Dear Anna,

Recent events have made us ­realise that the teams of the ­future need to be prepared to work virtually, without ever meeting colleagues and team members. Do you have any tips for helping a team bond, making new members feel welcomed, and working creatively in an online set-up when a job can’t be boiled down to a checklist of tasks?

Anon

Dear Anon,

Remote, or distributed, working has been growing in popularity, not only because technology has enabled it but because the way people want to work has changed. As you note in your question, recent global events have accelerated a shift towards ‘enforced’ remote working, but the great news is that this is ­nothing new. So we can choose to see this as perhaps a more intensive test-and-learn phase that can help us explore what does and doesn’t work.

In my day job, I work in a large global tech company that regularly interviews via phone screens and video conference, and some of my colleagues manage teams of people never based in the same office as them. Flexible working is the norm, and you can be in a meeting room waiting for someone to walk in the door to see you and instead they pop up on the screens, as they’re at ­another office or at home that day. This is mind-boggling if you come from a background or an ­organisation that values presenteeism more than productivity, but it is really liberating when you see it in action and are empowered to design working patterns that work for you.

In the broadest sense, the things that are important for us to feel valued and connected in our workplaces – and indeed as humans – become amplified in a remote-working situation. Signals like body language are harder to read, nuance in a conversation can be lost thanks to a dodgy wifi signal, and being able to get a sense of the temperature of your teams becomes much harder.

The things that are important for us to feel valued and connected in our workplaces – and indeed as humans – become amplified in a remote-working situation

As I’ve been plunged into this deeper home-working experiment myself, I’ve had the phrase from the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on loop inside my head: “Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

I realise now that it’s a useful mantra as a leader of remote teams, because you need to be constantly checking, plugging into the present, and trying not to miss the small cues and clues as to what’s needed to get the best from the team.

So I’ve been trying to centre myself very firmly in each day, each moment, to be present. It’s the subtle difference between asking someone, “How are you?” and “How are you today?” If you’re in the moment, you’re attuning yourself to the very real fact that a day at home juggling work and life can be glorious one minute and ghastly the next.

The four pillars I have been using to approach this are communication, care, connection and community. Communication is a fairly obvious one, but it’s important to consider the individual components of a group, as well as the nature of the group itself. Spend time with each member of your team to find out their preferences. Do they like email for action items but a chat programme ping for quick questions? How frequently do they want one-to-ones? Do they want to track progress week to week, or are they more ad hoc? Then take those preferences and set up dynamics with the group.

An exercise I did with my team was for each individual to create a ‘user manual’ for themselves to share with the group, so we all knew how they like to be communicated with and could understand their working styles. It gave us all a shared context. And context is key in communications when working remotely. Because it’s very hard to track who knows what, and who has seen which internal post and who hasn’t, so always make sure to give the bigger picture on something before you dive into dishing out actions.

When you’ve mapped out communication approaches, you can apply these to ensure you’re really focusing on care for the team. There are wildly different challenges to being a remote worker if you live alone than if you’re a parent of small children, for example. How can you as a leader support routines that work for your team members individually? Can you help them identify what areas, like workspace and routine, will help to support their wellbeing in a positive and productive way? Also remember that team check-ins shouldn’t just be about project progress. Remote working in the digital age can mean that teams feel like they have to be always on and that can lead to burnout, so build in time during one-to-ones for checking in on that.

There are wildly different challenges to being a remote worker if you live alone than if you’re a parent of small children. How can you as a leader support routines?

Developing a solid foundation of communication and care will help you build a deeper and more lasting sense of connection – from you to your team, and from team member to team member. You can reinforce this in how you set up meetings. Time them considerately (or fairly share out the unsociable hours if you have time zones that need to be accounted for), find a cadence that works, set clear goals and allow everyone to contribute to the agenda. Make clear asks of what you want from the team in meetings and rotate moderation to ensure everyone is heard. Video conferencing is best for building that sense of presence and connection, but it’s just as important to share notes, goal-tracking and next steps quickly and clearly so the meeting has purpose and helps to build momentum.

With those three pillars in place, you should start to feel like you have a real community coming together, even though it’s a dispersed one. It’s worth being aware of the dynamic differen­ces between team members that might actually get to see each other in one location and others that don’t, and so spending some time focused on fun as a team can really help. While we haven’t been on a Ferris-style adventure replete with parades and pretending to be the Sausage King of Chicago, in recent weeks I’ve set challenges for the start of our team meetings, including wearing hats (the teammate that showed up in full Deadpool facemask won that one!), telling the story of an important object from their home, as well as playing games and sharing pop culture recommends for the weekend’s watch lists. All this sharing builds intimacy, trust and a team that is so much more than a project management checklist.

Finally, remember that the structures these four pillars build should evolve iteratively, because communication goes two ways and you should be seeking a whole lot of feedback as a leader through this. But with this approach, you will be supporting your team members to do their best as individuals, as well as bringing together a collective that can share, support and challenge each other to do their best work.

Life does move pretty fast but, like Ferris, we can follow the rules, make some mistakes, and have a little fun along the way.

Anna

Anna Higgs is Head of Entertainment at Facebook. If you have a question for Anna, please send your problem via Twitter or Facebook, or if you would prefer to email, send it to [email protected]