Silence isn't golden, it's deadly

When your team is wholly distributed it can be tough to develop a team spirit, strong culture and shared approach. This talk will highlight the challenges we've seen and suggest tips and tricks that we have experimented with to improve this.

In a recent internal survey we identified that one of the challenges we experience working remotely is the sense that we don’t actually feel like we are part of a team. This has led us to consider how this impacts on the work that we deliver as well as the detrimental effects to individuals.

Over the last few months we have experimented with several different approaches to improve communicate, grow trust and build culture. In this talk I will provide examples of the experiments that we have tried, describe the results that these have had and set the scene for where we might look to experiment further in the future.

Transcript

1. “In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly.” Mark Sanborn
2. Who am I? @PaulaLKennedy
3. Which team am I in? Thanks to @deniseyu21 @PaulaLKennedy
4. What’s my problem? @PaulaLKennedy
5. Why might that be? @PaulaLKennedy
6. How are we trying to improve? @PaulaLKennedy
7. Communication: Weekly standup @PaulaLKennedy
8. Communication: Monthly retro @PaulaLKennedy
9. Communication: Quarterly ”virtual” off-site @PaulaLKennedy
10. Trust: Psychological Safety @PaulaLKennedy
11. Trust: Active Listening @PaulaLKennedy
12. Team culture: Off-site @PaulaLKennedy
13. Team culture: Team Mascot @PaulaLKennedy
14. Team culture: Virtual “coffee break / happy hour” @PaulaLKennedy
15. Team culture: Shout Outs @PaulaLKennedy
16. Team culture: Celebrate achievements @PaulaLKennedy
17. Is it working? “... impressed by the strong sense of team, especially since we are all remote” Anonymous new team member @PaulaLKennedy
18. What’s next? Thanks to @deniseyu21 @PaulaLKennedy
19. Any ideas? @PaulaLKennedy
20. Thank You @PaulaLKennedy