Building Culture for Remote Teams in Times of Crisis
How Rituals can be leveraged to create Cohesion
It was early March of 2020, we were kicking off a series of projects for an important client, with a small team of designers projected to grow to around 30+ people in a year across multiple teams. Nobody knew much of what would unfold in the year (how could anyone guess?), and I was responsible for keeping these teams delivering and functional.
If I had to say what is the main goal when it comes to leading teams, I’d say building a team culture. The challenge to develop and maintain a culture in remote teams is, at least, demanding. Now, leading remote teams that can maintain focus, cohesion, and engagement during a crisis is definitely something else.
People First, crossed my mind.
Daniel Coyle lays out three elements that drive highly successful groups. In his book Culture Code, he describes that building safety, sharing vulnerability, and establishing purpose are a set of enablers for success, and I couldn’t agree more.
Driven by those concepts, I set out to strengthen the teams' culture in a new remote environment. Building such a strategy requires several variables to be considered, but now, I will focus on how to strengthen purpose, building safety, and sharing vulnerability through Rituals.
Team Rituals
Rituals can be understood as activities with a strong symbolic meaning running through a period of time. I began to pay attention to Rituals in work environments when I experienced their value generating a particular cohesion in teams, even if those activities were not related to that group's specific tasks. From there, I began to encourage myself and others to break the concept of “wasting time in extra activities” within processes.
As I mentioned before, when it comes to a crisis, cohesion, focus, and engagement play a major role, but how to prioritize for people when other urgencies pile all together in the process?
Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn described the characteristics and behaviors required to lead a team through crisis. I found myself particularly interested and fascinated by Ernest Shackleton, one of the most renowned leaders of the Antarctic exploration era.
Shackleton demonstrated impressive qualities when he and his crew got stuck in the middle of the Antarctic for two years, leading through prioritizing what he called “mental medicine” over the rest of the urgencies.
Shackleton's first goal was to assess his team's engagement, outlook, and cohesion before anything. His strategy was centralized on creating “Rituals” to prevent the crew from going down a spiral towards dead. This may sound very excessive, but Nancy Koehn describes this correlation very simply; she said, “Ennui can become boredom, boredom can become disbelief/despair, despair and descension can easily, then in high stake situations, becomes death.” Shackelton knew this, which is why he operated and prioritized his crew's mental health over the rest.
Obviously, what Shackelton’s crew went through was an extreme scenario. Still, by translating these learnings to work environments, these Rituals can be leveraged towards motivation strategies, purpose builders, and subsequently to more efficient and happy teams.
Rituals as enablers of cohesion
Rituals bring elements and moments that usually get lost or are absent when teams are remote, and they are extremely valuable for a team's function, no matter the work they are set up to do.
Those moments can be found in:
- Activities within meetings
- Workshops
- Peer recognition activities
- Creative and collaborative activities
- After hour meetings
- Asynchronous activities
- 1:1 meetings
- Spontaneous encounters between people
Rituals help to “force” those moments in remote environments, bringing the team closer (cohesion) and set the course for a high collaboration environment.
Marissa Golberg describes these elements as breakthrough moments and provides a simple recipe to enable them:
Step 1 is to create the structure necessary for these breakthrough moments to happen (create the Rituals, set up the cadence) to then as Step 2, provide the permission for them to happen (Allow the team to participate as optional and encourage participation through self-content generation).
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and author of Delivering happiness, called these touchpoints between people, collisions. Tony was obsessed with the idea of these Rituals of interactions; although you may think of these as serendipitous encounters, they can be planned and set up for this to happen. Tony even had set up goals of having one thousand collisionable hours per year for himself and a hundred collisionable hours per acre for his Downtown Project.
Another fascinating example of creating conditions for these moments to happen is in Draper Kauffman’s NAVY SEAL training program. SEALS are among the most highly effective teams in the world, and part of that success comes from how well they cooperate. The reason behind this, Daniel Coyle described, is the strategy built into the training, which generates thousands of micro-events (highly cooperative touchpoints between members) that create closeness and collaboration.
Rituals for remote teams in times of crisis
At Globant in 2020— as most of the world's companies moved to a full remote setup — my main strategy was to set up as many highly cooperative moments as possible, subsequentially, providing a space to channel people’s anguish, fears, and sense of uncertainty in that particular context we were getting into.
Following, I want to share details of some of the Rituals we built and ran with my teams:
1:1 meetings
- I increased the 1:1s cadence and encouraged the teams to have theirs 1:1 with whoever felt that they needed it at any moment. We called it Virtual Coffees to increase the sense of proximity as if we were having our usual coffee break in the kitchen.
Activities within meetings
- I injected activities during meetings to “force” those breakthrough moments. Example: An ice breaker activity the first 5mins of each weekly call in which participant take turns to choose an object and explain why that object is important that week. This ritual helped maintain a common subject to refer to during the week between the teams and discover new individual aspects of each member “humanizing” the picture behind the screen.
- We created a Ritual in which every member of the teams picked a “personal signal.” Whenever anyone was joining a meeting with a shared screen, we would draw our own “signal” on the screen (think about the bat-signal ), so the rest knew who was joining and started to engage.
Communication and recognition
- I set up automatic workflows in Slack to give shoutouts to any team member of the teams, encouraging any small act of care, collaboration, win, or even failure. Workflows can also be leverage as reminders, and l set up some for healthy reminders and funny gifs during the day.
- Shoutouts became so common that the team created customized “awards” to give away to members who went the extra mile. Examples: the “Speedy Gonzales of the week,” to the one that expedites a particular task, or the “Patient of the week” whenever that person manages to keep it cool during a design review :) or “special awards” like the “Queens of Dashboards” when a designer mastered data visualizations.
Peer recognition is highly encouraged within Globant. Through an internal tool, people send “stars” to their peers (https://www.starmeup.com/). We leveraged that ritual to connect with other teams within the company, as well.
Automation of dailies status + mood tracker
- Besides slack channels for music, movie, and food, I leverage a great service and Slack plug-in (https://geekbot.com/ ) that allowed me to measure the team's mood throughout the day. It helps me to identify if someone needed individual support or special attention. However, most importantly, it was necessary for everyone in the team to see the weekly report, to see that happiness comes from a series of ups and downs, an important aspect to keep moving forward through a moment of crisis.
Asynchronous collaborative activities
- We also created a Spotify playlist to share songs depends on the mood of the day. This activity got its cadence when team members started to share songs throughout the week or weekends. This Ritual was fun and generated engagement asynchronously.
Customized retrospectives meetings
- Finally, I combined all the team's retrospective meetings, generating customized and “thematic” sessions called: Feasts. (to simulate the ritual of sitting down around a table to share a moment of collaboration, joy, and learnings.)
This ritual became the most celebrated and participatory within my teams. It became our safe space where people share what went well, what else could be improved, but most importantly, share how they felt during the week, share anecdotes and give shoutouts to their peers.
Within this space, we also share presentations and talks about different relevant subjects such as the importance of vulnerability; our responsibility as designers in this new context; how to communicate better; how to deal with clients; inspirational quotes; videos, and of course, memes :)
This Ritual is currently expanding and transforming into new activities, documented into a deck we called “Remote Together” with case studies, anecdotes, games, making this ritual tangible, persistent through time, and even with a team identity based on our beloved Baby Yoda.
Somehow, now, is our time capsule on how we forged our culture identity through a crisis.
I began to see these Rituals' value through metrics related to higher collaboration, better communication (internally and with clients), motivation, better decisions, a stronger sense of team purpose, and definitely a more compassionate, supportive, and happier team.
There are several more examples and data on how successful groups performed at their peak when they shared a strong sense of purpose, trust, and share vulnerability. A Harvard study showcases that people in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, and collaborate better with their peers. These people experienced:
- 106% more energy at work.
- 74% less stress.
- 50% higher productivity.
- 76% more engagement.
- 40% less burnout.
- 29% more satisfaction with their lives.
- 13% fewer sick days.
After one year of implementing the first set of emergency Rituals, I’m more than confident that this is the path to follow if we want to respond to unanticipated crises with strong team cultures. And becomes more important than ever in these global uncertainties, when new rules for our life and remote work are still getting defined.
As leaders, we have a duty to keep building a responsible, safer, and fair future for all, and the way to do this is to put people first. Always.
Now, watching your agenda for the next weeks, what Rituals are you willing to facilitate for your team?
Illustration by Likkilow — part of the team :)
