Team Building for Remote Teams

Many of us work in fully remote or hybrid teams these days. When you get hired into a leadership role for a remote or hybrid team – especially in organizations who have only worked in that style for the last two years, you may find that really challenging.

There are a number of reasons why this is hard:

• Team members are grieving the loss of ease of life before the Pandemic
• New team members have never met the rest of their team in person
• Working remotely can feel deeply isolating and lonely resulting in mental health challenges for your team members
• New team members lack access to a lot of the subtle cues on culture that are all around them in an office context
• Sitting in front of a video call with imperfect connections creates communication challenges (body language is harder to read, there could be a lag in video, there is often noise or interruptions in the audio transmission – especially when people are not very diligent or experienced with their mute button)
• Spending extensive time in video calls is mentally exhausting
• There is less time for joyful, playful social connection with the other humans in the team (think of that joke at the coffee machine, the joint lunches, the sharing of a birthday cake, time at the football table if your office has one, your office’s version of an ugly sweater contest, the nice little random chat you have with a colleague in the elevator or on the hallway, etc…)
• Team members may not have a functional work environment (they don’t have space for a proper office chair or a desk, they may share their space with little kids, or use their bedroom or living room to work while no longer having those spaces as a space away from work). As a result they may struggle from physical pain or a lack of an ability to draw boundaries between work and personal life.

This asks of leaders to very intentionally focus on a number of issues that used to either not even exist, or not present to the degree they appear in remote team setups.

I find it most helpful to take a look at some of the underlying psychological impacts this new world creates, so we can as leaders get creative in addressing them.

The lack of social connection

One of the common themes in a number of the challenges listed above is very simply a lack of experiences of social connection, being seen, feeling appreciated, laughing together and helping each other out. These experiences act as powerful little moments of trust building for the relationships between each of the members of your team. So anything you can intentionally build into your team relations that acts as a way for people to show up authentically the way they are, laugh together and see each other’s full humanity can work to build some social connection tissue into your team. Share stories or photos, celebrate anything that is meaningful to somebody in your team, and encourage peers to show appreciation for each other. Encourage team members to approach challenges with their peers with lots of curiosity. Address any kind of blaming or judging language you witness between team members by reminding everyone that you firmly believe that everyone shows up to work intending to do the best they can with what they know that day. It can help to regularly retrospect, so small issues get addressed and learned from right away before they have a chance to build up into something bigger, and most importantly this gives the floor to regularly celebrate the little wins in your team. On a more operational level this is a way to regularly speak about progress towards your goals as well.

Not enough breaks

One thing I see so many teams do, is to schedule meetings back to back throughout the day without sufficient time for breaks in between. If you work with Google calendar, it is very easy to turn on the “speedy meetings” setting for all your invites. This schedules every 30min meeting for 25min and each one hour meeting for 50min. Be diligent with ending meetings at this earlier time. This gives everyone a break between activities that allows to get up, get some fresh air, use the bathroom and get a glass of water. Encourage people to schedule their lunch breaks (and make it a habit to never schedule over somebody’s lunch). Ensure that people who need to finalize work that requires deep thought have long enough windows in their day that allows them to code, to write, to work on a design or to prepare a presentation. If the nature of your work allows for this, you can experiment with meeting free days, meeting free afternoons, or any other convention that allows for people to focus on work while not being in a video call.

The lack of the post-standup informal talk

When everyone is in an office and does their 15min morning standup, you can typically grab a colleague you need an answer from very easily while walking out of the room and spontaneously accompanying them to the coffee machine or to their office. This can be an especially helpful little access point to very busy people in your team. Some of my teams have intentionally put a little blocker into their calendars after the standup to allow for somebody to request a quick chat with a peer without having to wait for the next hole in somebody’s calendar which may not even exist that day. For anyone who is not needed for that spontaneous chat that day, this extra 15min blocker serves as another little space holder before their next meeting.

A lack of collaboration

Quite often we find ourselves naturally offering a hand to a peer who sits in the same office with us and obviously struggles with the task at hand. You can witness their frustration about something not working, sometimes all it takes for them is to state out loud what they’re struggling with and they get to the insight to solve their problem themselves. Or you see somebody starting to work in a specific direction and somebody else points out to that person, that this does not lead to a desired outcome. People simply share their work experience in much more natural ways in an office context. One way to address this in remote teams is to highly encourage pairing. Having somebody to bounce your approach off of, or simply collaborating on finishing a task together makes it less likely to get stuck, has some built in accountability for the joint success, strengthens the social bonds between team members and gives everyone that happiness boost that comes from helping out a peer.

Mental Health Issues

One of the dark sides of working fully remote, and especially when working alone in a fully remote context can be team members struggling with their mental health. As a leader in a fully remote team it is helpful to be aware of the mental health status of your team. And chances are you will have to face the realities of your teams being affected by challenges in the mental health of one of your team members. Creating a culture of active listening (for example in your 1:1 conversations), of allowing to share personal challenges openly (for example with a two word checkin at the beginning of a staff meeting) and role modeling how showing up vulnerable and open yourself will normalize speaking about the challenging emotions one of your team members may face. And knowing how to watch for signs that may require for them to take some time off, or get help are something any leader in a remote team can learn. Building this level of trust with your direct reports may take some time, but may just make the difference between somebody quitting with burnout or slipping into a serious mental health crisis vs. finding the help they need in time to prevent this in time. If you have the budget for it, working with an external Mental Health Counselor for your leadership team could be an excellent resource to support you and your leadership team in this. I’ve worked with Shani St. Louis before and can highly recommend her. She made the topic of mental health accessible and easy to talk to for the leadership team at eyeo.

A lack of fun or sense of joy at work

I recently heard a definition of “fun” in an episode of the Happiness Lab podcast that makes a lot of sense to me. Catherine Price defined fun as experiences that share an element of playfulness, social connection and flow. If you think about this in a work context, those are also the kind of environments that most likely lead to creative discovery in an innovation context. And when I’m talking to people these days, they often state that while there was an initial productivity gain in having people work remote, what is now lacking are those random little encounters between members of different teams that spark an idea, that lead to collaboration and ultimately lead to innovation in your organization. So building that back in in some way is crucial, not just because those experiences of fun and joy give us an immediate happiness boost and a sense of relaxation and connection, but because these fun and joyful experiences in your day act as a resilience boost for those moments when things turn stressful or go wrong. If you feel like you need permission to schedule something that is simply aiming at having a good time together, know that you are doing something good for morale in your team, to build resilience and that may ultimately spark an idea for your next cool product solution. It can be challenging to get people together in real life during Covid, but if you can find any safe way to do it, try collecting your team in person for having some fun together at least twice a year!

But things are not all bleak and challenging in with working remote. Yes, it’s true that it takes a lot more intention and focus to create good social bonds in teams in this new work life, but there are also some pretty cool upsides to working with distributed teams.

• Shared Workspaces let everybody co-create (shared documents and shared whiteboards – e.g. mural – are amazing tools for this)
• Some roles thrive when they have time alone for deep thinking (e.g. software engineers who actively code; introverted personalities who write)
• You have access to talent from around the world
• It is absolutely possible to have a ton of fun with your remote team (see all the resources I mentioned here)
• People spend a lot less time commuting (time they can dedicate to their favorite hobby, or simply for taking a walk each day)

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash