Trumpet time: a great way to kick off a remote-first all-team meeting

In 2021, I wrote a blog post on running effective show & tells. If I were writing that blog post again today, the first thing I would add would be kick off the event with trumpet time. 

What is trumpet time?

A chance to celebrate the achievements and contributions of your team over the past week. This was something our CEO introduced at Climate Policy Radar last year, and it is how we kick off all of our weekly show & tells.

What problem is it solving?

There are lots of small wins that happen throughout the week, which don’t always get spoken about.  Giving and receiving deserved compliments is a nice habit to get into, and helps build a happier and healthier team. But as with most habits that would be good to get into, most people are not in the habit of doing them as much as they should. 

When we were just 11 people, we solved this problem through regular retrospectives. As our organisation scaled beyond the size where doing retrospectives together was feasible to do regularly, we lost a broad forum to recognise each other’s positive contributions at an organisational level. 

How does trumpet time help?

Habits stick much more easily when you turn them into a routine that happens at the same time and place every week. They also stick better when you do them as part of a group.  So that’s exactly what we have done with trumpet time.  We take the first 5 minutes of our weekly show & tell to recognise each other’s contributions throughout the week. 

We do trumpet time asynchronously in Slack. This works well for a few reasons:
1. In an hour meeting where people speak and listen, 5 minutes of solo focus time to think and write gives some nice variety

2. Many people find it easier to write a Slack post than to say something out loud in front of a group of people

3. As a team of 30, in 5 minutes, each person can easily add 5 comments and browse through the comments from the rest of the team. If we did this verbally, there is no way that much could be shared in such a short space of time

4. Everyone can bring their best emoji game to respond to what others are saying

How does it work?

Step 1: Announce the start of trumpet time in the team Slack channel
Trumpet emojis and GIFs get a lot of love here

Step 2: Start the tunes. 

My colleague Sion has mastered the art of playing his Spotify over Slack. He has a great selection of… can you guess it? Trumpet-themed tunes. My favourites are the ska-punk ones.

Step 3: Everybody starts commenting

We all spend a few minutes adding some comments. I like to jog my memory by flicking through my to-do list and calendar.  The types of things I like to say include:

• Thanking people whom I have worked with closely throughout the week
• Calling out positive feedback I have had from a user interview or partner conversation
• Recognising people who are slogging through particularly hard but invisible pieces of work. Or things that won’t otherwise get shown off in a show & tell
• Calling out new product improvements or research findings. Usually, this means cross-posting something that has been covered more thoroughly in a different channel 
• Giving out made-up awards like “engineer of the week” or “data scientist of the week”. This has turned into a bit of a running joke with some making the case throughout the week that perhaps a bit of work they’ve done might earn them the coveted top spot
• General office banter. There are often a lot of funny comments

Step 4: Read and reach (with emojis) 

Once I’ve finished commenting, I read through the posts. I also take time to admire the excellent emoji game from the wider team. If I am feeling generous, I might dish out some of my go-to emojis on my favourite posts. Usually the ones mentioning me 😉

Step 5: Wrap up

The music stops. The facilitator brings trumpet time to a close. And we move on to the rest of our show & tell agenda

Final word

Trumpet time works well for us. I think it is a great way to kick off regular team meetings. In particular, I recommend it for organisations that have grown beyond the size where they can do a regular team retrospective, and for those who do their meetings remotely.