A year in review of authentic, remote team cohesion sessions
During peak covid isolation in 2021, my client asked me to uplift the dynamic of our team by carving out time to get to know each other in a casual setting. This post shares the highlights from over a year of fulfilling this ask.
This request had a few inherent challenges: the team had not been established as an in-person team pre-pandemic and the team is 100% remote, distributed. We weren’t going to fly everyone to HQ for an extrovert’s paradise filled with happy hours, rock climbing, and escape rooms and magically have everyone feel like they had a best friend at work. As the team’s friendly, neighborhood scrum master tasked with facilitating team communication, I embraced the assignment and put on my social psychologist hat, brainstorming ideas for empowering my team. After a few chats with my client, we settled on experimenting with monthly 50 minute meetings over the lunch hour.
Initiating change for a group to try out can be awkward. In an agile fashion, I had to keep seeing the change I was leading as iterative experiments building off of each other as opposed to a flip of a switch I can mandate. No one successfully motivates a team by declaring, “The power of agile compels you to act like a cohesive team!” and then hold retrospectives. Instead, I guided our team over the hump of uncertainty by explaining the why and what involved in the latest experiment we were going to try.
We weren’t going to fly everyone to HQ for an extrovert’s paradise filled with happy hours, rock climbing, and escape rooms and magically have everyone feel like they had a best friend at work.
I explained the rationale to my team: our PO/your manager/my client wants us to take breathers from the grind and foster psychological safety and belonging. I highlighted a few things: 1) if we don’t like it, anyone can opt out or propose tweaks on how we strive toward the goal, 2) it’s not going to be an unstructured, unhappy hour where the person with the most power does all the talking and tries to be witty, 3) I’ll offer some structured prompts for us to try out and no one needs to do any prep if they don’t want, 4) the invite list is intentionally limited to the small group of folks who are direct reports of my client, 5) we’re doing this during work hours to minimize imposing on anyone’s personal time, and 6) I’ll do my best to cover lunch without requiring we all eat on camera — no one needed to get to know each other by watching each other chew.
The goals for the team cohesion sessions were multi-layered. First, let’s follow through on previous verbal reminders that our daily huddles were “safe spaces” to raise any concerns or questions. I wanted to give folks the opportunity to practice offering creative contributions and expressing dissent in a lower stakes environment. Second, let’s offer folks more than a paycheck as their reason for working. I wanted to give folks the opportunity to get to know each other, find common ground, and build partnerships with their teammates. Third, let’s invite joy in the work space and recognize each other’s humanity. I wanted to make my team members carve out the time to laugh and support each other in keeping burnout at bay.
I’ll spoil it for you. We started with this monthly meeting in Summer 2021 with a meeting invite I struggled to name, so I desperately called it “Tuesday Fun” worrying that not everyone might be feeling it. I figured out everyone’s preferred delivery app and sent them small gift cards to use at their leisure. We are now more than a year into meeting this way, and it has evolved into “Friday Fun Team Cohesion Time”. Now my client directly makes sure everyone taps into a budget and use their corporate cards to grab lunch for that day. Everyone on the team attends most of the time. Sometimes we reschedule to make sure everyone can make it because that’s how much folks are sad if a conflict arises. Everyone joins with cameras on, and everyone engages by writing in chat or verbally. I recently celebrated the milestone with everyone by doing a “Year in Review” rehashing things we tried and the memories it generated. The session helped welcome our newest group member to the fold and get up to speed on the group’s shared lore.
Everyone on the team attends most of the time. Sometimes we reschedule to make sure everyone can make it because that’s how much folks are sad if a conflict arises.
These were my overarching goals that guided our sessions:
Goal 1. Establish “safe space” by giving folks the opportunity to practice offering creative contributions and expressing dissent in a lower stakes environment.
Goal 2. Offer opportunities for folks to build connections while respecting each other’s comfort zones.
Goal 3. Create a consistent space for joy in the work space and support each other’s well-being.
Especially in the beginning, I gave folks advance notice of what the meeting’s kickoff prompt would be, so that they could prepare ahead of time. This helped lower the stress for the team’s introverts. Part of the notice included making it clear that participation in the prompt was optional and that everyone would respect each other’s comfort zones for personal disclosure in the workplace. I also wanted to ensure everyone had a chance to chime in early, so there was an increased chance for full participation throughout and not the most vocal person dominating the conversation. Over many sessions, I asked various prompts to guide everyone’s attention toward things that are positive and meaningful:
- Share one thing you think is a common myth or misconception about professionals in your field. (This is a great prompt for a group not used to sharing anything personal about themselves at work).
- Bring a picture of your “baby”. (Everyone was free to define “baby” as they saw fit, so we had a mix of human, fur, plant, and mechanical “baby” pictures).
- Share a description of your “happy place” or your “ideal day”, again defining however you see fit. (We got to hear about nostalgic locations, ideal settings, and peaceful memories).
- Come with a description of the “best thing you ever ate”. (We really loved talking about food and giving recommendations for travel).
- When someone went on an extended vacation, we asked them to share some of their vacation photos. (Someone brought pictures of drool-worthy meals from a trip to Asia and this resonated for many of us who haven’t been traveling much due to covid).
- Share the latest thing you’re listening to that’s helping you feel good. (I gave a plug for raunchy Asian standup (that link NSFW) and the Calm meditation app because it has focus music for my work day and some of the most niche sleep stories that help keep my brain occupied, so I can finally zonk out).
- Share the “best and/or worst advice you ever received”. (Everyone mostly opted to share best advice. This ended up being a prompt that took the whole meeting time because folks appreciated the contributions and discussed how they apply in their current circumstances).
- Share about a cause or a charity you support. (We realized the team has some common threads they are activated around and it was fun learning about things folks were passionate about in the world).
- Share your baby picture as the background image for the surprise baby shower for our teammates!
- Take the Myers-Briggs personality test and share one insight from your results. (Everyone rose to the occasion on this one, and I think it helped that I ran this by folks in a prior session to gauge receptivity).
- Bring a contribution for a round of “positive gossip” where we share one nice thing we know about someone on the team. (This conversation lasted the whole meeting time because everyone was eager to fill others in on amazing things about each other).
We also did shorter icebreakers that any online search will yield prompts such as:
- How do you feel today on the cat/dog/baby yoda/etc scale?
- Fill in the blanks. I had prepared sentences I populated in chat and let folks respond in chat (e.g. I like to wake up with a cup of _____. If I could be good at one Olympic sport, it would be _____. My go-to takeout is _____. If I could do one upgrade for my WFH setup, it’d be _____. Yada yada yada).
I wanted to give them a chance to practice certain skills in our lower stakes environment
The other chunk of things I prepared were exercises that had a learning outcome associated with it (my background is in higher edu and I’ve taught college students after all). I would reveal to the group that I wanted to give them a chance to practice certain skills in our lower stakes environment:
- Pancakes vs. waffles to practice consensus building, expressing dissent, and advocating for an unpopular view. The team is asked to remake the world by navigating a set of binary choices and decide which choice to preserve in the world. It revealed there were a lot of things we were willing to sacrifice in order to preserve a good night’s sleep.
- Six-word memoir to practice distilling something complex into its essence and communicating that bottom line. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I’d run out of time that session, so I tortured everyone by limiting them to only 2 words to describe themself that they had to put in chat. The requirement of using chat kept my extroverts honest in adhering to the rules.
- DM an ambiguous situation to practice asking the right questions to understand a context and decide how best to act. This takes a bit of prep and improv. For anyone who has played tabletop role playing games, you know that it takes a diverse team to explore possibilities and solve a quest. It’s a great setup for the team to hear each other’s point of view how they would navigate any number of tricky work scenarios.
- 5 things we all have in common to practice establishing common ground with others and self-organizing how to go about the process of vetting categories. Natural leaders jumped in to prompt everyone to respond to categories like music, TV genres, etc. Everyone learned a lot about each other in a short amount of time and maintained the spirit of the game by avoiding cop-outs like “we all have birthdays”. The prompt to generate “5 of X” can be adapted in a lot of ways.
- Stroop test to demonstrate the limits of being human. Our brain can only process so much stimuli, and I wanted to emphasize that we all need breaks in order to be kind to our hard-working brains.
The work environment we want is one that we have to co-create together
The rest of the time was typically spent playing an online co-op game. Mainly, I looked for games that are free and prioritized cooperation over competition to keep the mood more chill. Some of our usual suspects ended up being Codenames, City Guesser, and Skribbl. It’s a ton of fun seeing who is good with words, who is well-traveled, and who is good with drawing.
I think folks have stayed as engaged as they have because a few things: my client has repeatedly emphasized how refreshing and fun it is to interact with the team in this way, I continue to remind everyone that the work environment we want is one that we have to co-create together, and now we’re more open to things being a little unpredictable. One time I asked everyone to play a mysterious waffles vs. pancakes style game only to have them realize their ultimate choice led to me asking them to respond to how they’re feeling on a scale of goose.
Not every prompt I try has worked as I had hoped, and it’s OK because I’m aiming for progress over perfection. One day maybe I’ll get everyone to try out “anxiety party”! And there was this one time we tried navigating a fascinating, online garden maze and all it did was induce nausea, so that one I can’t recommend.
