Ways of working

Microsoft Teams

We use Teams as our general internal communication and chat app, when an email isn’t required.

Use channels rather than chats where possible. These are more open and leave a record that can be searched by people in the future.

  • General channel – all the JGI team,
  • Data Science channel – accessible to all the team, but primarily for data science discussion,
  • Ask-JGI channel – for disucssion with the Ask-JGI PhD data scientist team,
  • and various other project channels.

Saying hello

We try to say “good morning” on the General channel and give an overview of what we will be working on that day and any challenges we are working on. This is an asynchronous replacement for a traditional morning ‘stand up’ meeting and is more inclusive of people working from home that day.

Data science meetings

Schedule meetings within the Data Science channel so that in-meeting chats also appear within the channel.

  • Before the meeting, use the channel to flag items for the agenda of the next meeting.
  • During the meeting, use the in-meeting for minutes, taking it in turns (when one person is speaking, another person take notes of those actions)

Outlook email

As well as your personal email inbox, we use the following shared mailboxes:

  • the Ask-JGI inbox,
  • other shared mailboxes for dedicated tasks, for example the admin team uses jgi-admin@bristol.ac.uk.

Outlook calendar

Keep your personal calendar up-to-date as most people use the Scheduling Assistant within Outlook to find the best time for a meeting.

Hybrid working

If you often work between home and the office, it is helpful to create all-day events to say where you plan to be.

Days away from the office (including leave)

If you’re away from the office then create an event in the team calendar (grp-Jean Golding Institute Team):

  • Set the title to “XX annual leave” (where XX are your initials),
  • Make it an all-day event and set ‘show as’ to ‘free’ (you can change this on your own calendar to ‘out of office’),
  • Invite yourself and your line manager.

Your manager can then accept this invite. The whole team can also see your leave on the team calendar.