If you read my January blog you’ll know that I’ve identified 6 areas where leaders and managers are finding challenges as they adjust to managing their teams virtually. These are in the areas of managing and measuring work, team cohesiveness and a sense of belonging, connection, relationships and communication, engagement, motivation and wellbeing, meeting effectiveness and technology.
Last month I shared some tips to help you support team member’s motivation and wellbeing remotely. This month I’m focusing on tips to enable you to build team cohesiveness and your team member’s sense of belonging.
When I collated the information I had from 40 managers of their experience of managing virtual teams, their team cohesiveness and team member sense of belonging challenges included:
(1) Struggling to create a sense of team coherence
(2) Lack of personal contact sapping team morale
(3) People struggling with a sense of isolation / loneliness
How to build team cohesiveness and sense of belonging:
Start with Team Purpose
It helps team members to have a sense of shared meaning when working virtually, particularly if you can help them to see how this aligns to their own values and what is important to them.
To do this, work with your team members on being clear on the purpose of the team. An effective purpose statement will inspire team members, enabling them to feel a personal connection to the work of the team and providing motivation. A great source of a process to support you in creating a team purpose is Carlos Valdes Dapena’s book on Virtual Teams.
In summary, have your team consider how to answer the following questions individually and then discuss as a whole team:
(1) Why does this team exist beyond our obvious reporting or functional relationships?
(2) What’s the difference this team is intended to make to (the business, customers, society etc)?
(3) Who would care, if this team didn’t exist?
(4) What important and desirable things wouldn’t happen, without this team?
(5) What undesirable things would happen, without this team?
(6) How does being in this team give your work meaning?
An example of a purpose for a team running a care home could be
‘We support each other in ensuring we are the guardians of our resident’s health and happiness, now and in the future.’
Build team understanding and empathy
A team benefits from having opportunities to connect as people, not just as work colleagues. Working virtually may mean that some of the ad hoc opportunities to catch up informally are not possible. Regular team meetings which include the opportunity for team members to get to know each other as well as having a work focus can help.
When we feel that we have good relationships with our peers in a team, we are more likely to connect with them individually virtually to ask for help, to use each other as a sounding board, or just to check in, all of which help us to avoid feeling isolated. As such, time for understanding each other is not only good for team morale but also for performance.
A simple way to more intentionally help team members to get to know each other is to choose a question for each team meeting that everyone is happy to answer. It works best to offer a few and then vote to select those questions that all feel comfortable with. Start with the questions that are more casual and easy to answer before considering any that may require more vulnerability – and again, only have team members answer questions they are comfortable to answer. Aim to select questions which build positive energy.
I’ve shared some of my favourites below:
(1) What are some of the small things that make your day better?
(2) What are you absolutely determined to do?
(3) What was the best compliment you’ve ever received?
(4) Who inspires you to be better?
(5) What are you most looking forward to in your future and why?
(6) What is something that your friends would consider ‘so you’?
(7) What are you grateful for?
(8) What are you most proud of in your life so far?
Create an inclusive virtual meeting environment
No one likes to be ignored. It’s easy to feel isolated and lonely if we are – and that’s true not just when working virtually – it can happen even when we work in the same physical space as others.
For a true sense of belonging, there needs to be opportunity for everyone in a team to share opinions, and for those opinions to be heard. The best way to do this in meetings is to give everyone the best chance of being prepared to contribute.
If you know you are going to have some open discussion within a meeting and you hope that all team members will take part, give the reflectors in your team a chance to consider the topic beforehand – sharing a question that the discussion will aim to answer is a good start.
During the meeting, if some team members are quieter and less confident, break into pairs (use breakout rooms or have people mute their meeting technology and call each other by telephone) to discuss the question before bringing it back to the whole team. Finally, have a round where everyone gets equal time to answer the question in turn, without interruption and with attention, before breaking into more free flowing discussion. Remember to acknowledge team members’ contributions. For more help in creating inclusive meeting environments that ignite thinking, take a look at the work of Nancy Kline through her book Time to Think.
If you’ve been working virtually for a while you will likely have other tips that work for you. Do share them in the comments section for others to benefit from. I’ll share some tips for other virtual management challenges in a future blog.
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