5 Tips to Keeping Your Distributed Team Connected

Remote work is not the future, it’s already here. In today’s connected world, you don’t need much more than a laptop and a decent internet connection to get to work. Remote work offers huge benefits, which is why so many companies are establishing teams and processes that allow employees to work from anywhere. This is especially true since the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which made remote work a “must”. Even companies who had never worked remotely in the past are embracing this way of working and learning along the way.

In addition to the many benefits of remote work, from more flexible hours to lack of commute, it also raises a few notable, though addressable, concerns. For example, it can be more difficult to build personal relationships or even maintain them when the whole team suddenly starts working remotely. Even with the best tools, communication can break down. Despite best efforts, keeping everyone in the loop will present quite a challenge.

What can you do?

Whether you’re working at a fully remote company or you’re simply coordinating an ad-hoc distributed team during challenging times, here are the steps you can take to overcome the challenges of remote work and make it easier for everyone.

1. Create a communication flow

One of the most important things you can do for a team is making sure that all information is accessible and easy to find. This benefits all teams but is especially important if your workforce is remote.

This will provide remote employees with all the important details in one place instead of forcing them to bounce from one colleague to another asking for help or sort through folders and spend valuable time trying to track down information.

While the ideal tools will be greatly affected by your unique circumstances, we at Symphony use Google Calendar to distribute important events we organize, from knowledge-sharing sessions to all-staff meetings with Cofounders. Over time, this became our most important tool to plan attendance and distribute updates on events to everyone.

We have a couple of Slack channels where we share announcements, community news and updates, as well as certain fun challenges that we do from time to time. Of course, we use email for occasional updates but we try to use email mainly for formal communication. For example, we announce newcomers via email, as well as certain work updates and important company news.

2. Create opportunities for building team spirit

When we all work in the same space we have the opportunity to meet each other throughout the day. We can catch teammates getting coffee or lunch, and that can be a great opportunity for creating personal connections. This doesn’t happen with distributed teams, so we have to get creative to bring these opportunities to life in the online world.

We organized some pretty fun and engaging activities for our community that helped us connect team members. One of the largest activities that we have done recently is organizing an online team building for our 250+ team members all over the world. We talked about the organization, certain challenges that we encountered and shared our know-how here — make sure to check it out if you’re looking for extra inspiration on how to keep your team connected.

Twice a week, we also organize online workout sessions (yoga, HIIT training, running, etc.) where 30+ people show up each time. We organize these activities after working hours, to make sure that during the day our team is focused on tasks and deliverables.

One of the recent activities that we started is an online cooking show where our chefs make a healthy meal in 30 minutes and the rest of us jump in to follow the preparation and ask questions.

Lastly, we pay special attention to knowledge-sharing between our team members. Every Thursday we organize internal sessions where one or more engineers hold a session dedicated to a certain topic or challenge they’ve recently encountered.

3. But don’t forget personal connection

Of course, it’s important to have activities that include more people, but it is also important to talk individually to our team members. Our Community and HR managers are making sure to do regular check-ins with all team members at least once a week and address their needs and concerns, as well as hear them out when it comes to community activities. Most of the activities that we organize are either a suggestion that came within the community or activity team members organized by themselves.

In the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, our HR team quickly created a support system that helped each team member cope with a drastic change in everyday lives. That proved to be extremely beneficial in maintaining a healthy atmosphere for our employees, both in their professional and personal lives.

4. Give acknowledgment when deserved

We all like to receive praise when we do something great. When working in an office, it’s easy to give kudos to people in person — you see a colleague making a coffee and you casually give a shoutout: “Congrats on a great job!”. Their day just got better, and you showed how much you care about your teammate’s success. When you’re working in a distributed team, you often get caught up in your tasks, and sometimes you just forget to acknowledge someone’s hard work and dedication.

Our culture gives great importance to feedback that in the end helps us excel in our tasks and deliverables. One of the main points of feedback for us is giving acknowledgment to our team members. In our bi-weekly community update (we roll them out in the form of an internal digital magazine called Flow) we have a section called “Bravo Board” where community members give praises to each other on work well done. Over time and spontaneously, teams within the company introduced different types of praises, from sending out cakes to home addresses for successful delivery to celebrating daily achievements on Slack channels. This proved to help team members value their work, but also their teammates’ in a much more transparent way than before.

5. Know your community

It’s not enough to know the names of people who are working in your company or their daily tasks — you need to really know them. For example, do you know how many people in your company are avid runners? Or how many languages do they speak? We pay special attention to these details and that helps us plan our communication and community activities ahead of time.

We have developed different methods that help us gather information about our community members. Whenever a new person joins our community, they receive a sheet with different fun facts where they put a simple X if some of them match their personality. We also developed a community profile for each team member we fill out with relevant information we gather during chats, meetings, or even Slack. For example, if we see a couple of people sharing an interest in certain TV shows or online games, we enter that information in the profile. Later on, we use these community profiles to plan our activities. This proved to be a rather efficient way to create events or initiatives that actually match the interests of our community members compared to only following the needs of the loudest members.

When done right, managing a distributed team will not only bring in new ideas and improve communication flow but allow companies to grow and embrace new trends. At Symphony, we always try to improve our internal processes and bring something fresh to our team members. We’d love to hear which tactics you tried! Let us know!