Team Building with Remote Workers

As a first time manager, I was absolutely blessed with an amazing team.

We all worked together seamlessly and really functioned as a unit.

And then a giant wrench in the plan - one of my team members needed to move back to her home state for a variety of personal reasons.

So I faced the option of losing her altogether and starting the training process all over again, or accepting the new normal and having her transition to fully remote.

Upper management had reservations.  I didn’t.

Finding great people who fit in with an existing team was not something that happened every day.  I needed to do everything I could to keep her.

A month or so later she packed up, moved cross country and the team dynamic drastically shifted.

So the biggest question for me was - how to make sure our out-of-office team member stayed engaged with the group when we never saw her?

For us, success was a combination of two things regularly: weekly video meetings and daily communication through Teams.

My entire department functioned as a team because we all did the same thing, we just did it for different markets.  So we were consistently chatting on Teams all throughout the day.

Does this contract verbiage look weird to you guys?

Are we all joining the meeting at 4? Who is taking notes?

I’m done with my part of the data entry, does anybody need help with their portion?

The constant contact and ability to run things by each other throughout the day kept us feeling connected and made it easy to shoot over a question if you were caught on something.

The weekly video calls were short - usually 30 minutes or less depending on what was going on that week.  But it gave us the chance to see each other’s faces (and no judgment - if you are on camera in your pajamas with your dog in the background, more than likely another one of us was doing the same).

The face to face conversations, sometimes not even about work but just catching up, were invaluable for feeling like we were staying connected even though we were states apart.

All of this is very dependent on what you do for a living and how your team functions.  But my advice is to experiment to see what works best for your team.  Don’t rely solely on email/chatting if you start to feel disconnected - it might be that you need to see each others’ faces every now and again to keep the connection.

What does your team implement for remote work connectivity?