With all of the memes out there moaning and groaning about how terrible meetings are as a remote employee, it feels like a pretty bold move to throw an hour-long team building session on the calendar with your remote team…
Build Culture and Connection With a Global Remote Team
Before being part of a fully-remote team, with some team members working from the other side of the world, it was great to go out to lunch, play a game of office ping-pong or have a potluck for holidays.
Now, everyone has Zoom fatigue and does not want to get on a meeting just to get to know each other better…. Or do they?
Here at Lincoln Labs, we’ve been learning with the rest of the world how to best establish culture in a global remote team and how to truly connect to our team members. This is a transparent series where we chronicle our remote team-building events, so you can learn from our lessons.
Our First Attempt Failed
We had been working together remotely for over a year and our strategy team realized we really needed to work on team building and company culture.
Our first attempt was setting up a virtual talent show, long story short – no one signed up.
*cricket, cricket, cricket*
Second Attempt… Success
As a company we have committed to doing an all-hands team building once a quarter. When the second team building event was approaching on the calendar, our leadership team was once again scrambling to come up with something.
We had a lot of ideas… then also a lot of reasons why those ideas weren’t good ideas… then it was time to go..
The managing partner of Truss, Julia, had been thinking a lot about what to do days leading up to the event. She thought to herself, “what is the goal of this?” Which led her to answering “well, just to get to know my team members”. So she decided to take charge, and to keep it very simple.
As a team, we went through a series of questions together where all of our answers were shared to the group, and we did just that! We learned things about each other!
Using Slido, as a team we went through the questions one by one and everyone was engaged and sent in answers.
Read More: The Best Productivity Apps for Remote Workers
As a global remote team, the first question was “What country are you joining us from?” A word cloud was produced to show the most common answers including Georgia and Uzbekistan of course!
Some of the questions made us laugh…
Some questions led to other questions like “Who was a Pancakemaker as their first job?!”
It was great to lift each other up and give shout-outs.
This team building event was simple. Didn’t cost anything but resulted in us learning some new things about each other.
The overall feedback was positive.
…Let’s see what we come up with for the next one!
