Ways We Foster Team Connection in a Remote World.
The change to remote work happened seemingly overnight, which made this transition all the more shocking. But if Benchmates are anything, it’s resilient. Every team has figured out their own way to stay connected with each other through what can only be described as a tumultuous year.
Emulating the social culture of the pre-pandemic Bench in the remote era has been a challenge to say the least. Our entire workforce went remote overnight and social connection became something you had to seek out intentionally.
The Environment team’s role changed drastically, adapting to a new fully remote environment. We learnt how to enable, support and foster connection of a newly distributed workforce across all our teams.
Here’s what we did!
We experimented with virtual events. We pushed connection beyond the team level; virtual movie nights, game nights, a Pechakucha event, and lunch break games became the norm. These virtual events had pretty low turnouts, which shouldn’t have been surprising since Benchmates were already having to spend their full day in front of a screen.
We added Slack apps that would integrate connection into the Bench social platform, like Donut and Disco.
We started a Benchmates focused internal video series, Hey Benchmates!
In this series, we showcased 4–5 Benchmates per episode — allowing them to introduce themselves, their work from home spaces, hobbies, and often their pets to the collective. We brought connection into the homes of our Benchmates across the country.
In December, we hosted a huge virtual holiday party — with a talent show, interactive games, music, and drag queens!
Bench Mental Health Guide
Overall we have a young workforce, and for many of our Benchmates this is their first permanent full time job since leaving college and it’s a whole new experience.
Bench is a startup and by nature, startups move FAST. We hustle pretty hard here, knowing that what we’re up to matters, and that making a profound difference in the life of 1,000,000 people takes grit and determination.
We want all of our Benchmates feeling full to the brim with energy to turn our mission into a reality. So, we revamped our Mental Health Guide. We know that life is hard and messy and we want Benchmates to know that we have a strong support system and resources in place if life takes an unexpected turn.
Part of the motivation behind the Mental Health Guide and our Mental Health Toolkit was to help Benchmates recognise when they need to take some time to recharge, and provide a list of resources available to them to help them do so. When we say we keep it human — we mean it!
The mental health guide and toolkit are ultimately part of a wider mental health strategy that we are rolling out here at Bench to support our Benchmates with their overall wellbeing.
Going fully remote
“In March of 2020, we braced ourselves to enter a global pandemic. Our highest priority was Benchmate safety. Period. Fortunately for us, we began remote strategy planning four weeks before we became a fully remote business.
In that time, we acquired as many emergency N95 masks we could find for our Benchmates, we practiced team by team working entirely remotely for a day. This let us know where the fully remote bumps were while we still had a functioning office.
We partnered with IT to ensure the VPN and internet speed requirements were achievable from our Benchmates homes, and we set up a virtual company wide Benchmate suggestion/ideas board.
A lasting memory for me and many other Benchmates was the day members of our environment team rented a U-Haul truck to drop off personal belongings and office furniture to Benchmates all over the Lower Mainland. Our Environment team knew how important it was for our people to have a comfortable work from home set up, and went above and beyond to make that happen. By March 20th, 2020, Bench was fully remote.
Since then, we’ve learnt so much — a lifetime worth of stuff. And the thing that rises to the top for me every time, is connection. We’ve learnt that there really is no substitute for in-person meet-ups and catch-ups (even though we threw some pretty epic Zoom parties in 2020).
As we look forward into 2021 and beyond, knowing that there will one day be a time for us to come together in-person, what we won’t forget is the importance of staying connected as many of us remain fully remote. Company-wide meetings will stay as virtual-first meetings, along with our team and working meetings. The only exception to virtual meetings will be when we’re all physically present together in the same location. Until we can come together again in-person, we’ll continue to make social Zoom hangs a priority.
We’ll get through this wild time, by staying connected to each other, one day at a time. Because there are one million people out there counting on us!”
—Bonnie Powell, Senior Director, People
How are our teams doing?
Honestly, we were curious about how our people were doing. We reached out to Benchmates to investigate how they were doing after being roughly flung from their comfy Vancouver HQ seats into a fully remote work-from-home-all-the-time era of Bench. We reached out to Benchmates who transitioned from in-office to remote work, those who were onboarded remotely, and our members of the leadership team.
Here are some of the responses we received:
“When it comes to how we think/feel about our clients and our mission statement, I think that has only gotten stronger. We are experiencing many of the same struggles that they are (the isolations, working from home, technology struggles), and I’ve personally found that my clients and myself really connect more when we speak on the phone because we are experiencing the same things.
We aren’t just a company to a lot of them now and it’s pretty cool to see the results.” — Delilah Black, Expert Associate
“There’s definitely a split for people on our team who started off in the office and those who came on post-Covid. That being said, we’ve been able to keep a lot of our core team values at the heart of our conversations. We’ve generally been able to do this with humor, and lots of zoom calls when things are going sideways. It’s harder to tell how people are doing via zoom, and if someone is upset. Our team has been very open with talking about the mental health resources Bench has.
The addition of a DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) team in our company has also made me feel more welcomed at Bench as a whole.” — Jude Dixon, Senior Bench Tax Coordinator
“There was an initial drop in morale and engagement, I was really worried about support and making sure that people were doing okay on a personal level. A lot of my team are here on work permits or without family, and they may not have anyone to interact with all day.
Previously I could walk around our pod of desks and do quick check-ins with the team. I could even tell how a person was handling stress by just looking at them.
Currently, I have a few social team times during the week that can help the team bond and unwind, but when I notice someone is particularly down, I Slack them daily to check in. It makes a difference to people when you send a message just to see how they are, instead of asking about work.” — Shahrzad Fatemi, Accounting Team Lead
“Leading a team remotely has been an incredible learning experience. I was always a firm believer that running a short cycled, high energy, quickly changing sales team remote would inevitably be accompanied by a drop in team performance. Everyone rallied pretty quickly though to do whatever was needed to share energy with one another virtually and support one another.
Though the team was quick to adapt, we continue to all struggle with creating an optimal work/life balance and supporting our mental health. One particular challenge we are still learning to overcome is how best to support team members who live alone who crave that in-person support and connection.
When it comes to my priorities and goals in leading the team remotely, these tactics have not changed. I still aim to build strong relationships with every team member, be as responsive as possible to their needs, and put their needs as a human first before the needs of Bench.
That said, I’ve had to find different ways to achieve these goals in a work remote environment. One example of this is instead of going on in-person, one-on-one walks with team members, I instead give their cell a call so we can still be outside and enjoy some fresh air while we are apart.” — Ada Vaccaro, Senior Sales Manager
We move into 2021 with over 600 incredible Benchmates globally. This pandemic has shifted the way we look at work and Bench is moving towards being a distributed workforce. With this, remote social connection will always be something we’ll continue to invest in — even after the pandemic is over.
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