I’m going to give you the secret to making teams work well together.
It’s not physical proximity. It’s relationships.
Physical proximity creates impromptu opportunities to talk to each other outside of the structure of meetings and that builds relationships. It’s not just being able to pop your head over the cubicle and ask a question or bounce an idea off someone. It’s being able to say “I’m heading to the roadmap meeting. Wanna walk together?” It’s being able to say “I’m grabbing lunch from the Biryani truck. Wanna come along?” It’s sitting down at the same table in the break room and talking about the latest episode of “Stranger Things.”
During that unstructured time, they’re not necessarily talking about work. They’re getting to know each other better as people. They’re getting a fuller picture of their co-workers, how they communicate, and what resonates with them. They’re building interpersonal comfort and trust.
Managers say that they need employees to have the ability for people to pop their head over the cubicle. Employees counter they can do that in messaging tools like Slack. What both sides have difficulty describing is how the relationships forged during unstructured time create the pathways that make popping your head over the cubicle more effective.
When we all went remote during lockdown, my manager tried to keep a couple of team traditions alive, like whomever was the last to give their status at the standup had to end with an office-appropriate joke. He also kept the periodic team breakfasts going. He organized a team breakfast over video, letting us expense a breakfast order from a restaurant local to us. Part of the requirement of attending was to share with everyone what you ordered and we all just talked about food and our weekends. We’d have time to talk about work at the stand-up afterward. He made a point to create unstructured time for simply being together as people.
The trick to managing remote teams is not to call them back into the office. That’s reductive. The trick to managing remote teams is creating ways to have unstructured time where they don’t have to talk about work. It’s building team-building into the schedule, encouraging your team members to just hang. If there’s a virtual team happy hour, it’s an hour before quitting time. It’s encouraging, but not requiring, people to have virtual lunches together. It’s working with partner teams to build those same interpersonal opportunities between teams as within your own team.
Strong interpersonal relationships make it possible for remote teams to work together as effectively as they would in an office. Yes, we are all employees, but we are also all people. If all we do is get to know each other as titles and responsibilities, if all we talk about is work, it creates a box and thinking outside of that box is difficult. When we know each other as people, collaboration is more natural, ideas and exchanges flow, and remote work works.