Building a Remote Team Culture
Chances are that your work-life has been turned upside down the last couple of days. The world has gone unpresidential fast from:
In the mids of the Corona crisis, the world has put on the emergency breaks (with good reason) and slowly awaits what will happen. But while we wait, we still have to take care of our jobs — both for our economy’s sake, but also to stay somewhat sane and divert our focus to something else than just bad news.
No, it’s not about the tools you use…
With this unforeseeable future comes a feeling of uncertainty — something we human beings aren’t great at handling. Uncertainty leads to fear and fear reduces our cognitive resources, make us defensive and risk-averse. Obviously, this is not the optimal state of mind, when you and your team are challenged with figuring out new ways of collaborating.
In this article, we will not talk about tips on what video conference tool to use, etc — instead, we will explain the importance and benefits of spending even more time and energy on creating a strong remote work culture.
Let’s begin by introducing a mental model that can help you understand what situation you and your team are in, and how you might take advantage of it.
It’s obvious that the Covid-19 situation brings forward a lot of reasonable concerns about how it will affect you, your job situation, your family, your friends, your community. These concerns tend to make us feel: worried, frustrated, sad, helpless, anxious, lonely, frightened. Which is normal. But, instead of trying to suppress and hide these emotions, it’s absolutely crucial to acknowledge and share them with your team members. It helps the team build empathy, understanding, and trust — some of the key ingredients for a healthy and effective team. Once you’ve acknowledged these concerns, you should direct your focus from concerns to the things you and your team actively can control or influence and be proactive towards them.
Besides from difficult emotions, crises also hold valuable opportunities to change things for the better. They can help you increase your responsiveness towards the unknown and build a mindset of “learning by doing”. As a matter of fact, this crisis, if handled in a considerate and intentional way, can help you and your team increase resilience and take the first steps into the future of remote work. A future that has a long list of great traits and opportunities to make work more engaging, some being…
All four are some of the key pillars of building what we call a responsible team and organizational culture, which benefits both our people and business. So let’s explore how you and your team can use this crisis for the better by focusing on things in your circle of influence and control instead of your circle of concerns.
The recipe is the same, remote work just need more salt and pepper
Working remotely and working in the same physical space isn’t that different from each other when thinking about building a motivated, healthy and productive team — but some aspects of working remotely are even more important because body language, facial expression, handshakes, high-fives, and hugs are taken out of the picture. It’s simply harder to connect mentally and socially.
Therefore, we’ve put together 3 small but impactful rituals we recommend you start doing to build a strong remote working culture.
1. Set your remote team working agreements
Within minutes you could easily find 10+ tips on which digital tools are best for what and how/when to use them — which is great. Times like these call for both an upgrade and an upskill in how we use digital tools, but we would argue that they have little value if you don’t spend time with your team to set your remote team working agreements. Your new remote work culture if you like.
All teams and organizations have a culture by default, which is a result of team members’ previous experiences, education, personality types, the work you do and infinitely more. This default culture can range from perfect to harmful and either help or hinder people to do their best work. We want you to instead intentionally design and create a remote work culture where everyone is enabled to do their best work in this, for many people, new work-life situation.
What are the most important things to agree on?
We suggest you spend at least a half to a full day on building your remote working culture since this will be the major factor that will either set you up for success or failure.
We suggest you discuss and align on at least the following aspects of working remotely:
- How and when do we meet digitally? What’s the purpose of these meetings and what do we want to get out of them? How do we make sure we don’t waste people's time?
- When we all meet, what behaviors can we agree are helpful and hindering for our team perform at our best? How do we make decisions and discuss in a digital space? How do we collaborate in the best possible way?
- How and where do we communicate and share information? How do we ensure transparency and make sure that people have all the necessary information?
- How do we set goals and distribute authority throughout the team? How we ensure clear roles and responsibilities in the team so everyone know what to do and how and when to do it.
- What are some of our individual needs in this situation? Does someone have kids at home? Does someone need more digital training from others?
- What are some of our concerns in regards to this situation? Not only in how we collaborate remotely, but how this will affect our lives in general? How can we support each other in these days?
The process
0) Pick someone in the team to document what you talk about and agree on. This document will be your teams working agreement and can be used in your weekly reflection (see tip no. 3 further down in the article)
1) Always start each question with 3–5 minutes of individual reflection to make sure everyone has time and space to reflect and gather their thoughts on the question before sharing with the group.
2) Then, take a round where everyone gets a chance to share their reflections without being interrupted or judged. Give the attention and space that people deserve.
3) Discuss common themes and align on your conclusions on the subject matter.
These are guiding questions that you should bring up with your team and discuss — but there is no perfect formula to this, so before you start your session, make sure you invite people to add other topics that might be relevant to your team.
2. Create time and space for emotions, focus, presence, and understanding.
Psychological Safety has over the last couple of years gained a great amount of attention and for good reasons. It’s shown to be the most important key dynamic of a healthy and effective team.
Sharing your concerns and emotions in a work context isn’t something most companies have built a culture to embrace — instead, we tend to suppress them, which makes our lives at work worse. Now is the perfect timing to establish or strengthen the psychological safety in your team by coming together about something that affects all of you.
How to start and end your day — the right way
Starting your workday with a check-in question and ending your workday with a check-out question ensures that each team member gets the attention they deserve, makes them feel seen and heard and most importantly, creates a safe space where feelings and concerns are accepted, normalized, and embraced.
These questions don’t have to be related to the content of your work but they can be a personal question about your feelings, mental state or a question about your personal learnings from the day.
Checking in for the day
Check-in questions come in many shapes and forms, they can be nudged to set a positive, emotional, energetic, developing or mindful mode. Here are a few examples for you to test out.
- What was your biggest take-away from working yesterday?
- What do you admire about our team?
- What has your attention?
- On a piece of paper draw something that illustrates how you’re feeling today?
- What were the best things about yesterday?
- What’s your biggest concern right now?
- What are you proud of?
- How we can make today a great day?
Checking out for the day
As for the check-out, questions are primally to create mental closure for the working day — extra important when work is being carried out from home and you don’t physically leave the workplace.
- How have you been today?
- What affected your energy today?
- What’s been my biggest conflict of today?
- What’s been the most challenging thing today?
- What have you done really well today?
- What would you like to do differently tomorrow?
- What one advise would I give to the team?
- What did you enjoy today?
Once again, there is no perfect formula for these, so play around, get inspired and find the kind of questions that work for you, your team and your situation.
If you want to see other suggestion for check-in / check-out questions, you should go to http://tscheck.in/
3) Emphasize and focus on how you will learn and adapt
When consultants, business gurus, and start-ups talk about failing fast, celebrating failures and fuck up’s, etc. it’s really about trying to apply an “experience-based learning mindset”. Trying something out, evaluating how it went and then using the insights to do it in a better way the next time. Failure isn’t worth anything, learning is worth everything. That’s why learning from the work you are doing should be a ritual every organisation and company practice at least once a month — regardless of the context, but even more important when you are trying something new — like working remotely.
Unfortunately, many companies don’t prioritize this aspect of their culture. It’s a shame since they miss out on the chance to constantly develop and become better for their people and their business.
Wrapping up the week with your biggest learnings
The weekly wrap-up is a powerful tool to harvest learnings and move from the circle of concern into the circle of control and influence. It supports you and your team to figure out how you should improve working remotely, now and in the future. This ritual is definitely a way to not let the crisis go to waste. Let’s look into a few simple methods on how to do it.
1) The reflection
- Ask everyone in your team to individually reflect on:
- What has happened during this week?
- How did it make me feel and what were my reactions?
- What insights or conclusions can I draw from this week? What did I learn?
- How can I apply what I learned to improve next week? What actions can I take based on what I learned? - Ask who wants to start with sharing their reflection and then go one at the time (the listeners can ask questions, but not judge, discuss or try to change how that person felt).
- After everyone has shared, ask everyone to make one “as a team we…” statement ex. “ next week, as a team we should spend more time on clarifying tasks, deadlines, and responsibilities.” One person is in charge of documenting these statements digitally and implement them next week.
2) The 4 L’s, a classic retrospective:
- Ask everyone in your team to spend 20 minutes to individually write down 2–3 notes on what they liked, lacked, longed and learned during this week of work.
- Share with the team and document your conclusions for next week’s work.
For more “fun retrospectives”, go to https://www.funretrospectives.com/
Before you get back to your team.
We hope this article gave you some input on how to handle your remote working culture and build a kick-ass remote team — and ultimately come out even stronger on the other side of this crisis.
And don’t feel like you need to start doing all of it at the same time if you find it overwhelming. Every team and organization has different needs and cultures, so choose what makes the most sense to you. If you need support with any of it or have questions just reach out to rasmus@eliot.works
I’m Rasmus, an independent Org. Designer & Facilitator who supports empathic leaders transform their organisations by creating engaged, effective & psychological safe teams.
If you want to explore how we can work together, book a call.
Connect with me on LinkedIn to get insights and knowledge on how to create more resilient teams and organisations.
