Issue 25: Fostering Connection for Remote Teams
In a world of hybrid and fully remote environments, how can a Chief of Staff build cohesion over Zoom?
Welcome back, aspiring and current Chiefs of Staff!
This week’s issue is sponsored by Authentic Travel Adventures and Corporate Offsites. Their area of expertise is bringing teams together to connect, develop relationships, have fun together, and create team cohesion, which ultimately leads to higher performance across your KPIs within your organization.
Authentic Travel Adventures and Corporate Offsites transforms a team from a bunch of individuals to a team operating as one streamlined unit over a corporate offsite experience.
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Authentic Travel Adventures and Corporate Offsites can help you design and facilitate one offsite, and if you don't improve your team's engagement metric, you don't pay!
*Interested in sponsoring a future issue of Ask a Chief of Staff, hit reply!
This week’s issue is guest authored by Kendall Wallace. Kendall specializes in improving employee satisfaction and engagement with the ultimate offsite that blends communication and conflict resolution, strategic planning, & fun in a retreat-like experience. She creates connection through bucket list adventure experiences while advancing the team’s momentum toward KPIs. For the past decade, she has worked with over 1,000 people across 75 groups (including Meta and General Assembly) in improving communication, uncovering blind spots, minimizing recovery time between breakdowns, defining work-life balance and making decisions more in alignment with what moves them in order to become highly effective communicators & happier people.
How Can You Keep Your Remote Team Engaged and Cohesive?
When thinking about how to keep your remote team engaged and cohesive, it’s almost easier to think about how to keep the remote team disengaged and not aligned.
STEP 1️⃣ : Make them feel unheard, unseen, and not valued.
STEP 2️⃣ : Make sure that most certainly if anyone has any differing opinions, those opinions in particular are not seen or heard.
STEP 3️⃣ : Never get them together.
STEP 4️⃣ : Definitely don’t talk about your personal lives.
Sound funny? Probably because it is. The truth of the matter is that so much of keeping a remote team engaged and cohesive depends on the relationship-building.
In this issue of the newsletter, we’ll go over key principles (and tactics from my work in creating connection within and among teams), because I want you to have actionable steps that you can take. The more effective remote teams are, the better the companies will perform, and the happier and more satisfied people will be in a significant area of their lives: the workplace.
⚖️ Principles for Running Online Meetings
Given how many meetings now happen on Zoom or Google Hangouts, it’s important to note that online meetings don’t run the same as in person meetings. The same sense of camaraderie isn’t as easily established when you don’t have the serendipity of running into folks at the quintessential water cooler.
Having an established set of guidelines for how people are expected to participate in online meetings gets everyone on the same page and sets the tone of the meeting. Much like there are rules for in person meetings for folks to close their laptops and put away phones, online meetings need the same kind of structure and guidance since participants are not in person to hold each other accountable.
1️⃣ Make the effort to have people get to know each other personally
When we’re not in the office, we miss out on spontaneous moments to get to know one another. As one community member said in a workshop last week, “Magic doesn’t just happen.” It needs a spark from someone taking initiative - and as a Chief of Staff, you’re the perfect person to initiate it.
For small team meetings, you can bring in a weekly question everyone gets to answer from “We’re Not Really Strangers” or “Where Should We Begin?” two games with cards that enable people to connect. It’s an easy way to build psychological safety in the room and get everyone to share something personal before diving into the business stuff.
Clara’s Note: When we run online workshops on Zoom, I like asking people an easy question to “warm up the chat.” Something like, “Tell us where you’re calling in from and from a scale of 1-5, how familiar are you with today’s topic?” These types of easy to answer questions helps loosen people up so that they feel comfortable sharing their thoughts in a low pressure way. Getting past that initial “ice break” then makes it much easier for people to speak up and participate as the session goes on.
More icebreaker questions here.
2️⃣ Consider a “camera-on” policy for online meetings.
Nothing beats having people see one another and need to show up and be visibly accountable to one another. You also add another element of communication to the mix: body language and physiology.
In addition to being able to read body language with a camera-on policy, having cameras on will encourage teammates to be in well lit and work appropriate settings so as to minimize distraction during those times. If folks know that they are supposed to have their cameras on during meetings, it will discourage them from taking meetings in the car (unsafe driving!) or in noisy common spaces (too much distraction).
3️⃣ Establish shared communication practices amongst the team
In online meetings, people may feel shy to come off mute and those who may have been quieter in in person meetings might not speak up at all. Think of ways to engage all voices if the meeting is meant to be a discussion or brainstorming - example in the next section. If the meeting is more of a presentation from certain teammates, establish a question asking procedure. Do people use the “raise hand” function or simply come off of mute?
I’ve also seen it work quite well to have people pop a “1” into the chat when they first join the meeting if they have a question. Then questions are answered on a first-come first-served basis. This incentivizes people to be on time and be engaged, otherwise their questions don’t get answered. It also eliminates people talking over each other or knowing who went first if several hands are raised.
🧩 Culture Creation
Creating a culture that rewards transparency, discussion, and being heard and valued, (even the unpopular opinions) increases engagement. One of the single biggest challenges that remote work faces is having people feel seen and heard.
As a Chief of Staff, ask yourself: “How can we use this opportunity to make people feel seen and heard?”
Recently, I overheard a group of women on a leadership team say that they observed that in female-run meetings, the leads would solicit input from all present team members, even those being quiet. In a male-led meeting, leads would ask the question and then if no one responded, assume there are no further questions and move on. Assuming that there are no further questions and moving on too quickly can lead to people being disengaged. Instead, giving people the opportunity to express where they are on a decision is important. Thus, here are two suggestions:
1️⃣ Break up into small groups so that people feel more comfortable vocalizing any dissenting opinions.
2️⃣ To help create alignment, go around the room and have each person hold up the number of fingers on one hand signifying how much they support the proposed decision. 👌🏼 3-5 means they can live with the decision or strongly agree. 2 or below means they cannot support the decision.
BUT, here’s the homework: anyone who has a 2 or below has to come to the next meeting with what they need to be a 3, and live with the decision.
🔁 Creating a Culture of Feedback
Creating a culture of feedback enhances teamwork, communication, and collaboration by encouraging open dialogue and constructive criticism. It can also lead to personal and professional growth for individuals within the organization, including Chief of Staff themselves, as feedback facilitates skill development and learning from diverse perspectives. Additionally, a feedback culture fosters adaptability and innovation, allowing the organization to evolve effectively in response to challenges and opportunities.
⛳️ Hold low-stakes activities to practice giving feedback
On my offsites, in order to up-level a playful exercise (such as Capture the Flag or a scavenger hunt course), we ground it in giving feedback to each other in a very low-stakes way. It is a game after all. That way, people are in the habit of giving feedback to one another when the stakes are much higher.
⚡️ Develop a culture around when there is weird or “off” energy, having the individuals take initiative to name it and clear the air.
Another idea for low stakes entry is introducing something like an “Energy Check-In” ritual during team meetings. At the beginning of each meeting, take a moment for everyone to share how they're feeling or sensing the team's energy. Share as if you’re giving a personal weather reports - “I'm feeling upbeat and sunny” or “I'm sensing a bit of tension in the air.” This practice normalizes acknowledging and discussing subtle shifts in group dynamics, making it easier for team members to raise more significant concerns when they arise. It's like a emotional weather forecast, helping navigate the work climate more effectively.
🪟 Creating a culture of transparency:
The most challenging happens when there is flip flopping or people aren’t leveraged in decision-making and are just told after the fact. Or they are not warned a big decision is coming. It’s hard for those individuals left out of the decision-making process on teams to not take it personally. Being unheard and unseen in important decisions can not only be painful but completely disengaging. Understanding that, when decisions are made that change the trajectory of the organization, creating opportunities for all to be seen and heard is so important.
At Meta, we had weekly Q&As with Mark, where anyone at any level could ask a question. Having the opportunity to anyone at any level speak to the leadership begins to create transparency. You can replicate this with town halls or even use something like Anonymous Bot in Slack.
You can also utilize surveys and 1:1s to understand what’s not working, and get feedback constantly on initiatives so you can see what’s working and what’s not.
👩👩👦👦 Cultivate a Sense of Belonging
💸 Invest in your people
Personal development or growth opportunities are a great way to continue to engage staff and deliver the message, “We care about you. We care about you enough to invest in you.” Similar to what was said in a previous issue about layoffs, choosing to invest in training and development programs for employees helps them acquire new skills but also demonstrates the organization's commitment to their growth, making them feel valued and invested in. It could also be interesting to look into executive coaching or leadership training programs for new managers. Don’t forget about ERGs and other employee led programs as avenues for investment as well.
🤝🏼 Create Shared Purpose
People definitely get aligned around goals, but even more than that, it’s about having relationships and the shared purpose.
Simon Sinek talks a lot about introducing oneself based on “What I believe” then “Why I believe it” and then lastly “What you do.” Creating greater transparency about what individuals on the team believe not only helps people get to know each other on a deeper level but also begins to create alignment on what matters to people. Creating more opportunities for people to share about themselves is relationship-building 101. Although it’s easy to just jump straight to the business, creating opportunities for this during 1:1s and team offsites is key.
The TL:DR; is quite simple: as a Chief of Staff, you have a responsibility to engage people and make them feel part of the group, create more opportunities for them to speak freely, be heard, and be seen by their teammates. Everything after that —the design etc—can differ based on the team challenges, but everything is really designed around making people feel heard and seen, which is a crux of an emotional need.
Hope you found the latest issue of this newsletter helpful. We’re looking to you for future newsletter topics! If you have any questions around being a Chief of Staff, tactical takeaways that you can apply, or other curiosities about the Chief of Staff role, submit a question below and we’ll answer it in a future newsletter issue:
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Additional Chief of Staff Related Reads:
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
How to answer about your goals in interviews
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👋🏼 Until the next issue,
Clara
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