It’s been a bumper couple weeks for Monzo community, with our Community Christmas party and Q&A with Tom last Friday and our December Open Office on Monday!
Thanks to everyone who came out or tuned in. Here are some of the photos posted on Twitter by members of the community:
https://twitter.com/CommunicatorEd/status/1072202008428511232
https://twitter.com/pinglinh/status/1072207016117133313
If you weren’t able to make it, here’s our official roundup!
The TLDR:
The theme was how we communicate at Monzo, with the delightful Will S from our Business Operations team explaining why internal comms matter, what issues we’ve faced in the past, and how we’ve decided to do things around here.
The video stream:
(There were some technical issues with the streaming, so the first part of Will’s presentation wasn’t recorded! 
I’ve done my best to summarise below)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7tf832aGhc
Some highlights:
Will started by explaining a bit about his background. As a former journalist, he was keenly attuned to how important it is to think deliberately about how we communicate. As he explained, communication isn’t just a means for us to do work – it determines the kind of work we’re able to do: “the way we talk is who we are.”
(from our Instagram story on the night – you can follow us on the handle @monzo)
In the early days of Monzo, “noise” wasn’t too much of a problem: the company was small enough for everyone to be privy to all communication, all the time. But earlier this year, we’d reached 350 people, and, quote: “Slack was wild.”
Transparency is still an important part of our company culture: the rule is that unless there’s a good reason for communication to be private, it should be conducted in a publicly accessible way. But we needed to figure out some ground rules for communication to account for the fact that we were now several hundred, not several dozen, employees (and growing all the time!).
Figuring out some ground rules so that we were all on the same page was, essentially, Will’s project, and he carried this out using our RFC (Request for Comments) system. You can hear him talking about that here at 0:42.
One thing we changed was making channel names consistent (1:36). Another was instituting owners for Slack channels who are responsible for ensuring the quality of the channel content remains high.
It’s hard to quantify success in an area like internal comms, but we know that the efforts we made to make things clear and consistent had a tangible effect because of things like the change in the number of private messages (2:01). Still, it’s something that you have to work on continually – and we have new problems now, like figuring out consistent ways to store internal knowledge! (4:23)
If you want to skip to the Q&A: (6:33)
Thanks again to everyone who got involved – we look forward to seeing you again next year! 
