What are online activities that remote team members could do together?
June 21, 2018 12:07 AM Subscribe
What non worky, online activities might I promote or offer to people as a way to get to know each other a bit more deeply? Some sort of communal puzzle solving? Other games? Leagues? A pet show and tell over skype?
I manage the engineering department in a smallish startup with ~150 employees. Around 30 of which are developers. Our main office is in London, but we have remote workers around the world, and a little office of developers in NZ. The time difference between UK and NZ is particularly brutal. Usually 12 hours.
This is generally going pretty well, however it's still difficult for people to connect with each other at these distances and time zones.
Would love some ideas.
I manage the engineering department in a smallish startup with ~150 employees. Around 30 of which are developers. Our main office is in London, but we have remote workers around the world, and a little office of developers in NZ. The time difference between UK and NZ is particularly brutal. Usually 12 hours.
This is generally going pretty well, however it's still difficult for people to connect with each other at these distances and time zones.
Would love some ideas.
It is nice that you’re trying to bring people together. But why do they need to connect more deeply, unless work is suffering due to lack of deep connection? The reason why most people who work remotely go down that route is because it suits them to work that way. Where I‘m coming from is that this reads like the equivalent of after work drinks or whatever other allegedly work related task I am asked to do that has nothing to do with my to do list and invariably I am expected to do in my own time. And frankly, I‘d be underwhelmed if you tried to make me play with my coworkers in my own time. And as you say, there is no natural overlap to the NZ working day...so there is no way to achieve what you want in work time.
posted by koahiatamadl at 12:43 AM on June 21, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by koahiatamadl at 12:43 AM on June 21, 2018 [9 favorites]
Our #cat-pictures Slack channel is very active! It lets people participate with photos/videos of their own balls of fluff (dogs also get posted all the time), or any memes they wish to share. It's a great way to get know a bit of your colleagues' personal lives that is very low pressure. Pet-less folks can still throw up the occasional react-ji even if they never post anything. Of course you can extend this idea to any other general interest topic!
Agree that carefully crafted team-building activities can feel very fake and useless.
As a manager, you can also make it a point to say stuff like, "Big thank you to team NZ for finishing X ahead of schedule, which made team London's work much easier to complete!" Let people know that they are directly affecting each other's work lives and that they are really a team, even if they are distributed.
posted by tinydancer at 2:12 AM on June 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
Agree that carefully crafted team-building activities can feel very fake and useless.
As a manager, you can also make it a point to say stuff like, "Big thank you to team NZ for finishing X ahead of schedule, which made team London's work much easier to complete!" Let people know that they are directly affecting each other's work lives and that they are really a team, even if they are distributed.
posted by tinydancer at 2:12 AM on June 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
Build stuff together in Minecraft?
posted by rabbitrabbit at 6:25 AM on June 21, 2018
posted by rabbitrabbit at 6:25 AM on June 21, 2018
I would recommend asynchronous ways of getting to know each other. The slack channel ideas are great. Also consider having people voluntarily take and share silly personality tests, write up brackets, etc. In a shared Google doc. Another idea is to have a "secret Santa" exchange (voluntarily). The act of giving and receiving gifts can be very powerful and fun.
posted by ellerhodes at 8:06 AM on June 21, 2018
posted by ellerhodes at 8:06 AM on June 21, 2018
We do volunteering at zooniverse. We pick a thing, like looking for animals in the jungle or trash in the beach or transcribing old recipes from cursive, and do it as a team. It’s fun, albeit probably less productive than any one person alone, and we laugh and have a good time while helping someone.
On edit: I see that the time diff is 12 hours, so this might not work. Drat.
posted by greermahoney at 8:27 AM on June 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
On edit: I see that the time diff is 12 hours, so this might not work. Drat.
posted by greermahoney at 8:27 AM on June 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Our whole project/company is remote, essentially, and the "share your pets" thing was very pleasant for us back when we were first getting started. (We didn't have Slack, so it was just via email, but even so.)
I would probably on some level enjoy having something like a slack thread that was "just for fun" to share innocuous youtube videos or spotify lists or something, but I dunno, nowadays the very sound of the Slack notification makes me wince. Very fine line between "building cohesion" and "do you want me to hit this deadline or do you want me to send emojis."
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:42 PM on June 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
I would probably on some level enjoy having something like a slack thread that was "just for fun" to share innocuous youtube videos or spotify lists or something, but I dunno, nowadays the very sound of the Slack notification makes me wince. Very fine line between "building cohesion" and "do you want me to hit this deadline or do you want me to send emojis."
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:42 PM on June 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
You can encourage them to self organize casual channels on Slack or whatever, but you'll find that people like me are largely uninterested in company fun time. I'm a remote worker and I know the details of my immediate team that I care about already, but the idea of being asked to pretend to care about someone around the globe that I don't really interact with at work's dog is unappealing to me.
posted by Candleman at 1:55 PM on June 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Candleman at 1:55 PM on June 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks for the thoughtful responses - We're heavy slack users. And the NZ and UK teams do have to work on very closely related projects. They're not unrelated. They need to work together. But I see very different standards of communication between people who have never met each other face to face. Which makes me sad. And causes real stress and dissatisfaction between people. So it's not an academic problem. This is just one way I was thinking of to give people a bit of empathy for the people who they're working closely with. Despite being temporally and physically distant.
Thanks again.
posted by aychedee at 11:45 PM on June 26, 2018
Thanks again.
posted by aychedee at 11:45 PM on June 26, 2018
I work on a globally distributed team. Facilitate an in-person offsite at least annually. There's no substitute for meeting face to face and it can totally shift the dynamic even if it only happens once.
posted by Threeve at 11:36 AM on June 27, 2018
posted by Threeve at 11:36 AM on June 27, 2018
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It's a high-pressure collaboration game-- one person has a bomb to defuse with various puzzles-- the puzzles are simple to solve with the manual, but the defuser has to describe what they see while everyone else looks at the manual. The catch is that the puzzles are designed to trip the tongue, confuse the listener, etc. It's devilish but fun.
Appropriate for small groups who can gather (online or in person) simultaneously.
posted by Sunburnt at 12:36 AM on June 21, 2018 [2 favorites]