Socialising in Remote Teams

This page is part of 🧰The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

Socialising is important. It's how we build trust – and therefore how we build strong teams. And as humans, we're inherently social creatures. In an office, we tend to get our social fix through quick ad-hoc conversations next to a water-cooler. In a remote environment this, obviously, can't happen - so we need to intentionally create opportunities to socialise.

Staying connected as a remote workforce has its challenges – we're often separated by physical distance and timezones. But we firmly believe that connection is crucial for our success, and socialising plays an important part in that.

In great remote organisations…

• Socialising is work – it has business value.
• Socialising takes work – we have to create space and time for it, and act with intention.

Vertical & horizontal

Socialising within our own teams is important, but timezones can make it difficult to get enough real-time socials with our teammates. So it's important that we intentionally build relationships with people where we do have overlapping work hours – even if we don't work directly with them. It's easier to socialise with people in a similar time zone or physical location.

But we also need to build relationships with folks in other timezones - sometimes where there is very little overlap. So just like our work, our socialising has to happen both synchronously and asynchronously

Socialising with Slack

Slack is a great tool for keeping in touch with everyone in your organisation on your own schedule. It’s usually a friendly place, so do get stuck in to non-work conversations. Although social conversations can happen in any channel, you might want to create channels specifically for socialising... you could call them interest channels: places where folks can connect about things they're passionate about.

If you’re spread about geographically, it’s a good idea to set up crew channels for people in similar locations to discuss local things.

General Tips

• Join fun Slack channels (and engage with them) - If you're into dogs, look for a #dogs channel and post some pictures of your four-legged friend. If someone else posts something you like, get involved in the conversation. This can feel weird at first, but it's a great way to get to know people's interests and identify folks who share yours.

• Be visible in Slack - Dedicate 15 minutes every day to leave comments and reactions on non-work stuff you find interesting. The more visible you are, the more likely it is that folks will reach out to you to say hello.
• Share personal stuff - If you bake a cake, post a picture of it in slack. Doing stuff like this helps other people to feel comfortable talking to you about non-work stuff.
• Take the time to message people - If you see someone post something interesting on Slack, reach out to them via DM to say hello. This takes effort, but it often leads to great conversations. This is especially useful if they don't work in the same part of the business as you.

Interest Channels

You might have channels like...

Crew Channels

We encourage people to connect with others in their area and we support people to open Slack channels specific to their country, city, town or area. Examples…

Synchronous Remote Socialising

Socialising on Slack can only go so far in developing social relationships – it's almost impossible to develop a genuine social bond with someone via text messages alone. So we need to take the time to socialise synchronously with our colleagues.

☕Social Calls

🕹️Games for Remote Teams