5 Ways To Connect With Your Remote Team

A lot of thought and dedication has gone into finding out how to bring teams together and foster a sense of community among colleagues. A trustworthy team is a united team. That results in increased success, greater teamwork, and a greater sense of job enjoyment. It helps to find new ways to connect with our remote team.

It's great, but it's not all sunshine & rainbows for those of us who work remotely. In reality, 65% of remote workers say they've never participated in a team-building activity. Remote employees are almost always forgotten when it comes to feeling like a member of the workplace community. That's not nice!  Particularly when trying to get to know your remote colleagues is so simple. Here are 5 ways to build relations with your team's virtual peers.

 

1. Build a Virtual Space.

It's crucial to establish a virtual social space for your remote employees. This is also known as a remote water cooler. Without one of these, days will pass before anyone simply inquires about their peer's weekend. Making a designated area for off-topic discussions makes the process more organic and relaxed. To put it another way, nobody would attach a photo of their new pet fly to a team email thread. but it's possible they'll post it on Instagram!

Build a place for colleagues to chat about what's going on with their personal lives by using Slack or having a Messenger groupchat. You can encourage these conversations, or you can easily open the door for colleagues to meet up and take a break. Although too much rest can be detrimental to efficiency, taking a minute to communicate can boost morale, particularly for remote employees who spend the majority of their days stuck in their homes.

 

2. Ask Them Questions About Their Life.

Give a couple minutes at the start of discussions for the staff to catch up on non-work matters. Alternatively, if your team consists of introverts, start each video call with a short open-ended question to get the discussion going. Since you don't see one another in person, it's easy to overlook that your colleagues live lives offline as well. So, successes and life changes may go unheard without any personal banter. If you want to learn more about your colleagues, make an effort to talk about their personal lives. It's really not that hard.

 

3. Organize Events.

It can be as easy as talking about somebody's day to get acquainted with your colleagues, but connecting and developing a good rapport requires more time & effort. You would need to schedule an event, like a happy hour, if you'd like to transform your remote workplace to more than just a workplace.

Make friends with others who share your interests at work. And if you can manage to get together (virtually) every now and then, exchanging shared interests with your colleagues is a perfect way to feel like you're hanging out, even though you're all over the world.

 

4. We're Going On a Trip.

Plan a yearly trip with the in-office team that is totally irrelevant to office work. Choose a daytime experience that will be enjoyable for everyone. Try your best to avoid talking about work during the trip. As for the remote employees, give each of them a stipend of $100 each so they can enjoy their own day out.

Get matching hats, take a couple of photos, post everybody's great adventure by using a shared groupchat, and acknowledge all the great, exciting new stuff each of you did.

 

5. Meet Up In Person.

If you truly want to connect with your virtual squad, there's only 1 way to do it: go offline. Even if you're unable to organize an all-expenses-paid yearly gathering, that doesn't mean you can't arrange smaller get-togethers. At the end of the day, the best way to show you're not a bunch of faces on a screen is to come together and see each other face to face.

Relationships aren't the only benefit of interacting with the team. Connecting with the remote staff is an important matter if you want to have a strong team, and if you're the CEO, a consultant who needs to bring their team together, or just a remote employee yourself.

 

If you are interested in applying for a remote job, you can browse job openings here.