“I never see anyone” he said. I looked around at the other people in the open space, but most of them were from other teams. He continued: “I don’t know why I drive to work every day just to log in to the same laptop and attend meetings wearing a headset.” He had a point.
Most teams, especially ones leaning towards tech, tend to have a newfound freedom of working from home, either fulltime, a few days a week or one week per month. Each remote person in my team tends to have a different agreement on what the remote work means though, some need to come to the office a few days every few months and others will be seen in real life every week. People here are from different countries, are consultants from different companies, with different human resources, and when they do come to the office there are two locations they can choose from.
The dates they go to the office are chosen by the employees themselves and they are not always aware when the others will be there. The result is them driving or flying to the office to sit there nearly alone, wondering why they did the effort. Ouch.
I remember a team I worked with many years ago. Back then you had to go to the office, log on to the big, heavy desktop at your designated place, and if you were lucky you had a drawer you could stuff stock-full of cookies to get through the day. Many years later that team would still keep in touch, check on each others progress and be happy when someone had a win. It was a team from different countries as well, from different companies, also with different human resources. We didn’t see each other daily, rather every few weeks. So what made that work?
Amiable strangers
Another team that came from a different background, with different personalities, was the Apollo 11 astronaut crew. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had only a couple of months time to complete their training and accomplish something unprecedented. It was ‘almost frantic’ Collins would later say. ‘We were all business, we were all hard work’.
Before the take-off, NASA organised a shared meal between the men to foster some group-feeling, something they reportedly kept doing for the duration of the mission.
After the mission was ended however, each of the men went their own way. Michael Collins would later describe themselves as ‘amiable strangers’. There was no time to go for dinner or a drink during the training months. There was no time to get to know the other people, and the flight itself took only eight days and three hours beginning to end, which was too short to build a friendship.
Most working people would consider the majority of their colleagues ‘amiable strangers’ as well these days. There are usually at least two high priorities at any given point and some companies even want to go to the moon, revenue-wise of course. In a work-floor politeness fashion, you ask how they are, you get your work done, but there is no real connection.
Shared downtime
You will only get a team in the office if you first get them out of the office.
Looking back, one of the key factors that in my opinion made that great team mentioned earlier work very well is the amount of food and drinks we shared. Regularly. Everyone who visited would be invited to join during lunch, whether that was a restaurant, cantine or simple bread meal depending on the country’s culture. Fairly quickly people would get invited to the team’s after-work drinks, birthdays would be celebrated and people would make sure the other ones got home safely when things got late. This did seem to be easier for people without family obligations, but people with families would in their turn show up when they were out of the country, visiting the other office.
To make this all work across the board, the plan is to synchronise the days people come into the office. Even if not everyone’s days are aligned, some will overlap.
The second plan is to take the team out for a team dinner. If a big portion of your team is onsite, organise something fun. Not everyone will want to stand on stage and sing karaoke, but everyone generally likes food.
We can see if it makes sense to schedule team lunches once the onsite days are synchronised, for those who can join.
What do you think? Will this plan work or do you have other helpful ideas? Let me know in the comments.
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