We’re all familiar with processes like “write a weekly status update” that start strong and eventually fade out to low participation, engineers automating their updates, and gibberish. When you ask people why participation faded you hear the same thing over and over, “It didn’t feel like anyone was reading it”. In this scenario, we’ve Pushed. We’ve told people they must do something, on a schedule, in a certain format. But we haven’t Pulled, we haven’t created a sense that the work is valuable, that there is a need it is filling.

Push and Pull — Kellan Elliott-McCrea

We do the “write a weekly status update” thing at CodePen. It started as a meeting that morphed into “uhhh let’s do this async instead”, with the added benefit of an actual accountability log.

I’d say, for the most part, everyone reads everyone else’s update. The “Pull”, as it were, is that we use Notion, which supports inline commenting in documents, and you can tell people read your document when there is commenting activity flying around. Plus their presence feature shows icons of our team and the last time people looked at the document, if you need proof without the comments.