Bonding as a remote team
Jamie Stirrat
17 replies
How do you personally manage it?
Replies
Andrei Petrik@andrei_petrik2
There's lots you can do. Other people have mentioned games already. So, what I used to do is literally have an "open virtual door" used to do it in Praglii, but that tool just failed for us. But I'd share out a google hangout link and anyone on the team could jump in and out. Ask a question, share an idea, or just work in silence for a bit while on hangout.
Share
@andrei_petrik2 Might be worth making this explicit :)
@andrei_petrik2 Amazing, I love this! You said used to, so wondering if you still do this?
We're actually building a collaborative desktop experience (trymoot.com), with workspaces, shared dashboards and co-working features integrated. Very much like what you've been doing here with an added ability to actually work together. Let me know if interested!
@jamesstirrat currently I'm in a different timezone so it hard to coordinate an overlap. But everyone knows (I hope) that they can just jump on a hangout with me at a moments notice.
I think especially since Covid there are plenty on online group activities you can do. If you’re a small team a fun thing to do is “zoom drinks” and some kind of board game. Our favorite is codenames. really fun game that is easy to understand and requires some teamwork :)
https://codenames.game/
@pablo_fatas Nice, we've been trying out different tools as a fun activity, one of which has been https://thursday.social :)
@jamesstirrat That looks like a lot of fun actually. How has it been?
@jamesstirrat I mean its in the title just do it on thrusdays 😂
@pablo_fatas Has been good. Issue is integrating it on a regular basis - but that's on us!
@pablo_fatas that went over my head 😂
Besides games which I think everyone played as a remote team, every few weeks we have a Lunch&Learn event. Every team prepares an education for the whole company and presents it. This way we all learn, get to know people from other teams better, and have fun. We have remote working times from time to time which helps us in idea exchanges and some personal chit chat.
@luka_vasic Oh I love this, how do your people feel about it? This is something I'd love to integrate.
@jamesstirrat Everyone loves it. It always starts nice conversations around the topics, and also lets you talk about things that interest you.
I recommend starting email threads where everybody can share their story. That's what was done in my previous job where we had hundreds of freelancers all working remotely. Our managers would occasionally start a thread (often before holidays) like "The spookiest story" or "Your family's weird traditions".
Everybody would share their experiences and then managers would make a game based on them. A game was simple and checks how much you remember. Questions would sound like this: Whose family had a tradition of watching bad reality shows every time they got together?
A team that won the game would get a day off or a long lunch:)
@anna_mandziuk LOVE this! I wonder if there's an easy way than email to replicate the same system :)
@jamesstirrat Probably there are, like threads in Slack, if you use it
We used to organise zoom events - Trivia evenings, Friday Fun etc...but as a bootstrapped startup, that was taking too much time to organise, and got super complicated with different time zones. And I realised what truly works is empathy - being interested in the people you work with. We started taking a little time in our daily calls to talk about non-work, personal stuff. It's pretty tough to remember to do that when the product release is looming up, but we try!