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Team cohesion: AI Team ReadMe creator
Automate team ReadMes to strengthen team relationships and streamline onboarding.
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Overview
Building cohesive teams is hard, especially in a remote-first or hybrid work environment. One of the best ways to do so is with team ReadMes, documents that describe how folks prefer to work, receive feedback, and more. But creating them takes time, and without a standard format, quality can vary.
Manual onboarding processes often fail to capture individual work preferences, while expensive personality assessments frequently end up forgotten after the first week. Team members waste valuable time navigating communication styles through trial and error, leading to misunderstandings and decreased productivity.
With our AI team ReadMe bot, you can automatically create personalized "ReadMe" documents that capture each team member's unique working style in their authentic voice. Instead of facing blank-page syndrome or completing lengthy assessments, employees answer a simple 5-minute survey. They’ll get a personalized document that clearly communicates their preferences for feedback, communication, decision-making, and more. These living documents become valuable reference points that strengthen team relationships, smooth onboarding, and foster ongoing collaboration—all without administrative overhead or constant manual updating.
Why build an automated employee ReadMe system?
- Eliminate the guesswork in understanding how colleagues prefer to work, communicate, and receive feedback.
- Create lasting documentation that remains accessible and useful the whole time they’re with your team, unlike personality tests that get forgotten.
- Scale your onboarding process efficiently as your team grows without adding administrative burden.
What key features come with the Team Cohesion template?
- Guided "Make a ReadMe" survey — Employees fill out a survey covering everything work preferences, eliminating intimidating blank-page syndrome.
- AI-driven document generation — Use ChatGPT to create personalized content in the employee's own voice, including a concise summary and statements about their approach to social connection, working relationships, and communication.
- Fully customizable — The resulting ReadMe document can be edited to ensure it accurately conveys the employee’s work habits and preferences.
- Automatically circulate — We’ll notify their manager with the ReadMe and prompts for discussion in their next one-on-one.
Who should use this template
A team ReadMe system is perfect for:
- HR and People Operations Leaders → Streamline your onboarding process with automated documentation that captures essential information about each new hire's working style, reducing friction and accelerating team integration.
- Remote and Distributed Team Leaders → Bridge the distance gap by giving remote team members clear insight into how colleagues prefer to collaborate, communicate, and connect.
- Executive Leaders and Department Heads → Scale your organization’s culture by systematizing how work preferences are documented, shared, and respected across growing teams.
How does this template work?
This template builds you a seamless system for documenting and sharing work preferences. Here's how:
- First, team members complete a guided survey through a Zapier Interface. They’ll select preferences from dropdowns and add personal details.
- Then, we’ll automatically collect background data by looking up the employee in your HRIS system (like BambooHR), retrieve a recent writing sample from Slack (or using text they’ve submitted), and gathering necessary context about their role and team. This happens without any manual intervention.
- AI will generate a ReadMe in the employee’s natural voice and tone based upon the writing sample. This includes a concise summary of their overall work approach and six micro-statements about specific aspects of their working style, such as social connection, working relationships, time management, communication, decision-making, and feedback preferences.
- Next, the template creates a new Google Doc based on your organization’s ReadMe template, populates it with the AI-generated content and survey responses, saves it to a designated shared folder with appropriate permissions, and generates a short URL for easy sharing. All employee ReadMe information is also stored in a searchable Zapier Table (a database that lets you track and automate your data), creating a central repository of team member preferences.
- Finally, the system handles all notifications and follow-ups by sending the employee a Slack message with their ReadMe link and editing instructions, calculating the appropriate follow-up time (3 business days later), and notifying the employee's manager to review the document before their next one-on-one meeting.
Once set up, this entire process runs automatically through Zaps (automated workflows), which means no babysitting by your People / HR teams required. The ReadMe becomes a living reference document that helps team members understand how to work effectively with each other, informs team discussions about collaboration, and provides managers with insights for more effective coaching and support.
Frequently asked questions
Can I customize the questions in the survey?
Absolutely. While the template comes with 24 recommended fields covering key work preferences, you can modify these to better reflect your organization's culture or add questions specific to your industry or work environment.
Do employees need to write their own ReadMe documents?
No, that's part of the power of this system. Employees simply answer structured questions in a short survey, and the AI handles the writing based on their responses and communication style. The employee can then review and edit the final document.
How does this differ from personality assessments?
Unlike personality assessments that categorize people into types, this system captures individual preferences in the employee's own words. It focuses on practical work behaviors rather than psychological traits, and the resulting documents remain accessible and useful throughout employment, not just during onboarding.
