I just went out for a team lunch with our local team - 5 of us had a very nice lunch and talked and joked about family, golf, airplanes, dating, and Hillary Clinton. During the lunch, I thought of the other 8 people that are part of my team. 3 data entry professionals in Mohali, India; 1 work-at-home mom in Pune, India; 1 part-time community moderator in Omsk, Russia; 1 freelance newsletter writer in Oakland, CA; 1 copywriter / editor based in Oregon but traveling in Brazil; and 1 search marketing consultant working at home in San Francisco, CA. If you’re reading this blog, you probably have been in a similar situation.
Why should they be excluded? Do they have the same needs as the rest of us co-located workers that get to enjoy each other’s company and go out for a lunch or a happy hour? Of course they do. So what do you do for team-building for distributed teams. Here’s a few ideas:
1 ) Introduce everyone - Make sure that your remote team is well-connected with each other and with everyone in the organization that they need to be. It’s easy for a local employee to raise their hand and ask others for help, but if you are the primary point of contact for your remote contractor, you need to make sure they have multiple people that they can turn to for help. And have some fun with the intros - ask each team member to send an intro email that includes hobbies or a funny story.
2 ) Run a full group chat 24×7 - Almost all instant messenger platforms have group chat capability. Start a group chat and let it run all day long even if you’re not around. Your team can easily communicate with the rest of the group and make the occasional jokes and comments. If people aren’t around during the time of the chat, they can read it once they get back to their computer. Make sure everyone has personal photos in their instant messenger client.
3 ) Send around joke emails - Why not? You do it with local employees and old college buddies. Spend a little time thinking about your remote staff and send some articles, jokes, comics, funny videos that you think they might find amusing. If you’re using something like oDesk Team for automated time-tracking, you’re not paying for any non-work related time. Encourage a small amount of fun time as part of the weekly work schedule.
4 ) Hold a weekly team meeting - Even if you have your staff is working on completely different things, it’s nice to hear everyone’s voice on the same call. Hold a team meeting at the same time every week and use webcams and headsets via a Skype or Yahoo group conference call.
5 ) Send around a weekly newsletter - Recognize team members for any strong contributions that week. Recognize someone if it’s their birthday. Keep everyone on the same page by including an update from your end.
6 ) Have a photo share - Ask everyone to upload some photos of a weekend activity to Flickr or other photo-sharing site. Spend 20 minutes during a team meeting to let everyone describe a weekend activity.
7 ) Create a Facebook group - If you have enough people on your team, create a Facebook group and consider it your virtual water cooler.
8 ) Host an online game for your team - Play Scrabulous with your team. Play online chess, backgammon, etc. Challenge your team members to a game of Desktop Defender or share Line Rider creations.
9 ) Send around birthday cards - You all know virtual card sites. Any time a team member has a birthday, make sure everyone else on the team sends the brithday-girl or -boy a virtual card. It’s sure to brighten their day.
10 ) Hold a fantasy sports league - It brings together local offices, no reason it shouldn’t work in virtual offices. If you don’t want to do a full fantasy sports league, find something that’s a short-term contest and get everyone involved.