Overcoming remote-working barriers

“As the pandemic wanes, many teams are still not back in the office—some not every day and some not at all. Other teams were remote pre-pandemic and always will be. Whether your team is distributed temporarily or it’s your default, your team members need time to get to know one another personally.

When teams are in-person, they get to know one another through their daily interactions. You and I get in the elevator together and ask each other innocuous but friendly questions: Do anything this weekend? How old are your kids now? And so on. This type of water-cooler conversation doesn’t happen as naturally with distributed teams.

Here’s one way you can encourage some casual chitchat. Every so often, throw the daily scrum timebox out the window and start the day with a little facilitated small talk.

I’ve gone so far as to tell teams that their daily scrums are required to start with five minutes of mandatory small talk. No mention of the project is allowed. Team members share anecdotes about their hobbies, what their kids did the night before, the great movie they saw, and things like that.

After that mandatory five minutes chatting, we start the normal part of the daily scrum, which is timeboxed to a further fifteen minutes.

One of my favorite things to hear about during this part of a daily scrum is how team members in a different country will be celebrating a holiday.

When on the phone with members of a London-based team recently, I got to find out what the Queen’s Jubilee was all about. (Seventy years as Queen–can you believe it?) Until hearing more about some holidays from coworkers, I had no idea what the festivities were like or why they were important.

I’ve learned about all manner of holidays from working with distributed teams this way. More importantly, though, I learned little details about the lives of my remote teammates. And that helped us all work together better.

So while I fully support a fifteen-minute timebox to the daily scrum, for some teams, I will occasionally break that rule by starting with five minutes of mandatory small talk.

I suggest you try it. I bet you’ll learn a great deal more about your remote teammates and find yourselves more naturally able to be honest and comfortable with each other in all of your interactions–which will help all of you succeed.”