The Future of Work: No-Code and Flexible

Every company wants a bespoke toolkit for its specific culture and employee base.

July 27, 2022
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There are 300 more icebreaker questions at the bottom of the article
How would you describe your job to a five year old?
What season would you be?
What is a weird food you have tried? Would you eat it again?
What is your favorite holiday tradition?
Would you go in the mother-ship with aliens if they landed on Earth tomorrow?
What is your favorite season?
Do prefer working from home or the office?
What is your earliest memory of this job?
What is the best thing you have bought so far this year?
What is the earliest book you remember?
If you had to move to another country, which one would you choose?
You are the best criminal mastermind in the world. What crime would you commit if you knew you would get away with it?
What is your favorite movie genre to watch?
What was the last thing you ate?
What person from history would you add to Mount Rushmore?
What is a weird fact you know?
What is your favorite part of working from home?
Were the Spice Girls a good team?
Imagine you can instantly learn any language. Which would you choose?
If you could live in any state, which state would you pick?
Which fictional team is the best team of all time?
What did you want to be when you grew up?
What do you usually eat for a quick lunch?
What simple food will you never eat?
Show us the weirdest thing you have in the room with you right now.
Would you rather stay at a hotel or an AirBNB?
What is your favorite movie genre to watch?
Are you more productive in the morning or at night?
Who is someone in your community that makes a difference?
Who was your most unique pet?
Choose one famous person from history you want on your team during a zombie apocalypse.
What is a good way to give back to the community?
Which song could you listen to over and over again?
Is Hugh Grant funny?
What is your favorite thing to eat for breakfast?
Would you want to have an imaginary friend today? Did you have one as a child?
What actor or actress would you want to play you in the movie about your life?
What is the best super power?
What is your New Years resolution?
You can only eat one food again for the rest of your life. What is it?
What is the best work holiday?
What is the first gift you remember receiving?
Would you rather join Metallica or Backstreet Boys?
What is the best example of a community you have seen?
What is an easy way to do something nice for someone?
Show us your phone background and tell the story behind why you picked this image.
What was your first job?
Pick any band to play at your funeral.
If you could have an unlimited supply of one thing for the rest of your life, what would you pick?
Which superpower would you give to your arch enemy?
What is the most obscure superpower you would want?
What emoji best describes how you are feeling right now?
If you could live in any country, which country would you pick?
Would you rather live in a city or a town?
What is your favorite holiday?
What is something you accomplished as part of a team?
What is your standard office lunch?
What is your most used phone app?
What is your favorite season?
Have you ever won something as a team?
Imagine you are a professional baseball player. What is your introduction song?
Beach holiday or ski trip?
Have you ever been to a funny comedy show?
Would you rather live at the North Pole or the South Pole?
What is your favorite song to sing?
If you could live in any state, which state would you pick?
Imagine you could teleport anywhere. Where would you go right now?
What is the most unusual job you have heard of?
What was the last thing you ate?
You can visit any fictional time or place. Which would you pick?
What do your family and friends think you do all day?
What movie do you wish you could watch again for the first time?
Show us your most-used emoji.
What was the most unique style or fashion trend you ever embraced?
What movie defined your generation?
You are stranded on a remote desert island. Are you alone or with your worst enemy?
What is your favorite knock-knock joke?
Have you ever told someone Santa is not real?
Do you know how to speak more than one language?
On a scale of 1 – 10, how much of a team player are you?
What is your #1 recommendation in this city?
What is your favorite holiday?
What bucket list item do you most want to check off in the next six months?
What is your favorite mythical creature?
What was the first way you made money?
If you could be great at any Olympic sport, which would it be?
Which song could you listen to over and over again?
When did you start liking/hating mushrooms?
Where is your favorite vacation spot?
Do you take your PTO all at one time, or another way?
Which show do you remember most from your childhood?
Which beverage goes best with pizza?
Would you want to have a personal assistant follow you around everywhere and do what you asked of them?
Have you ever met your idol?
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Would you rather live 100 years in the past or 100 years in the future?
What is your hobby?
When you are alone in the car, what volume is the music at?
Imagine you no longer have to work. How would you spend a Tuesday?
What is your favorite type of sandwich?

After spending years in the employee engagement space, I've heard it all and learned that every culture is different. Every company wants a bespoke toolkit for its specific culture and employee base.

Because of that, software companies, on average, have xx software tools and spend xx per person per month and the average tool only gets used xx times a year.

The first question that may come up is that worth the money…. Maybe? But the bigger question you should ask is, what does that do for employee productivity and engagement? Does having 15 tools that all do marginally different things make sense? Is tool fatigue just a saying everyone hears or is it real?

Most companies have a performance management system for year-end reviews. Occasionally for 1:1s and goal setting (Lattice, Culture Amp, 15Five, Office Vibe), most companies have an internal communications solution (Slack, MS Teams, Workplace), and most companies have survey tools for both heavy surveys like eNPS and eSAT surveys. Still, in addition to those platforms, most companies utilize Google forms, Microsoft Forms, Survey Monkey, Typeform, or Qualtrix. However, these companies that may have multiple tools in each category will also likely have a task management tool like Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc. This list can continue as we add more subcategories (recognition, rewards, announcements, games, icebreakers, document storage, search, etc.) that involve employee productivity and engagement.

There is an old-school thought where point solitons are the only way to drive action. They may be very effective at one thing, but switching context between software solutions is costly for employees, and with a robust point solution comes a lack of flexibility. For example, Excel is the best worksheet by leaps and bounds, but why do Airtable and Google Sheets exist. The short answer is people are willing to sacrifice 20% of functionality for 100% more collaboration and flexibility.

In the past decade, a new type of solution emerged, a kind of technology that changed the game… "No-Code." No-code technology allows a nontechnical person to drag and drop build their desired outcome with minimal effort and no technical understanding. Companies leading this category are Shopify, Notion, and Airtable.

Shopify is a no-code website builder that allows anyone to create the website of their dreams without hiring a developer; you simply drag and drop your layout, copy and paste images into place and that's it.

Notion is a modern document that you can manipulate in thousands of ways. They gave you lego pieces to create your bespoke document of choice.

What Notion did to a document, Airtable did to a spreadsheet.

Airtable is a collaborative spreadsheet with thousands of templates to which any marketer, product person, HR, finance, etc., can come into the platform and find a prebuilt template for their specific use case. You can adjust worksheet templates to your particular use case, customize the views, and include anyone you want in the document.

The use cases of these companies are vast, and the true power is flexibility. After working at multiple high-growth companies and seeing different cultures, teams, and industries thrive, the short answer is every company is different. So if your software tech stack is not flexible, you will fall into the trap like most companies out there and buy dozens and dozens of software that will not be utilized and, even when they are, not to their full potential.

Employee engagement and HR tools have been left behind in this trend of innovation and flexibility. What Notion did to the form, Shopify did to the website, and Airtable did to a spreadsheet, Assembly has now done to the form.

Assembly has created a platform where any individual, team lead, manager, or HR lead can custom create engagement, productivity and performance modules precisely as they see fit. You can set permission within each module you create of who can participate, who can have visibility right, should the form be anonymous and additional, every module provides analytics to the module's creator.

Assembly has hundreds of prebuilt templates for recognition and rewards, task management, surveys (internal and external surveys), manager to report 1:1's, company announcements, icebreakers, company moment feeds, and more.

Within a company, if management launches a company-wide rigid software, there will undoubtedly be groups who reject or seldomly use the platform. Why force something unnatural. With Assembly, HR can launch a company recognition & rewards program, launch annual performance reviews, twice-yearly eNPS surveys, and quarterly surveys to understand employee sentiment. Managers can launch 1:1's, about us questionnaire forms, and quick polls. Project leads can run automated daily standups, sprint/project retrospectives, and 360 feedback on their team. Individuals can run a daily reflection, an automated daily journal, or utilize the task management tool to keep them accountable. Every template is editable and can reoccur on any cadence the creator would like.

Historically HR tools function as a command center where only HR can build and launch templates, and analytics are reserved for just the HR team. As proven by statistics, that format is not prone to high engagement. Inspired by the titans of no code, Assembly has built a tool where any employee can create use cases, utilize templates and build programs that are effective for their role.

Because the platform is bespoke, can automate your routine tasks, and every workflow has its self-contained analytics, Assembly generally sees over 90% participation when turning off more than one flow.

Companies on the Assembly platform have launched over 30 workflows, and the reported cost savings of tool consolidation for a handful of companies came in at over $30K per year on average for companies between 50 and 200 employees and over $100K per year for companies north of 500 employees.

No matter your role, Assembly is for you. If you're an individual or team lead, feel free to sign up here and start playing around with the task management tool, the project retros, the automated 1:1 functionality, and more. If you're looking to launch a flexible all-in-one engagement and productivity tool for your company but would like a demo of how the platform could solve engagement problems for your teams, feel free to book a demo with an Assembly product expert here.

The future of work is no code, and the future of work is flexible.

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