How to Maintain Team Spirit While Working Remotely

Managing a team while working remotely can be challenging. When you’re managing a team, you have to ask yourself: ‘What makes a good team?’ Common answers to this question include support, communication, fun, and team goals. However, these can get lost when you are not together in person. Hence, it’s important to maintain team spirit while working remotely.

Small business owners should be continuously learning unique ways of engaging and connecting remote workers. This incorporates creating and maintaining strong connections within the team, regardless of where they are. You shouldn’t worry if you have just started your business and operating a remote team. 

Team spirit is one of the fundamental elements of creating a successful business and keeping workers adjusted to its objectives. Companies invest in team formation due to several advantages. With the COVID-19 pandemic and consecutive increase in remote working, companies should maintain team spirit even if workers are not working face to face.

You can include these tips in your small business plan and use them to develop and maintain team spirit while working remotely.

 

1. Make a Virtual Break / Office Room

Simple chats on the office floor are among the most significant elements that separate in-house teams from remote teams. These occur naturally in the workspace, and you possibly don’t think about them at all. However, it’s difficult to replicate ‘watercooler’ conversations in a virtual setting. 

First, you need to establish a virtual workspace. This is where your team signs in every day and typically works over video. This implies that casual chats can flow while your team is working and workers can feel encouraged by seeing one another doing hard work.

In case you don’t find this the right option for your team, you can try a virtual break room as well. This would be where your employees can sign in and join over their tea break or lunch break, helping them catch up as they would in the workplace.

To make these efforts successful, you should encourage utilizing these, so the virtual workspace feels like a community and becomes a part of the regular remote working day.

2. Hold Virtual Business Events

Small businesses feel more like a team when everybody comes together for company-wide meetings and events. Hence, ensure not to miss these out from your remote working schedule. You should run virtual business events similar to in-person ones. For instance, you can make a plan, finalize a host and speakers, and present an opportunity for asking questions.

The single difference is everybody joins in the events over video. This helps a lot in bringing the entire team together and maintain team spirit while working remotely. It also makes the employees feel excited and proud of the business they involve in.

3. Create a Reward and Recognition Platform

One of the best ways to maintain team spirit while working remotely is by supporting all of your team members. You need to nurture this when the team is working remotely as you are not physically present for thanking each and everyone in person. Recognizing the efforts of your employees is an important step in achieving small business resilience.

Creating a reward and recognition platform will be a fantastic way of ensuring that recognition becomes a normal part of daily life. This platform enables everybody to get engaged in the celebration of achievements – as appreciation from your associate can be as significant as praise from your boss. When workers celebrate and praise one another’s effort and hard work, it brings them together, regardless of where they are based.

4. Begin ‘Show and Learn’ Sessions

Each team member has an exclusive talent or skill that other team members would benefit from knowing more about. Make time for workers to take turns teaching their team members something unique, informally. This helps share knowledge and skills around the team and enables the team to take an interest in each other’s skills and praise their knowledge.

One of the biggest challenges faced by remote teams is connecting with their colleagues. Most remote workers haven’t met each other except for video meetings. By introducing such engagement activities, you are helping your team to get to know each other better.

 This activity helps remote team members get to know the talents, enabling better cooperation and more substantial outcomes from upcoming projects.

5. Utilize Donut for Slack

It can often be simple to lose touch with your teammates when you’re working in a remote setting. An easy way to maintain team spirit while working remotely is to encourage communication. Employees are so busy with their deadlines and work commitments that they do not take time to get to know each other. This is where an app like Donut can come into play.

Donut is an amazing app for Slack. It pairs you up with a random team member every one to four weeks. Then, you can meet for a virtual coffee and get to know one another slightly better.

Donut is an amazing way of getting to know people you do not work with regularly, and it helps create connections among the entire team. In case you don’t have Slack, another choice is for business managers to put team names into a hat and pull out pairs for having a virtual meet-up or coffee that week.

6. Begin a ‘Good News’ Conversation

Working remotely can make you feel alone and monotonous.  20% of remote workers said they struggle with loneliness. A big reason for this is that, more often than not, conversations don’t go beyond work. By introducing a ‘good news’ conversation channel, you provide your team members an outlet for sharing things that have made them happy.

For instance, a colleague can share a song that they really liked, or someone can share a happy instance that they encountered. Whatever it is, sharing good news can be an excellent conversation starter and helps the team feel closer as they celebrate one another’s small successes. Working remotely can be lonely and isolating, so assistance from a powerful team can help maintain team spirit while working remotely. 

 

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