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The value of virtual team building

Office workers around the world were pushed out of their offices and into remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic this year. Some for a short period and some for a very long time, like the employees of Slack, Google and Facebook. A huge portion will never return to the office and every company, really every, should have a contingency plan how to work remotely over a certain period, in the case of infections or a shut down.

With that trend comes a shortage of a very important thing: team building. We all know the off-site team builing activities like trust falls, rafting, high rope courses, hiking and building wooden rafts. Nearly all of them are cancelled due to possible contacts and forbidden travelling. And some of them are awkward anyway! Also all the informal communication at coffee maschines, watercoolers and lunch is gone suddenly, too.

Having a really good connection to your coworkers and feeling a team spirit is essential to good and efficient work. This is perfectly and funny shown in Apples commercial: The whole working-from-home thing.

To put it in a more empirical context: Atlassian surveyed over 1000 team members and found out, that ‘94% of participants feel mutual respect is important to a team’s success. 19% point to it as the number one factor in their team’s emotional well-being.’ (Source).

There is a growing number of remote-only companies out there. Gitlab is considered the biggest with over 1300 employees spread over all continents. They did a full-company retreat all the years – which cannot be done this year for the first time. But even if you can meet everyone in your team once a year – without virtual team building, team work feels like exchanging results between unknown contractors.

If we know each other and like to work with our colleagues, we are much happier, which highly increases our productivity. And remember that loniness is the number one obstacle in remote work settings. More on that in my post Remote Work Happiness.

If you want to plan team building activities, you have to know the different kinds: synchronous vs. asynchronous, one-time vs. regular and fun vs. improving collaboration technics. Synchronous activities are common, but in the virtual environment are even asynchronous activities possible. Think about posting pet pictures in a special Slack channel, showing your WFH (working from home) setting to the others and post ‘messy desk’ pictures.

Do some of the activities regularly, so they can become a habit and do other things from time to time as impulse. Fun and improving collaboration is not an either or. It is, for example, perfectly combined in the specially for remote teams designed online escape room by ‘Skyrocket Your Team‘. That is a fully-remote startup (5 founders, 4 nationalities, working from 4 countries) with the only purpose to let remote teams thrive.

For more specific activities I suggest the blog post about 12 very different team building activities by Sarah Goff-Dupont: The best virtual team building activities, according to full-time remote workers.

And don’t forget the small hacks about informal communication which will help you every day: regular 1-on-1s, virtual lunch, coffee breaks and after work beer, and please: always video on! More on that in my post: Informal communication in remote teams.

Please share some of your experiences or additional suggestions in the comment section!

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Remote Work Happiness

We are all still in the worst pandemic, the earth has ever seen. Besides all the tragic, we have one positive outcome which will enhance the life of so many people: the rise of remote work.

The vast majority of office workers are able to work wherever and whenever they what, or to be presice: how it fits best to their personal circumstances. It is real freedom, if you can pick up your kids from school, walk your dog whenever you want and first and foremost live in a city or rural area you like instead of the city where the work was.

But there are a few things that can cause problems however. Many middle managers still have to learn that team members should be measured by outcome and not by working hours or presence. Another thing is mental health which is directly connected to happiness.

It is way to easy in the home office to forget:

  • to make breaks
  • to exercise
  • to maintain a healthy diet
  • to stop work after doing enough
  • to cheer coworkers
  • to miss social contacts

The risk of loniness and burnout is real. To read more see ‘How To Avoid Burnout In The Age Of Remote Work‘ by Shelcy V. Joseph via Forbes.

Even if we don’t look at this extreme, happiness is the key for your mental health and your productivity. So please mind the points above if you are remote working. And at top of that try to make something that fits perfectly to your skills and will have an impact to drive society in the direction you want it to be. There is nothing more encouraging than to make the world a better place.

If you have remote employees, make their hapiness your highest priority. You may know Sir Richard Bransons famous quote ‘Happy employees equals happy customers”. That is true since a long time. But now, as your team members are working remote, this has to be achieved in a different way.

As a remote leader please take serious care of your coworkers:

  • Schedule regular 1-on-1 session with audio and video
  • Organize retreats if possible
  • Fascilitate a written frist work culture to avoid misunderstandings
  • Over-communicate, especially work targets and common goals
  • Spread information as much and as often as possible
  • Embrace off work talk, like in my post ‘Informal communication in remote teams‘
  • Make clear that long hours are undesired

You agree on the importance of remote work happiness? Do I have missed a significant point? Please write it as comment!

Picture by Radu Florin via Pexels

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Informal communication in remote teams

Lots of companies have changed their way of work radically 5 weeks ago because of the virus. Hundreds of thousands of teams switched instantly from co-located work to remote work. That is exactly what many employees fought for for years. But because it came so suddenly, most are not prepared.

The biggest change by far is communication. Good teamwork is based on good relationships between people, which depends on good communication. We are building relationships with all we know as smalltalk, water cooler talk and something we call in Germany ‘Feierabendbier’ – after-work beer.

Can this work remotely? Yes it can. Informal communication can have the following forms in remote teams:

  • stay in touch with your teammates with regular talks via Slack, Teams or whatever conferecing platform you use – but please with video
  • randomly organised one-on-one talk inside your team or organisation, wherein you discuss 15 – 30 min about free topics, gladly personal topics
  • teams or departements do breakfast or lunch breaks together, maybe at special days per week (video on!)
  • make appointments for an after work beer – use your video conferencing platform, take a seat which is not your working place, take a drink of your choice and try to avoid work related discussions (that is my favorite)

Please take care, that no one in your team will be left behind. Include everyone and wait not for rules or management guidelines, you can improve the communication with your own initiative, instantly.

What’s your experience with informal communication? How often do you do it? Have you developed other forms? Please let us know in the comment section!

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Tackle remote works biggest obstacle

What is remote works biggest obstacle? Viable internet connection? Video conferencing hardware? Collaboration software? Recruiting? No, it is trust in employees and team members!

Normally we blame managers that they are not allowing remote work because their lack of trust. But please try to turn your perspective around. I did, as I became a project manager some years ago and as becoming head of project management with a small team of project managers later on.

You can read more in my older post at: Trust is the key for successful remote work

It is really not easy letting your team members go out of sight if your are used to work in the same office. Even if you know their competencies and all the advantages of the home office and all the disadvantages of the office work. Read about the Pros and Cons here: The Ultimate List of Remote Work Pros and Cons

People are used to collaborate in the personal way. We are just not trained to work and trust over the distance. And this is not a miracle, because we all grew up in a world without real time video conferencing around the world for free. But even in the future kids will be raised by personal interaction – for good reasons. So we all have to learn trusting our remote collegues and team members first.

How to build trust with remote workers

This is a collection of methods and ideas to gain that trust and overcome this major obstacle of remote working:

  • do a lot of communication, i.e. short daily video conferencing
  • do video conferencing instead of phone or written communication as often as possible
  • set up regular work demonstrations, a great possibility to show your appreciation
  • even interesting is, that this enhances trust in the team, because most of the technical people rank their peers on their work results
  • if communication and demonstrations are frequently, it feels less like monitoring
  • try to avoid changes of the team members in a project and even over similar projects, because the team members are getting used to each other
  • plan enough time at the projects start for newly mixed teams that they have the possibility to get to know each other
  • do regular team retreats if you are fully remote, because having fun together is building easily good connections
  • do off work activities even if you are co-located, to connect better to each other
  • provide pictures of your home office or home stories in your employees magazin or collaboration tool
  • talk about family and hobbies – it is always surprising what off work talents you have in your team

Conclusion

All our business ventures, companies and other undertakings could be so much more successful if we can strengthen the partnerships to our remote collegues which is possible with the above mentioned methods.

What is your experience? Missing trust is not the biggest obstacle? What else helps you in your daily work? Please let us know in the comment section!

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Remote Work does not work… completely by itself

Even if the technical preconditions, available work and willingly remote workers are distributed everywhere, remote work runs not by itself.

Distractions

Most critics are complaining the possible distractions you can have at home or at the coworking space. Distractions are possible, but by far most of the remote workers would have more distractions in the office environment than at home. My actual job is 4 days onsite and 1 day at home. The home office day is the ‘work day’ the 4 others are the organizing stuff days, packed with meetings and 1-to-1 discussions, regarding my work as project manager. Reading specifications and do longer planning sessions is only possible at home.

Off-topic work

Another problem of remote work is the content, meaning what tasks will be performed. If the project information and tasks are not properly distributed over the team, people tend to perform task they like most and not the ones which are needed most. This can only be faced by good project management. Be it agile or more traditional the core points are:

  • have the necessary information at the right time at the people who are needing it
  • provide a clear overall picture to all stakeholders
  • have a clear structure in your project
  • trust your team members (clear point but often missing) – see also ‘Trust is the key for successful remote work‘
  • transfer responsibility to your team members, but monitor the results
  • make agreements about delivery times not orders

Failure at remote working situation is rarely based on the people, but mostly about bad communication and bad project management.

Self-motivation

Anyway you need a good portion of self-motivation. Most people need a good environment for that. You can achieve that with a good company culture which is even effective for remote workers or, if you are working for your own, by a good coworking space. I’m referring here not only to the fancy, busy spaces in big cities, but primarily all that small office spaces which are available in your direct neighborhood. And this unspectacular place to work together with other remote workers is a thing that hopefully will spread further in the near future.

Here are some more points, ‘Why Remote Work has Not Exploded yet‘ and here is my ‘The Ultimate List of Remote Work Pros and Cons‘.

What is your experience about the success factors of remote work? Let us know in the comment section!