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How to build social connection in a remote team
Dynamic Icebreakers
If your icebreaker questions are intriguing, cheeky, humorous – the answers you receive will be, too.
Many remote teams will kick off their weekly meeting with an icebreaker question or insert it during their morning stand-up meeting. Even more popular is asking a series of icebreaker questions during the onboarding process when hiring someone.
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Personal Connection
A sense of connection and belonging are sentiments that are helpful for building “affective trust” – a form of trust based on emotional bond and interpersonal relatedness.
It varies from the “cognitive trust” – which springs from reliability and competence. Both are influential to performance, but affective trust tends to be more salient for a team at the beginning of a relationship, according to studies.
Statistics On Remote Workers
- Loneliness was reported as the biggest downside for 21% of remote employees, and one of the reasons that makes them more likely to quit.
- Most remote managers say they’d be more inclined to stay if they had more friends at work.
- Individuals who have 15 minutes to socialize with colleagues have a 20% increase in performance over their peers who don't.
- Positive social relationships are correlated with better life expectancy.
Over-Emphasize Onboarding
With affective trust being so important to foster at the beginning of a relationship, onboarding new hires well becomes even more critical for virtual team building.
You can partner newcomers with experienced employees and have a formal onboarding process at the company, or at least a partially in-person one, with expenses covered by the company.
Build a Buddy System
Many remote companies offer buddy systems for onboarding. This is also a way for people to have fun and get closer, as well as to increase job satisfaction and commitment.
This can take the form of assigning an official “mentor” or a random employee, with whom they have periodic one-on-one meetings to get acclimated to the company.
Foster Connection
- Try regularly scheduling chats over video. Those work particularly well when paired with activities like coffee breaks, online gaming or topical discussion.
- Create a dedicated non-work chat channel. This re-creates the “watercooler chat” you would have in an in-person office and it often becomes the primary mode of communication for online workers.
- Invest in company retreats and make space for people to socialize on them.
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Assembling the Team
... that's capable of executing in a remote setup:
- Hire doers: they will get stuff done even if they are working from a secluded island.
- Hire people you can trust....
Software/Tools
In a remote team, you'll need the right tools to make sure everyone stays on the same page and can continue to execute without a physical person standing next to them.
You likely will need a tool in certain categories like group chat and video conferencing to make remote successful.
Processes
Good processes let you get work done in the absence of all else. They provide structure and direction for getting things done.
A few examples from Zapier:
- Weekly Hangouts;
- Weekly One-on-Ones;
- Bring the team together 2 times/year somewhere cool;
- Automate anything that can be automated.
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The challenges of hybrid teams
Most companies embracing remote work also have dedicated headquarters. But remote-ish teams have even more communication and collaboration challenges than fully remote teams.
...Remote-friendly vs remote-first
The single biggest mistake companies can make is to opt to be remote-friendly instead of remote-first. Companies often accept the idea that remote is the future of work without creating an inclusive culture to ensure it works for everyone.
- Remote-friendly environment: Employees are allowed to work remotely, but work is not optimized for it. There is a disconnect between office and remote employees and team meetings exclusively occur in a co-located time zone. Water cooler chat is a space for key decisions and presence is correlated with meaningful work. Communication is synchronous-first. Managers must work in the office.
- Remote-first companies: Employees are empowered to adopt remote work. Real-time meetings are kept to a minimum and recorded. Decisions are made online and performance is measured by output, not by hours worked. Communication is asynchronous-first. Managers are encouraged to work from home.
Connecting a remote-ish team
Hybrid companies function best when the entire company is optimized for remote work. Successful hybrid teams set up processes to help their remote workers thrive alongside their office teammates.
Leadership must acknowledge the various challenges remote workers face and create solutions. Create a remote work policy that keeps remote workers and contractors from feeling like second class team members. Remote workers should feel fully connected and not missing a thing.
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Building Rapport Remotely
To better build rapport and counter isolation do the following:
- smile, tilt your chin lower so you're not looking down on them, and slow down your speech during your vid...
Relying On Text The Right Way
Voice and video calls can help you feel more in touch with your team and avoid the issues of asynchronous communication like time lags or misunderstandings.
However, you'll likely spend a lot of your day communicating via text as it’s a good way to interact without interrupting their work. So you need to be able to get your point across clearly and simply, show empathy and understanding, and be efficient to avoid wasted time.
Staying Up To Date
Remote workers can feel overwhelmed by the amount of text they have to process. So finding ways to keep on top of what's going on is imperative for communicating efficiently with others.
Create archive lists and CC irrelevant emails to them, so you can save and share them without flooding non-involved people.
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