What are some ideas for remote team building activities?

Sitting in yet another Zoom call to “socialize” and drink coffee probably isn’t on the top of your team’s wishlist. Remote team building doesn’t have to mean virtual, and some of the best ideas blend real life and internet life together

• GeoGuessr. Hands down, this is my favorite thing to do with remote teams. If you’re especially distributed, create a custom game with each person’s current town or hometowns as a location. Split up into teams and make the competition a little more interesting with a prize for the winners.

• Company recipe and grocery stipend. Anything with cooking during an in-person retreat has always been a highlight for my teams when we’ve done it (even for those folks who don’t ever set foot in a kitchen). Come up with a straightforward, accessible recipe and give each team member some cash to go buy ingredients. Create the space for everyone to get together and share their result, or post it to a Slack channel. Desserts are great here (especially no bake desserts), or a signature cocktail.

• LEGO sets. If people are going to sit in a Zoom call and drink a beverage of choice together, give them something to do! Later, people can have their LEGO sets in their office or in the background when they’re on a call. It’s a nice reminder that stays around longer than a cup of coffee.

• Online games. Jackbox allows for online multiplayer games where folks can use their smartphone or tablet to play. Drawful was a pandemic favorite. There are also plenty of online multiplayer browser games which are a great fit for remote teams.

What’s the point of a self review?

As a manager, your direct reports’ self assessments are the best way to check your own performance when it comes to setting expectations and delivering feedback. If you read through a self assessment and walk away surprised, you need to change something.

Let’s not pretend that self assessments aren’t a (big) pain to write. They can take a long time, and it might feel awkward to craft what’s essentially a brag sheet talking about how great you are. They can also often feel repetitive, like you’re just rehashing stuff you’ve talked about already. This is actually a great thing. There is a time and a place for a surprise, but a performance review isn’t one of them. If everything in the assessment and review feels repetitive, it means you’re communicating well, celebrating wins, or addressing issues as they come up.

I ask my direct reports to submit their self assessments to me at least a day or two before we have a formal performance conversation, and I hold myself to that same schedule when I have a conversation with my own boss. Seeing the self assessment beforehand is a great way to prep for the conversation. Are you aligned on performance? Or are there surprises in there that you need to address?

I also recommend keeping a brag sheet! I have one for myself and one for each of my reports. It’s easier to add each win to an ongoing notes document than to spend hours racking your brain about what happened in the last review cycle.

Have a Management Query? Let me know at questions@lauratacho.com or on Twitter.

How can I make standup work for my remote and distributed team?

Short answer: ditch the sync meeting. And you might consider ditching standup altogether.

Standup can be disruptive for your team even in the best case, where everyone is co-located in the same office. The more your team is dispersed, the more disruptive it gets, and the suck factor starts going through the roof.

Within the same time zone: a sync standup meeting interrupts people who have different naturally productive times. I’m a lark, and I can easily get twice as much done in half the time before 10am. A standup meeting at 9am is just killer for folks like me. Folks who prefer later mornings will grumble about needing to be “on” for a meeting that doesn’t give them much value.

If your team spans time zones or even continents, syncronous standup has little value. It’s not useful as an afternoon meeting for folks in later time zones, and then you have a mixed discussion of what people plan to do and what they did while they waited for their coworkers to come online. What’s worse is that blockers are surfaced to the team at potentially inconvenient times where it might take a whole business day cycle to get something addressed because of the way time zones line up.

What to do instead

• Rely on your tooling for status reports, not standup. If you can’t see at-a-glance info about the status of a project, use the time you would have spent in standup to improve the way your team plans projects, scopes out work, or makes that work more trackable in whatever tool you need.

• Surface blockers immediately. Standup is most useful for raising blockers, but can introduce unnecessary delays if your team doesn’t have open communication through the rest of the workday. Don’t wait until standup to let the team know you’re blocked.

• Do find time for the team to connect in other meaningful ways. Standup can be useful because it’s a way to introduce a little “human time” to your routine. Your team will benefit from contact time and interaction, so find a way to inject that into other meetings, or create space for social interaction sometime during the sprint.

• Consider async standup. If it’s just too painful to say goodbye to standup altogether, there are a couple decent async standup tools for Slack like GeekBot, or even Slack’s own tool.

• Don’t ditch syncs altogether. This isn’t about being dogmatic about ditching all meetings. When you have a good reason to meet to talk about the project, go for it.

Have a Management Query? Let me know at questions@lauratacho.com or on Twitter.