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How to be in touch with a team in a pandemic situation?
If everyone is remote and we're managing within even more time zones and working hours?
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Dimitris Karavias
Is your concern about organizing work or keeping the human connection?
You can improve your async communication. Not everything needs to be a meeting or realtime conversation.
The founders of Basecamp and Sahil Lavingia have written useful content.
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@dkaravias My concern is both human connection and organisation of work. In general, there is a big connection between the human factor and the organisational work: it is very difficult to maintain the spirit of the team and motivate them to work, if you are all in different time zones. Even if a designer, for example, has a question and wants to know the opinion of his colleague, who lives in a 12 hour difference with him, this greatly burdens the process.
@irina_seng Is it possible to group them into teams that are closer so there is overlap? And would some of them consider (or even prefer) to work non-standard hours so they have more overlap with their team?
In my experience 2-3 hours of overlap per day are enough. If they need more it might be an indication of poor performance, people given too much responsibility, or inefficient communication. In your example, asking for someone's opinion is fine but in the meantime they shouldn't be blocked from doing other work. If they are, it's a sign of either micromanagement (not allowed to work without a senior's approval) or lack of ownership (every decision has to go through a committee).
@dkaravias Yes, it is possible to put them in small teams, you gave me a very interesting insight, thank you a lot!
Hi, in my team we have a list of tasks for one week, where we put ticks when we completed a task if someone has a question, it is published in other table of Q&A, also we have zoom calls each week on Fridays, but we make it fairly by time, we spend it in accordance with the queue, for example, one week we call at 10:00 PST, the next at 10:00 GTM, and so on. We have not yet found another way to stay in touch in a pandemic situation, so if anyone has better experience or advice, I’m ready to listen.
@irina_seng My team is not very big, so it is not a torture for us to experiment like this😅 We have 7 people only
I worked with remote teams for 3 years before 2020. What helped us to stay closer was a 15 minutes call every day. During the call we discussed things that were not related work, like share some photos from the weekend etc. After that, we had a 15 minutes stand up call where we switched to work matters. It took 30 minutes every day, but we felt much closer that most local teams.
Why? Because all locally based teams saw each other every day for 8 hours. We only had 30 minutes so we actually valued the opportunity to communicate much more than the others. And the bond was stronger because of that. After 2020 events this approach works even more
@slava_bobrov Amazing idea! I will definitely take it as an example for our team too! Thank you for sharing!
Once thing which I ensure to have a personal call with them towards the end of the week, which helped me understand the challenges they are facing not only on a professional level but if they are too much worked and if they need a small break.
@rashikaahuja Yes, I am doing the same but do you have someone in team which is in 12 h time zone for you? In this case how do you manage?
@irina_seng Yes, definitely yes. I have a day defined when I work in their time-zone and ensure I do not miss onto that conversation. It isn't possible to do it every day, but yes, once a week, it works.
Our team was formed in this remote work world. Async video recordings helped us get working time back while still feeling connected. Check out Threadit - a new tool we just launched from Google's Area 120 today! https://blog.google/technology/a...
We actually built Rock to help in this exact situation. Remote work can be tricky nowadays with a lot of different tools integrated in the communication and collaboration of your team. This can lead to a tool overload making you less productive in the long term as you have to continuously switch tools to find information or collaborate with people.
Many tools were not made for remote work, which can make it hard to stay productive and communicate enough with your team.
Communication should be asynchronous by default and synchronous when most needed, this helps with avoiding a lot of meetings or constant messaging/mailing without actually getting much done. Rock was purpose built for remote work by integrating messaging, tasks, notes, video-calls and files on a single platform (for free).
Here's the link if you want to check it out: https://rock.so/ :) any questions you can always reach out to me!
@dimvas @katerinabohlec Everyone knows what to do, but sometimes it is necessary to have a connection between your teammates. As I said, it is a human factor - when everyone has the same vision of a product and how it should work. I don't think that this is a huge problem but I wonder how other companies and teams deal with it to take it as an example for my team.
This was touched on in Rework by 37 David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried. Just try and have overlapping hours when everyone is on at the same time for 2 hours!
We organise virtual coffee. We have one per week with a random collegue.
Having a human connection with a team across different timezones can be tricky. I think there are some lessons we can learn from social media where meaning conversations can still happen even if they are async.
Creating shared experiences is one way to help build bonds within the team. It can be as simple as "bagel day" where each person shares a photo of them enjoying a bagel. Team members can have the feeling of a shared experience without having to be in the same space or same timezone.
We schedule a morning call for 15 minutes daily - It is similar to daily office standups. It helps us get in sync and discuss targets for the days. The entire team is motivated for the day.
You can chat using Google tool and you can increase the amount of online communication.
There are so many awesome ways beyond dreaded daily Zoom meetings! We created, and have been using, a company channel in my firm. We initially kind of made it for ourselves to be honest, but it snowballed and so we made it public for our users too: https://www.fugo.ai/use-cases/co...
We have also been using 'Donut time' on Slack which is pretty fun: https://slack.com/apps/A11MJ51SR...
Another fav of mine for sure is https://timezone.io - super handy when you have a globally disbursed team! Hope that helps
