I’ve covered “virtual” socialising in Socialising in Remote Teams and Building Relationships in Remote Teams , but sometimes there’s no replacement for real-life get-togethers. Here are a few suggestions for how to enable those in distributed organisations…
Localised Meetups 🍻
Encourage folks who live in the same city (or country) to organise their own real-life meetups regularly. If you have crew channels in your slack (see Socialising in Remote Teams - Crew Channels), consider giving each crew a small budget to do this. And if one or two are a bit further away than the rest, cover their travel costs. You could ask each crew to nominate a volunteer “social coordinator” to lead on organising these local meetups.
Whenever a group of employees meet up in real life, make sure they take a bunch of photos and share with the wider organisation – it’ll encourage others to follow suit!
Follow The Sun - 🌕 Socialising with the Bright Side
Co-Working 🧑💻
If you have people in the same city, pay for a co-working space for them to meet up and work together occasionally – even a few days a month in a co-working space is a great way to keep in touch with others and build connections. These’s no need for everyone to be in the same team, or working on the same projects.
‘Workations’ 💼
Taking co-working a little further… encourage teams to get together somewhere, set up a temporary workspace and spend a few days working together. If one of your teams has four folks in Ireland and one in Romania, fly the latter to Ireland for a few days.
This can often be rolled up with important team workshops or project kickoffs, too.
Vacation Visits 🌴
If an employee from Japan is taking a vacation in Paris, encourage them to meet up with the employees in Paris while they’re there. Giving the Paris-based folks some time off to show the visitor (and their family) around their city is a fantastic way to encourage deeper, more meaningful relationship-building across timezones.
You could also offer small subsidies for non-work travel if folks choose to visit a city where they’ll meet up with other employees. Or maybe set up a “house swap” scheme, where employees can save a bit of money by holidaying in each others’ homes.
Whether you establish formal policies for these things or not, this kind of stuff is a great (and usually cheap) way of encouraging real-life socialising in a distributed organisation.
Retreats 🧘♂️
Getting the whole company together once or twice a year is a a fantastic way to build a sense of community. If you’re more than 20 people, I’d strongly recommend getting help from someone who knows how to organise retreats properly.
And if you’re paying for 100+ air-fares and hotel rooms, don't cram it all in to 1-2 days! Leave plenty plenty of time for people to socialise organically.
Funding Non-Work Social Activities
Everything above is focused on encouraging real-life socialising between people in your organisation. But IRL socialising doesn’t have to be with other employees. Many companies offer to subsidise social activities on an individual level… paid memberships to sports clubs, subsidised group classes etc.
This won’t help with relationships within your organisation, but it will help folks who are isolated or lonely because of remote work to connect with other people. Which is arguably more important.