was an important team building goal; the activities for team appreciation and personal identity (e.g. favorite food, family photo, etc.) were ranked as the most valuable.

  • The pilot was viewed as an effective way to cultivate more genuine connections at work and was seen to have a positive impact on psychological safety.

  • Challenges: Participants had difficulty committing to the daily cadence of the pilot and found that many activities could not be completed in a 10 minute timeframe.

  • More clarity on the goals/outcomes were needed; participants had mixed expectations on whether the focus was social vs. productive and had varying levels of comfort with the more serious/vulnerable questions.

Thanks to the pilot, our team made a critical and tremendous change to improve the user experience. We made it possible for teams to asynchronously interact via team questions, which enabled teammates to participate anytime they were able and/or wanted, rather than having to wait for everyone to become available.

 

Habits: Creating a ritual for team bonding by making it easy, fun and readily available.

Recess is super simple to install on a team’s existing work chat platform and teams could start playing within minutes of sign up.

Building healthy habits is something everyone aims for in life. Can “team bonding” become habitual?

The main feature that Recess started with was a team answering a question and revealing the answers together.

To make this into something that can be considered a habit, we added three elements:

  1. Auto-schedule: Recess is set on a schedule so no one on the team has to take the initiative or make a plan. Once you sign-in, we recommend a question cadence for the team. All users have to do is invite teammates to play. Teams on Recess answer and reveal about 2.5 questions per week.

  2. Ease of use: Recess is incorporated into your work chat platform (i.e. Workplace and Slack), by sending you prompts and reminders. You can answer the question asynchronously based on your schedule, and you don’t have to open up another app to do that. Recess is only one-click away as a web app, making it super easy to use during your work hours.

  3. Surprise and delight: Revealing everyone’s answer together is a time that brings most joy in Recess; where everyone gets to experience the emotional bond together. Whether it’s a surprise, delight, or a head nod, Recess makes it possible for you to have that connection with your teammates.

 

Engagement: Keeping users intrigued through customization and content variety.

Recess has 4 types of questions that make it fun and easy for you to get to know your teammates: simple questions, guessing questions, this or that, and most likely.

We highly encouraged teams to create their own team questions as we saw the high correlation between teams that create their own questions and how much they engage with the product.

You can also customize the “intimacy” levels for questions depending on the existing closeness and comfort of the team.

Learnings: What we learned through our time was that the timeline of how long the teammates knew each other didn’t necessarily translate to how many intimate questions team wanted to receive. Often, teams came to Recess for light hearted and fun moments with teammates. Surprisingly, even when they knew each other and were “pretty tight”, they opted in for less high intimacy questions.

 

Relationships: Making it easy for teammates to find a jumping point to start a 1:1 conversation.

Scientific research shows people connect well with others when finding commonalities like shared interests, hobbies, or even life circumstances. We wanted to create this magical moment of revealing unexpected commonalities with teammates. From your favorite ice cream flavor to a place where you feel most at home, we made it easy for you to start that next 1:1 conversation with something that sparks joy in both teammates.

Really enjoying the commonalities! This is a great way to learn about the team in a deeper way when I don't get the chance to learn about people outside of their work very often.

 
 
 

Timeliness: Never having to feel bad about missing your teammate’s special day.

Milestones like birthdays and work anniversaries should be celebrated, but what we heard from users was that it was too hard to remember and prepare for them. With Recess, whenever a milestone was coming up, we automatically dedicated a teammate questions towards that milestone instead of the existing scheduled question. Celebrating each other really helped one another feel like they belong ❤️.

Learnings: We confirmed that the timing of when these questions show up is essential for these celebration questions.
Even if the celebration question was asked on the milestone day, since the answer reveal was a day or two later, the milestone had passed, and no one really wanted to celebrate it. Oddly, a highlight moment quickly turned into an embarrassing moment as the moment for recognition had passed.

 

Real-time: Providing a chance to connect anytime, anywhere.

The way that Recess let teammates answer fun questions on their own schedule made it possible for many teams to bond on their own terms. Even so, there was still a need for real-time bonding. Teams still put a lot of emphasis on having a bi-monthly or monthly “team bonding” where everyone would come together to hang out and decompress.

This led to why we created a way to play mini-games in real-time. In the “Rec Room”, teams can choose from classic games like Foodie Trivia, Would You Rather and Caption This. At the end of each game, a leaderboard displayed who got the best score.

Learnings: Giving the right amount of time for teammates to discuss answers made these games much more fun. It was never about the right answers, but more about “why” some picked the answers they did. Through these interactions, teammates were able to laugh together and find out more about each other.

 

What’s Next: Referral and Retention

Recess is now about 1 year old. It’s a super bright child with so much potential. Our Sean Ellis score for team leads this half was 47%. As reference, 40%+ suggests the product has a product-market fit.

In addition to this, we introduced a new question in the in-product survey to more closely assess progress against the core value proposition of our product - “How valuable is Recess in terms of helping you get to know your teammates better?”.

Based on responses so far, 78% of respondents found Recess very or extremely valuable in getting to know their teammates better. This is an extremely positive sign for the value of Recess in the workplace.

However, there are 2 new areas of focus we are aiming to build out:

  1. Referral: We want to make it easy for someone in a company who discovered and is already using Recess to refer other colleagues to use it.
    - It might be easy for one team (5-12 people) out of 250 people in the company to use Recess, but if they are liking the product, how can we make it easier for them to tell the rest of the company so more of the 250 people in the company can also use Recess?

  2. Retention: We realized that not all workplace chat platforms have the same UX expectations. As Recess began integrating with Slack, we heard from Slack users that they expect the product to be more seamless within their Slack channel.
    - How can we redesign the product so that it feels more native to Slack users?

Our team is excited to explore and continue to bring out the best version of Recess to solve feelings of loneliness and isolation at work by helping everyone feel like they belong.