How ocushield built a daily lasting remote habit with geekbot
"Our team is fully remote, from Argentina to EMEA. With work and business, everyone's got so many different tasks and responsibilities. Geekbot makes sure we don't forget just to check in on each other."
Dhruvin Patel, Founder, Ocushield
Ocushield manufactures eye care products for people who spend most of their day looking at a screen. It also runs a digital eye-screening service by letting their clients check their eyes from a phone or laptop. We had the pleasure of chatting with the founder, Dhruvin Patel, about how a short daily ritual keeps a team like that aligned.
Distance makes two things hard
Ocushield closed its office two years ago. “We had a physical presence, but we were dialling people in anyway,” Dhruvin says. “So it didn’t make sense.”
With 15 teammates working remotely across Argentina, the US, the UK and the wider EMEA region, there’s no moment when the whole team is naturally online together. Before Geekbot, Ocushield relied on one-to-ones and general alignment chats. These worked for setting direction, but left two gaps:
- No daily view of what everyone was actually working on. Alignment conversations cover priorities in the abstract, not day-to-day progress.
- No reliable way to know how people were doing. A group call sometimes is a difficult place to admit you’re struggling, so most people don’t, and a manager has no way to know unless someone says something.
Ocushield turned to Geekbot during 2022 to close both gaps.
A four-question ritual, before 10 am
Every working day, Dhruvin, has set Geekbot to ask the team four questions:
- How do you feel today?
- What have you done?
- What are your top three priorities for today?
- Anything blocking you today?
The 10 am UK time deadline is what makes the habit stick. It’s quite simple, because a question with no deadline is easy to skip. But if you ask by a set time each morning, it becomes part of the routine instead. Four years in, that routine has produced close to 4,000 submitted reports, with participation holding around 78%.
Around the check-in sits a shared window: 10 am to 2 pm UK time, when the whole team, Argentina included, is reachable. Outside those hours, people set their own schedule.
Priorities are tracked down with a color-coded system, each marked green for finished, amber for in progress, or red for not started. Anything still amber or red rolls into the next day’s list automatically, and nobody has to keep tabs on it.
A safer way to say things aren’t okay
Before updating for work, a well-being check is in order. And that order matters because: “It’s going to be very rare that someone says ‘I’m not feeling great today’ when there’s a room full of people,” Dhruvin says. But, if you type that same sentence on your own schedule, it removes most of the reason people hold back.
It also gives a reason for people to reach out. Someone mentions they’re coming down with a cold, and a few teammates chime in with warm wishes, remedies, or movie recommendations.
Sometimes the message is quieter than a direct admission. “Usually they’re feeling good every day, and then they say ‘okay,'” says Dhruvin. “That’s a change in how they respond. So it’s a great way to ask someone: what’s been the change? Is everything okay?”
A routine you can take with you
Dhruvin didn't design anything complicated. He set four questions, a 10 am deadline and a shared window across time zones. You can do the same in a few minutes, and adjust it once your team settles into the habit.
Free for teams of up to 10 users. No credit card required.
Deciding what matters before the day fills up
On the other hand, work questions have a different but also crucial role. “It’s important for people to know and work on needle-moving tasks,” Dhruvin says, “versus just being busy for the sake of it.”
Therefore, answering the question first thing forces that choice early, before meetings and messages start dictating the day.
And it’s the person’s own choice to make. “Without their manager or someone else reminding them, they can actually think for themselves.”
For Dhruvin, the same four answers work as a management tool. “For leaders, it gives you that visibility and a snapshot: right, what’s the team working on today?” If a listed priority doesn’t look like it’s moving the needle, he can flag it in a reply while there’s still time in the day to redirect. He credits the habit with helping tasks get finished faster across the team.
Four years and thousands of check-ins later, Dhruvin’s take on what Geekbot is providing for Ocushield is simple.
“It will help the team work better together wherever they are.”
Key Takeaways:
- Color-coded priorities (RAG) can deliver unfinished work forward automatically, without constant reminders.
- A short daily ritual, with a fixed deadline, can hold a multi-time-zone remote team together.
- Placing the well-being question first, and answering it in writing, can help team members to admit their struggles more easily.
- Tagging teammates on blockers keeps the requests visible instead of relying on what they remember.
Built a daily lasting remote habit with Geekbot
How does Ocushield use Geekbot?
Ocushield’s fifteen-person remote team answers a four-question daily standup in Slack before 10 am UK time: how they feel, what they’ve done, their top three priorities, and any blockers. The well-being question comes first so the team can flag a bad day in writing rather than on a call.
How do you set a fixed time for a Geekbot standup?
Each Geekbot standup has its own schedule and time zone. Set the send time and a reminder, and Geekbot prompts anyone who hasn’t answered before the cutoff. Ocushield uses 10 am UK time so the whole team, Argentina included, has answered before the shared working window (10am to 2pm) opens.
How do you add a well-being question to a standup?
Add “How do you feel today?” as the first question in your standup, or start from the well-being check-in template. Answers post to the channel with the rest of the update, so teammates can respond directly.
How does Ocushield track priorities in Geekbot?
Each person lists their top three priorities and marks them red, amber, or green. Every answer is posted to the Slack channel and recorded in the dashboard’s Timeline, which shows all reports in chronological order and can be filtered by participant, question, or date range. That means anyone can filter yesterday’s priorities by their own name and see what’s still amber or red before they answer today. Filtered data can also be exported as a CSV if you want to analyze how priorities move over a longer period.
How does a manager act on a standup answer in Geekbot?
Every answer is a Slack message that is posted to a public or private channel so the manager can reply in a thread. For the bigger picture, the Insights dashboard pulls the same answers into widgets: Team Participation shows who has reported and lets you remind those who haven’t, Blockers groups reported obstacles into categories such as Dependencies, Health, and Fatigue, and Team Happiness reads the mood of well-being answers over a day or a date range.
