Remote work best practices, part 3: Congregate

Quick recap: Teams that want to get the most out of working remotely—not only with regard to productivity and innovation but also in terms of maintaining their sanity and well-being—must commit to some basic best practices. These include communications practices—default to async and keep communications in context—and collaboration practices—collaborate without interrupting and make transparency your default. These practices are born from an understanding and appreciation of the fundamental differences between working in an office and working from a home office. Even if you could successfully recreate the synchronous office environment on a fully distributed team, our argument is that you shouldn’t. If you do, you will destroy both the upsides of remote work and the health of your team.

But that doesn’t mean you should never get synchronous.

Congregating can and should be part of working remotely, provided you commit to some best practices there too:

• Congregate sometimes. Remember, your default way of communicating and working together is asynchronous.

• Make the time together count. Utilize agendas, make room for small talk, and invest in making the most of your meetings.

Whether it’s two or several or all of you, getting together in real time is for nuanced or sensitive discussion, for relationship building and team cohesion, and for celebrating wins. It shouldn’t be a remote team’s everyday way of getting things done.

A little congregation goes a long way

So what does “sometimes” mean? How often are we talking about? Our advice is to avoid getting legalistic about this; if your team is working asynchronously 70% to 90% of the time, then you’re congregating “sometimes.” Focusing on the communication and collaboration best practices we outlined in parts one and two will ensure that you’re hitting that range.

Here’s a breakdown of our org-wide get togethers, shared as an example only.

Weekly

Standups
We hold voice-only phone meetings as our remote version of standups three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The facilitator presents our project management software from their screen, and we work through our various projects, updating each other and raising flags as needed. We keep these meetings to thirty minutes or less for the most part.

Why we do it
As we’ve mentioned before, real-time communication shouldn’t be the way teams update each other by default. So why do we do standups? As a small (less than twenty-five members at press time) firm, we find that we’re the right size to be able to build interdepartmental empathy with these ninety minutes total of real-time interaction each week. Without them, Marketing, for example, would remain forever unaware of the effort it takes to build the products they champion in the marketplace, while Software Development might similarly suffer from the Field-of-Dreams delusion, thinking that if they build it, customers will magically come.

Monthly

Culture Corner
We hold a culture-focused, voice-only phone meeting once per month or thereabouts. We use this time to discuss a topic, generally something designed to elicit nuanced perspectives and challenge our automatic impulses. For example, should we apologize for bugs in our code? Why or why not? And: How can we set support hours expectations clearly for both end-users and internal support staff while also creating space for team members to over-deliver?

Why we do it
Culture that evolves without purposeful shaping generally isn’t all that healthy. Eventually, unhealthy cultures cost in the form of lowered morale and productivity. Culture Corner is just one of many ways that we purposefully shape our culture, and we like to do it in real-time to allow for nuanced discussion of sometimes sensitive topics. We always come away with action items, though it may take two or three meetings on a particular topic to get there.

Occasionally

All Hands
Once every couple of years or so we like to get together in person somewhere in the continental United States for about a week. We’ll rent a VRBO somewhere picturesque and spend the week cooking and eating together, celebrating wins, showing off our passion projects, and brainstorming both new ideas and improvements to existing products and processes.

Why we do it
All Hands is mostly about team-building and enjoyment for us. We come home with action items galore, but that’s not the primary purpose of the trip. Our goals for these meetups are to:

• Build community and opportunities for future empathy, e.g. learn something new about each person we work with.

• Have fun, restore, and renew with a brief respite from the usual.

• Set/clarify our vision for future goals

By sharing this breakdown, we don’t intend to assert that this is how your team should congregate too, but to showcase that real-time get-togethers on remote, async-by-default teams must have clearly defined purposes. Don’t call a meeting just because you think it’s easier, in other words.

Intentional congregation bears more fruit

When you know what you want to get out of a given meeting, you’re well-positioned to plan it appropriately and approach it intentionally.

Utilize agendas

What will you do during your meeting? What topics of discussion will you cover? An agenda helps to ensure that you achieve the purpose of your meeting or, at the very least, that you don’t undermine it. They don’t need to be formal or fancy, just a quick list of bullets shared with the group ahead of time gives everyone a roadmap for the meeting. Or, in the case of standup-type meetings held regularly, the agenda could be in the form of a list of projects to be touched on.

Make room for small talk

Water-cooler chat is hard to come by on async-first remote teams. Which, while arguably a good thing, can make your limited congregation time feel rigidly formal and lifeless if you don’t deliberately make space for it. For example, our standups meetings start at 9am on the dot, but the facilitator starts the call at 8:55am, giving anyone who wants a little small talk five minutes to enjoy it before the meeting. This kind of intentionality rewards us with the best of both worlds; we get the warm liveliness that small talk provides without losing productive ground to it.

Invest in making the most out of congregation

If you’re going to hold an in-person All Hands event, you need an Event Coordinator. If you’re going to hold thrice-weekly standups, you need a Standups Coordinator. Or some such. Call them what you will, you need dedicated roles for planning these meetings and keeping them fit for purpose. We write Playbooks for these roles, ask team members to volunteer for a term, and support our volunteers as they work to make our real-time get-togethers useful and fruitful for everyone involved.

You need all the best practices for each one to work

As much as we love our asynchronous way of operating, we know that if that’s the only way we worked together, we’d feel more like a group of independent consultants than a cohesive team. But we also know that it doesn’t take much congregation to bring us together as a unit. By making up in intentionality what we lack in frequency, we hit a sweet spot that allows us to leverage the unique opportunities that working remotely gives us without suffering from the alienation and disconnection that might otherwise turn our work into a collection of lonely, brutal slogs. That’s the secret sauce for remote team congregations—equal parts infrequent and intentional.

But—and we cannot stress this enough—this secret sauce will not work for teams that don’t also practice communications and collaboration best practices. So if you haven’t read parts one and two of this three-part series, we urge you to now. Otherwise, remember: They’re called best ‘practices,’ not best ‘talents.’ Expect to stumble. Expect to grow. Don’t expect perfection.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Photo by Petr Macháček

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