Remote Bonding: How a Distributed Team Builds Culture |

Company
Sep 2016

We each wake up, go through our morning routines, sit in front of the computer, and hammer away at our to-do lists so we can feel productive and accomplished. Sometimes, we don’t even have a real conversation with another colleague or team member for an entire work day- especially those of us who are working remotely.

I know how it is- the team I work with is spread out all over the world. We live and work in different time zones. We each have our own tasks. We don’t “need” to talk to each other until it’s time to submit a piece of work to them so they can then perform the tasks for their portion of the project. We are all busy trying to ensure that all of our work is done correctly and beautifully for our clients. But we realized at Glide that a big part of being able to submit excellent work to our clients is ensuring that our team can work together as a cohesive, connected unit.

Practical considerations

While we are aware of the space and time zone issues, we decided not to let them hinder us. In fact, we let them serve us. Think about it- having a team of people working from different places means that we have a global team right here at Glide! We each come to the table with our own skills, talents, mindsets, ideas, and perspectives. Rather than letting those go to waste, we decided to form relationships with each other, learn about each other, encourage each other’s professional and personal projects and goals, and pull all of our assets together to make one powerful team!

The new watercooler

We began with using Slack, the online messaging system that encourages a team’s daily communication. Users can create “channels” and invite members to collaborate there- some are project based, which means a new channel is created for various design projects. Others are more fun, such as our “#watercooler” channel, where we post quotes, jokes, inspiration, passion project updates, random ideas, and yes, even photos of the adorable things our kids did over the weekend.

autumn painting

The fact of the matter is that business is becoming more and more global, with fewer restrictions and boundaries, so we must evolve with the changes. We have to find ways to not feel hindered by physical location, and learn to collaborate in other ways. Perhaps one of the challenges of this is that without spending actual time with a person, you don’t know them as well as, say, someone you share an office with. But with a little extra effort, maybe we can learn things that are of more value to the team than someone’s office routines and habits.

Healthy competition

Glide’s owner and founder Travis McAshan had a great idea to pull the team together for a fun weekend activity, and that was to conduct a paper airplane flying contest. I put the official rules together, though there weren’t many- what fun are rules?! We created an #airplanes channel on Slack to post our rules, updates, and photos, and allowed about 3 weeks to create and fly our planes. This extra time was allotted due to crazy winter weather patterns.

airplaneautumn

We offered 2 categories- Glide adults, and Glide kids. Participants could fold an airplane any way they wanted, but they could ONLY use paper- no extras like tape, glue, or motors (designers can get a little excited!). We each were allowed 3 throws and we posted our longest throw on our #airplanes channel on Slack. This was one of the most fun aspects, as all of our results trickled in, and we were able to see photos and videos of our kids participating.

Success!

We each got a glimpse of each other’s family life, and that was a really cool way to help us feel connected to each other. It provided a small space where we could create banter, jokes, even airplane-flying trash talk. It was a fun experiment in global team culture and how we don’t need a single office to have a little competitive fun- just some creativity and a Slack channel!

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