This is the thrilling tale of how I made memes a regular part of an NHS.UK sprint.
Tell me more about joining NHS.UK..
So you might have read my last blog, where I mentioned that I’d recently joined the team that redesigned the NHS website. I was feeling the pressure from day one. I had already spent time in two other NHS Digital teams and after hearing the odd story about how cool they were and meeting a few of the team members, I was both apprehensive and very excited for my first day with them. I did struggle communicating with them at first, they all used Slack, an application I’d not familiarised myself with yet. I was also the first female in their team in a while and I wanted to get stuck in as soon as humanly possible.
NB. If you hadn’t read my last blog, don’t fret, you’re now up-to-date.
Research in real life
I’ve spent a lot of time with front-end developers before. Not only do I live with one, but many of my fellow Digital Media graduates now work at various agencies and organisations as front-end developers. They all had something in common though: their love of sharing memes. It’s very rare that when I have a notification from my other half on my phone that it’s something other than a meme he’s found hilarious. In fact, I wrote my dissertation about this very thing. I always found it interesting how my other half sends me more memes than he does full sentences. With the might of Leeds University School of Media & Communication and the impending deadline to submit a project proposal ahead of me, I decided to investigate how people use memes to communicate for my final year dissertation.
I found out some really interesting things in my dissertation. I sent out a survey and interviewed people about how they used memes. The main take-aways I was able to get were:
- People liked to use memes to break the ice in new situations. It helped them judge where their sense of humour would fit into a particular setting or group of people.
- People used memes to make others laugh. They really enjoyed passing along the feelings of joy they would get from a particular meme to somebody else.
- Some people used memes to make light of current events. This might have been to just make a little joke out of a news story, or something that had happened to them.
One does not simply use memes in a professional organisation!
So I had all of this academic research that I somehow crammed into 11,000 words and a team full of people who I believed would enjoy sharing and using memes. So I sent a risky Slack message to the entire team. I told them that after every sprint review, I would open the floor for creative genius and encourage the team to make memes about things that happened in the sprint. They obviously had to be tactful and considerate and after a short while, my notifications were starting to slowly fill with submissions from the team members. I was right, we were all laughing and it also opened the door for some conversation. I no longer felt nervous about talking to the team members because I had broken the ice, they now had a platform to make light of recent events, and it was an opportunity to make everyone laugh. I was thrilled to be using my research in action and that it was working.
I see what you did there..
We’re on our 6th sprint creating our sprint-based memes and I don’t think we could go back. We’ve had some great memes created by different members of the team. I took the liberty of printing them out and reserving a space for them in our team area, so that other teams can enjoy them too. I am going to be moving on to another team very soon, and hope to pass the meme baton on to another member of the NHS UK team to keep it going. Hopefully my new team are as open to memes as this team was.
I would love for another team to pick this up after reading this epic tale, it’s very fun — and very digital. Honest.
