In modern technology circles, the fully remote or hybrid work options are sticking around and becoming more prevalent with remote work being seen as a big incentive for employees.
And after three years where this has become the norm, I have learned a LOT of lessons about running/managing remote teams and helping to keep them motivated, and working as a team. So today’s blog post is sharing these lessons.
In office:• There is a huge advantage in team building• Spending many hours a day, every day together brings individuals together as a unit • You learn each other’s personalities, lives outside of work and often naturally create close relationships through the team• In person, naturally occurring relationships build in team advantages, such as knowing whom to reach out to for each kind of task, when help is needed • Collaboration is also just natural. Stopping by a teammates cube and asking for an opinion is trivial, and this ease of collaboration can often produce excellent results
Remote:• With a remote team, one does not have the natural location based advantages when it comes to team building, forming relationships, and creating and maintaining internal bonds. This formerly automatic benefit now must be curated• Without this care and feeding, many employees can feel unsupported, disconnected, and even a bit lost, leading to poor performance and higher turnover
In my role as VP of Engineering at Madison logic, I work with a distributed team of around 50 across 10 time zones, and building a sense of team is a huge part of my success in having a 100% retention rate. By focusing on remote team building, creating connections between remote employees, I am able to increase morale, productivity, quality, engagement, and our overall bottom line. So the question you are asking is how?
The first and foremost key to bringing and keeping employees into a team focused environment is communication. From first day of hire, a carefully thought out Onboarding Plan is critical to creating a welcoming, open communication based setting for new employees. In my onboarding plan, I use a 2–Buddy System.
The first buddy is responsible for helping to introduce the new employee to the company, and should NOT be on the same team. The second buddy IS on the same team, and is their work partner for shadowing. This technique gives a new employee at least 2 contacts on 2 different teams all on day one, building a great sense of belonging and channels for communication.
Day to Day Communication is also key. For engineering teams, I prefer Daily Standups, but coach the PMs/ScrumMasters to spend a few minutes every day in engaging in Non Task Focused Interactions.
From day to day, making sure all team members are included as appropriate. I have found that over time, the work focused portion of the standup tends to be much more interactive, if the standup starts with a less formal step first. Such as a Scheduling Lunch and Learn/Show and Learn Sessions.
I have seen that Daily Non work Questions/Interactions play a big role. As slack style tools have become central to remote teams, having channels devoted to hobbies, book clubs, gardening, and other common interests in critical to bring a sense of team across the company. Additionally encouraging interactive daily question channel is a simple way to allow
employees to share more about themselves as well as find things they share with other members of the team. Some examples of questions are:
1. What is your favorite TV show from your childhood?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What is the worst holiday gift you have received?
4. What was the last goal you achieved?
5. What was the best Black Friday deal you snagged?
I find keeping questions general and light encouragesconversations.
End of Week Wrap-ups help to cement communication. By Friday, your team will usually have been working very hard, and is looking forward to a break away from the office. Help them ease into the weekend by having a show off session with an informal gathering where people can chat about what they did this week, in a relaxed, informal environment. And I use this time to look through the recognitions that the team has given to each other in the past week.
This helps to end the week on a high and gives everyone a chance to connect before the weekend comes. Again, by focusing on making sure the team is feeling positive as the weekend begins, we reduce stress and anxiety related to the workplace. And less stress means higher retention.
Inevitably conflict is something that occurs with all team so I like to schedule Joint Mediation Sessions to tackle it. When everyone is in the office, pulling a few team members aside and hashing out differences is a natural thing. Scheduling a zoom meeting to do the same thing is much less organic. So as a leader, when you start feeling, tensions, seeing tension, work with the team to meet, and mediate. A very successful methodology I have used in these conflict sessions is to get each member to focus on the ideas not the personalities. To accomplish this, I will usually have each individual present their view of the situation, and a brief overview of their solution. This is not off the cuff; each member is informed to come prepared. The second step is the one that makes the difference. I ask each participant to restate the arguments made by their team mates.
Creating a healthy communication based environment is the key tool you have to bring your team members together as a unified force, and exploring new ways to make this work in a remote environment is critical to long term health and support of your team.