Some tips:

You can track and checkout a remote branch in just one command:

    git checkout -t origin/foo

If someone's working on a topic branch themselves, it might be better to rebase master rather than merging it:

    git checkout foo
    git rebase master

Thanks for the checkout tip.

I don't like rebases when it is for a bunch of commits, it gives a straight version graph which everyone likes. But when you have conflicts, might have to fix them more than once.

From what I know, rebase creates a patch for each commit and then starts applying them on top of your master (if you are doing it on top of master). So, this has the unintended consequence of causing merge conflicts for multiple commits. With merging you just have resolve conflicts once.