In Defense of Digital Teams
How to build cohesive online teams that get results and have fun
Maybe it’s just my corner of the world, but it feels like the powers that be are quietly pushing the office-using workforce out of our homes and back to sterile-feeling towers. I personally quite like hybrid work; a few days in the comfort of my own home with no commute, and a few days in a dedicated space with folks doing work similar to mine. As this arrangement becomes increasingly imperiled, I want to share an experience that to me proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that online teams can absolutely form strong ties, collaborate effectively, and produce high-quality work.
Like a lot of people, my first positive experience with fully-online community building happened in 2020. (Well, first work-related experience. Fandoms have known the power of online community building for decades, but that’s another story). It was March, and I was preparing to go back to my summer job of four years at a live-in summer program for teenagers as a Program Assistant. At this time, if you asked me what made this annual experience so meaningful, I would have said that the in-person nature of it was key to having an immersive experience and forming a tight-knit community that enabled people to be vulnerable, take risks, and grow in extraordinary ways. So, when we were given the challenge of transitioning the program to a fully online experience, we knew we had our work cut out for us.
I’ll admit I had my doubts at times as to whether we could create an online experience even a fraction as meaningful as the typical in-person program. But by the end of the month it was clear that we had created an experience that while different, was still meaningful and transformational, and a community that truly cared for each other and supported one another. My team and I decided from the get-go that we didn’t want to just create programming that would be fun; we wanted to keep community building for the participants and the staff team at the center of every decision we made. This attention to participant and teammate experience ultimately paid off.
To this day, even though the flagship in-person programs have returned, the organization still runs an online version of their programming, a more highly polished and fine-tuned version of what we MacGyvered together five years ago. They recognize that while different, the online program is more accessible, and allows more people to have an incredible, enriching experience.
Similarly, remote-friendly teams allow a larger pool of candidates to be considered for a position, can introduce more diversity to a team, and for many jobs that already rely on online tools for file sharing and communication, don’t substantially change how the work gets done. I’m not going to get too much farther into the weeds on why remote teams can be beneficial, since many people have already described that better than I could. What I would like to do is describe what worked for us, and give some ideas of how it can translate to a workplace team.
Note: While some of these principles could work for hybrid teams, the focus of these points are for remote-only teams. I do have plans to write a hybrid-specific article soon; if it’s been a few months and it’s not out yet, poke me and I can move it up in my writing queue. In the meantime, feel free to adapt these tips to try out on your hybrid team, and let me know how it goes!
The Principles
Work with the constraint, not against it. A common trap we noticed others falling into was that they would try to transpose the in-person program into the online format, beat for beat, activity by activity. I get it, it’s tempting to continue doing what worked in-person, especially at a time when resources are scarce. However, we found that we had much more success when we took a step back and asked ourselves, “what does [in-person element] accomplish? What purpose is it serving in relation to our broader goals? What other activity or tool can accomplish that same thing?” For example, making Rube Goldberg machines in small teams on the first night of the in-person program works well because it’s structured, high-energy, and gives nervous participants a shared goal to work towards in a smaller group. It takes away the awkwardness and exhaustion of having to introduce yourself to a group of 60 people and then make smalltalk. Of course, it’s highly physical, spatial, and requires precise timing that Zoom doesn’t easily allow. Our online alternative? Wikipedia Speedrun contest. (Before people coded apps and websites to facilitate their play, to boot). Get from a shared starting article to a shared ending article in as few clicks as possible, and the winning teams share their route with the group. Other things that online allows for that are more difficult in person: sharing links, presentations with live feedback, using the quirks of one’s physical space to tell a story, pet cameos, infinitely large digital whiteboards that also double as a digital capture of your meeting, easy file sharing, and generating meeting recordings, transcripts, and live captioning.
Be intentional. A big misconception is that team building will happen by itself if people are simply put together in a space and hang out there long enough. And yet, I think a lot of us have had an experience on a team that never quite gels. If you want your team to feel more connected, you need to help it along. In our online program, starting at day one we explicitly told the group that we were intentionally building a community, that their contributions and participation were important, that we were all so glad they were here, and that we looked forward to getting to know each other better. This set the tone to encourage folks to show up as themselves and participate actively in community building. Then, we made sure to give people lots of opportunities to do just that. Little things, like chit chatting to welcome people into each session (What did you think of yesterday’s guest speaker? Or, ooh did you get a haircut? It looks so good! Or, how’s your groups’ project going? Or, a perennial favourite, Can you show us your dog???) or mini games (do you prefer pancakes or waffles? Discuss and then vote in the poll to progress the bracket!), and bigger things like participant-run mini-sessions to gather over shared hobbies. We also did this asynchronously by encouraging participants to strike up conversations in the Slack #random channel outside of program hours, which was helpful for the more introverted folks in the group. Many of these examples can translate quite literally for a work setting. Starting off team meetings with a check in question, encouraging teammates to get involved in workplace volunteer initiatives (and adjusting their workload accordingly), wishing teammates happy birthday (with permission), or adjusting meetings to accommodate shared team experiences like attending a webinar.
Create space for things besides work. This one goes hand-in-hand with #2, but I think it deserves to be its own point. Probably one of the biggest complaints I hear about online teams is that being in different physical spaces means you interact less due to being physically separated, which means you don’t teambuild as easily. As described above, depending on the personalities of your team, shared in-between times (lining up at the coffee shop, waiting for the elevator, walking to the meeting room, etc.) can allow unstructured time for shared experiences and non work-related conversations, but it’s not a given. What matters isn’t necessarily the amount of forced time together so much as a mutual desire for connection, and then time for that connection to happen. In our online program, on top of the soft starts to some of our sessions described above, we also programmed in timeslots specifically for facilitating the building of connections. These started as choose-your-own adventure breakout room rec times. We created breakout rooms for activities like Gartic Phone, pictionary, book club, or group crafting, and allowed participants to move freely between them, occasionally checking in to see if they needed anything. Over time, the participants knew what activities they wanted and would request them. We also got requests for more unstructured rooms for participants to talk about mutual interests they discovered, study groups (these kids are, and I say this with the utmost love and respect, nerds), and were happy to oblige to facilitate the bonding. We also create several social Slack channels for things like pet pictures, book recommendations, or general chatter not related to projects, key communication, or other logistics. All three of these can translate fairly easily to the office; start team meetings with a fun check-in question; create social channels or group chats to give people dedicated space separate from the substance of their work to bond with their colleagues and get to know each other better; have a weekly social coffee break call where folks can drop in and chat about anything besides work. Besides, things like this just make coming to work more fun.
What’s something your team does online that facilitates team building? Drop it in the comments!