| >I also know that working remotely can hurt communication and collaboration if extra effort is not given. You've hit upon the key point that many remote workers neglect. It doesn't hurt, and oftentimes greatly helps, to consciously make the extra effort to relentlessly, while appropriately, seek out moments for personal bonding time between team members. Remote staff may need to take this to gentle professional extremes to glean tidbits of personal information on their teammates (i.e. small talk). Examples: - Few minutes early to conference calls? Don't always let the line remain silent. - Schedule formal 1-1 calls and purposely build in some "meandering" time into the agenda (especially for managers of any team who should be scheduling 1-1s with their directs anyway on some cadence). - Jump on rare lulls, pauses or other appropriate moments during phone calls or IM chat conversational flows. - Reach out and IM somebody during a known break period (admittedly, this has a low success rate for me due to differing timezones). Remote staff are starved for information about their teammates. Some remote staff don't care. Others are clueless, in which case they should be classified as-such and you may adapt your style of interaction. From my personal experience[NB] managing remote technical consulting teams, most people do in fact crave more personal connections across teams, but they need to make continuous, concerted (and sometimes disconcertingly) conscious effort. This type of cognitive overhead is fair to classify as "extraneous" and "bothersome" by certain people, and some extreme cases of successful remote teams (examples: interacting almost entirely via mailing lists, high ratio of long form vs. short emails) do not seem to maintain or require this overhead. However, for the rest of us working in 99% of other organizations, remote staff can generate the same type of buzz, high-energy and high-performing team outcomes that Dr. Pentland studied, iff the remote team members are collectively willing to build personal relationships with each other. [NB] Anecdata trigger warning |
It's curious to me how when a lot of discussions on remote workers, especially those negative to the idea, I rarely see mention of chat rooms, when I've used them at every single place I've worked remotely. Most of my career success is due to connections I've made on IRC. I don't think this is that rare of a scenario, see the #w00w00 folks.
In the era of "catfishing" where people can fall in love with people based solely on chat and online relationships, I think it's hard to deny it's possible to form meaningful connections online. Emails, conference calls, and video conferences aren't going to do it. If you spend 8+ hours a day "talking" to some one in a chat room, you can learn more than 15 minutes at a water cooler now and then. As well, the whole team/group can read the backlog and know what's going on with everyone else. No need to repeat the same story to x, y, and z.
I agree with what you've said about having some informal conversation during lulls on calls. Those moments can be very valuable. Another thing I've done on some teams is after a major release or milestone achieved, everyone grabs a drink of their choice and joins a group video chat and virtually goes out to the bar to celebrate as a group.
Lastly, one of the things I've done is occasionally send small gifts to other team members. As an example after explaining rubber duck debugging to a team member who solved their own problem immediately after asking me and wasn't familiar with the term, I sent them an awesome rubber duck overnight. (Total cost <$10 via prime)