Three steps to avoid burnout and depression in a remote team

Let’s face it, most remote teams lack the ability to foster transparency. Often, the lack of transparency propels depression and self worth. If not addressed, remote team contributors feel undervalued. Here at Deep Work, we discovered a process with simple tools to boost your team in a healthier and more productive manor, especially in a remote environment.

This article is an attempt to share our mission at Deep Work along with the tools we use today to prevent remote burnout. The inspiration for our mission is personal.

Step 1: Use a text-based communication software daily — and be succinct

Several years ago I felt depressed and undervalued at work, nobody seemed to pick up on my emotional state or help me and what’s worse — I could see on my coworker’s faces that I was not alone. I decided to start an experiment — the aim was to make employees and leaders aware of each others emotions with a simple check-in and it turned out to uncover much more — and completely transformed the remote company I run today.

There are many tools to generally increase communication — Slack, Discord, Basecamp, Twist etc. The important note is to be honest about everything and put extra effort into eloquence and succinct writing. It’s very easy to misunderstand someone’s current state of mind and underestimate the amount of stress someone might be suffering from in their current local environment.

Inclusivity, trust and self-discovery as a default

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves.”

— Leo Tolstoy

In the book “Liberating Structures” the authors talk about how change within a company is most effective by creating new habits instead of enforcing values from the leadership: “Successful new habits will influence beliefs about what works and what is possible based on concrete personal and group experience” They would present principles for open and inclusive collaboration, which allow for quick adaptation and change within an organisation. Implementing these principles as habits should avoid misunderstandings and lack of employees motivation. Most of the principles require empathy skills and were created from an in-person environment.

But how do we build trust remotely? Can we practice self-discovery within groups that never physically meet? The book is a worthy read to understand the fundamental structures of successful companies, but taking them to remote environments is a novel challenge.

Step 2: Understand the importance of emotional granularity

When I was still working at a product design agency I wanted to try and start a conversation about emotional states, especially with the leaders. Employees were depressed or unhappy but the leaders didn’t seem to pick up on the obvious signs.

Coincidentally a good friend of mine was working in schools and managed to find a little time to improve how kids get in touch with their feelings and share them in a safe environment. This made the kids more emotionally intelligent and the teachers had an easier job giving them constructive feedback.

It’s very simple — it consists of a chart with several colors representing emotional states and kids and teachers would place a pin to which emotion they think they identify with at a given day. This sounded like a perfect experiment for team, but to confidently propose changes within a company I first wanted to make sure I understand how emotions work.

Developing emotional eloquence — a slight detour into neuroscience

From a neuroscientific point of view, emotions are not categorised reactions to your environment but rather concepts constructed from our interoceptive experiences in combination with context. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes that we all have individual bodily sensations when we experience an emotion and since our brain ties these in with our past memories, constructing an emotion creates a very unique and individual affect. So what I consider “disgust” might not be “disgust” to you.

This is why it’s important to develop emotional eloquence, sometimes one word doesn’t provide the full picture. And the better we get at expressing what’s happening inside out bodies and why, the more we are able to discover ourselves within a group of other individuals.

“Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action.”
- Lisa Feldman Barrett in her book “How emotions are made”

The reason we have words for emotions is to communicate our state to others and use our environment (and other people) to balance out our body budget. This means helping when someone else’s body budget is low or asking for help if we are in a bad place — ideally.

But what I’ve seen in a typical work-environment is that this doesn’t happen. Not only do people not talk about how they feel, but if they do it’s reduced to extremely simple expressions like “fine” or “okay”, which works if I can read someone’s facial expressions or body posture throughout the day, but not if I see them once a day on camera.

Step 3: Share, listen and respond

To me, this new view of neuroconstruction of emotion carries an important building block for improved understanding within remote working teams. Just because a person is smiling on camera, it doesn’t mean they are happy. Just because they are frowning, it doesn’t mean they are skeptical. Just because they are using aggressive words, it doesn’t mean they are angry at me, they might just not have slept well and misinterpret the affect of their feelings.

A team within a company is not a classroom and the dynamics are slightly different (or are they?) but I liked the idea to anonymously assess how the room feels — to make sure my voice is heard by the leaders and learn how to talk to everyone else. So I recreated the chart with colors and different pins in the kitchen of the office, for people to check in every morning.

In the office at my previous job, it uncovered the extreme imbalance of emotional states among leaders and employees. Now that we have this simple check-in automated by a bot, it made us much more in tune with who we are and much more efficient at communicating with each other.

Automate it with a Slack bot

It’s a ridiculously simple tool. You can set up a Slack bot to ask a daily question as a questionnaire. The answers are different colors from red (negative) to blue (positive), leaving some extra-amazing ones above blue.

Every morning, each individual chooses one of the colors to represent their daily mood and the poll/bot automatically shows the results right away. This will require for them to think about how they feel and express it. If they feel like it’s necessary, they leave a comment underneath to provide context for the color of their choice.

That’s it. Sometimes the comments spark a longer conversation, sometimes no conversation at all. This is normal and if you are planning on using it within your team it’s important to not force anyone to participate. It’s an honest exchange of emotional states and even if nobody else adopts it, doing it alone will make you emotionally more eloquent.

When someone from the team had a bad day or slept badly, it will be immediately clear that they will not be able to react in a focused and emotionally clear manner. We offer each other to listen to the mutual living situations and give advice. Which makes us as a team the most productive and wonderful team I’ve ever worked in.

Take it slow when using it

When you first start using this bot, not many people will adopt it. It’s not common to share our feelings and you shouldn’t expect people to shift behaviours immediately. Don’t get discouraged if nobody starts using it right away, people need time to see the value in it and often see someone lead by example. Start using it for yourself to track your own mood and communicate. Over time, others will follow.

Conclusion

The amount of stress this simple tool has resolved and the increase in openness and help among each other is unbelievable. We have a lot more information in real-life scenarios to tell us about someone else’s mental state, or their “body budget”. When all the visual information disappears in a remote setting, we need to find substitutes that bring it back through language and mutual understanding.

I have worked on this for quite a while and I hope it will bring your team as much joy, love, happiness and compassion as it did to mine. We can be better if we support each other on all levels.

By the way, the MIT media lab had a project in the past called Emotional Beasts, which would pick up different changes in body signals and visualise them in VR.

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