Remote off-sites: Having fun with colleagues is overrated
Remote team activities, remote off-sites, remote after-hours - the market for online social activities has exploded since the beginning of COVID. They all promise to accomplish team building through games and challenges, bringing the traditional team day into the cloud.
There’s only one problem. Having fun is not enough to build a successful team or a strong company culture. Strictly speaking, it’s not even necessary.
The magic of meaningful connection
Fun can be an accelerator for social connection. Laughing together has a lot of benefits, however, to create those social connections in the first place, you need something different. You need conversations and interactions that dig deeper than just solving work problems, or getting out of an escape room.
Analyzing why remote employees choose to stay or leave a company, McKinsey summarise their findings as follows: “Yes, they want pay, benefits, and perks, but more than that they want to feel valued by their organizations and managers. They want meaningful—though not necessarily in-person—interactions, not just transactions.”
Meaningful interactions are those conversations and activities that you remember. They signal that you can rely on each other (at least in a work environment), that you recognize each other as part of a bigger picture. They should happen more often than your usual remote off-sites, and they don't need to be scripted.
So, how can you create those meaningful - though not necessarily in-person - interactions? How do you embed social connection and meaningful interactions into your organization without adding even more zoom calls to an agenda filled with meetings?
Serendipity and conversation design
In person, meaningful interactions often happen out of boredom or by accident. You may learn something about a colleague as you wait in front of the meeting room, by the coffee machine, or while putting on your coats. You may spot someone’s favourite mug or admire a new-to-you-gadget, ending up in deep conversations you didn’t expect.
In an office, the space itself tends to facilitate (or hamper) these interactions in unexpected ways. A microwave in the kitchen might encourage people to eat together. A drafty hallway means people don’t congregate before a meeting starts. The amount of desk space available influences the amount of personalization (and thus, conversation starters).
Without a physical space, you need to be more intentional about creating situations and moments that encourage these interactions. Your challenge is to create a structure that allows people to interact and share moments at their own pace. Here are some examples:
Plan for 5-10 min of conversation before starting your online meetings with smaller groups. If you are using zoom, avoid muted silence by sharing your playlist via audio only.
Use the asynchronous hot seat activity to learn more about each other over time.
Use Donut to match people based on interest, team, or location. It works Slack channel based, so if you have non-work related channels (think #architecture, #dog-lovers, #tallinn), you can match people that have at least one thing in common.
Add a “random” question to your daily or weekly check-ins. This works better asynchronously since people can respond in threads, independent of the moment.
How can you create unexpected (and expected) interaction between the people in your team or your company?