Camaraderie and inclusivity in the age of COVID-19
Tips to make remote working mirror IRL office banter and bonds
As a senior engineer in Xero’s accounting platform team, I can proudly say that we own a very valuable part of Xero: the machinery that transforms bills and invoices into an accountant’s native tongue — journals in the general ledger.
That means that we’re responsible for building the software, like API services and libraries, which our product teams then use to build Xero’s products and features. Because of us, they never even have to even see any of Xero’s formidable internals.
Prior to COVID-19, the idea of working from home was deeply unappealing, but that perspective has since changed. I now know that remote working is not only more comfortable and conducive to deeper concentration, but through screen and keyboard sharing software, I can actually collaborate far more fluidly than in the office. Most importantly, of course — I’m around my partner and children. But it’s not all roses.
Where have my friends gone?
For all of its upsides, there’s an insidious trade-off to remote working; a silent but inherent loss of social structure and familiarity that comes when you’re cohabitating with only yourself and the bobble head statue on your desk. Life can become lonely.
For fully remotely workers, or even those in a hybrid model, your colleagues in the office can talk to each other whenever they want, eat together, take breaks to grab coffee and play pool or just generally decompress. To help with their work, they can tap each other on the shoulder to ask for a second opinion, or a fresh set of eyes — and doing so feels casual and effortless.
As a remote worker, not only are you de facto excluded from this kind of activity in the first place, but often even trying to ‘quickly catch up’ requires a formality and foresight that renders it something destined for the basket of too-hard things. In turn, this fosters neglected communication, reduced bonding and higher levels of alienation and separation.
Tips to build camaraderie and maintain social bonds (even when remote)
In my year of remote working, there are three things that me and my teammates have actively done to enforce a base level of team communication, ‘play’ together and nurture our kinship. These have worked for us really well, so I’d like to share them with you today.
Videoconference everything (yes, everything)
We are all remote workers now, in some capacity. Because of this, our team now acts like all work and all people are remote, even if they aren’t, or aren’t all of the time.
To us, videoconferencing is like having full-time access to the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts. We view finding and scheduling a physical room to everyone’s availability a relic of a bygone era, so instead we capitalise on the fruits of the modern pandemic age: videoconferencing, for everything. By making an effort to accommodate all of our team rituals inside of Google Meet, nobody gets left behind or loses the important context on something — even if it’s only a daily standup, retro or catch-up.
For us, the following rituals run really well via video conferencing:
- Standups
- Estimations
- Local news quizzes
- Team decisions
- Retrospectives
- Having lunch together (get rid of the headset for this one)
There are rules, though: only one person is allowed per screen and headset, so the audio is balanced and faces are clearly defined. And if we need to pair or mob, we do it remotely using mouse and keyboard sharing software, such as TeamViewer or CoScreen. For some tasks, we use a built-in multiplayer editor in vscode, vs or Jetbrains.
Give a little push, give a little pull
To prevent our team’s Slack channel from becoming a lonely dust bowl, we proactively use it as more than a way to simply keep abreast of goings on in the wider company. For us, it’s a literal desk neighbour, where in lieu of syncing the whole team in person, we use it to facilitate team communication. This is done through what we call ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’.
Pushing is declaring what you are doing to the group, showing that you care that they know what it is (and providing a context for subsequent conversations) and pulling is asking to be updated, so you can stimulate the group to talk about what’s going on. What happens is that team members who appreciate the update will engage, and I often find myself mimicking this pro-communication behaviour when I see it from my colleagues in return.
Here are some examples of how we push and pull one another:
Push your current status:
- “@here I am investigating the errors we talked about this morning”
- “@here I am just getting a snack and some fresh air”
- “@here I’m working on XBAP-1337 join me on <coscreen link>”
- “@here I’ll be back at 1:30pm”
Pull the status of your team:
- “@here Yo! What are y’all working on?”
- “@here Hey! Is anyone keen to mob this?”
Ultimately, pushing and pulling your status throughout the workday creates a natural redundancy and stimulates reciprocal status updates and requests from your colleagues. Plus, as a side note: pairing or mobbing from your screen, mouse and keyboard is way more comfortable and hygienic.
Mandate the fun and the silly
Winding down and kicking back with your colleagues is a hugely important part of working at a thriving tech company. The people you work with are funny and interesting, and getting to know them outside of the work they do is imperative for building strong interpersonal, professional relationships. Missing out on those opportunities is one of the more detrimental downsides to remote work.
Our team is dedicated to combating this. So, we’ve created new normals in how we collaborate, and that means injecting short bursts of daily ‘playtime’. We dedicate an hour each week to simply getting to know each other better, and ten minutes in the morning and afternoon to ritualistic games and check-ins. Some of our favourites for remote play are:
If no-one comes to the ‘playground’ but you, drum up support and direct message with urgency: ‘join right away we need you’. Mandating playtime, although it sounds like a luxury, is really important for carving out bonding time and building camaraderie between teams. It also allows each team member a better insight into how their colleagues critically think, solve problems and communicate in a non-pressure environment, which lends itself well to better collaboration for actual work.
The future is remotely better
The big picture benefits of remote work are undoubtedly compelling: more contact time with loved ones in a more comfortable environment, fewer emissions from transport and office operations, and from a technical work perspective, instant, high-quality pairing and mobbing.
But the downsides do exist, and if not properly worked around, can really affect how included we feel and connected we are. I’d love to hear if these tips worked for you and if you tweaked them at all — comment below and let me know how you went. If the future is remote, let’s make it remotely better.
