Remote software teams - get the team to gel
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Covid has had many, many bad effects on us. But from all that bad one thing at least positive has come out - the validation of the concept that remote work is not only viable, it is actually better sometimes. Remote work, work from home, WFH are words that are resonating around the strategy discussions in pretty much every company around the world. There is no question about it: remote work and remote teams are here to stay in our workplace.
And in this busy space of remote work conversation there is no sound as strong as the remote software development team theme. That is because, software development is by it’s very nature remote and distributed team ready. It has always been. Long before COVID remote software development team, spread out across the globe in different timezones was a things. Our technology, tools and work process all support this model of remote work inherently. So when COVID forced us to remote work only mode, our industry was the first to embrace it and embrace it without many hiccups. At Kaz Software, we are approaching our second year going completely WFH. We wrote about our experience about software development for one year in WFH on our first anniversary and will soon be writing a post about our experience on the second anniversary! But if you think about it, we have always been working on software projects remotely: Kaz works solely on software projects from our customers around the world. So for the past 18 years that we’ve been around, we’ve been the remote software team for companies around the world - actually 16 countries around the world and counting! So with this new push towards going completely remote and building out distributed software teams that work smoothly and in synch we are pretty much the experts! So from that brag rights, we asked our software developers and project manager about their ideas about making a remote software team work properly. This is the first part of those top suggestions.
Get the team to gel
Sounds like one of those sports advice, doesn’t it? :) But team gelling - is the one single factor that differentiates great software teams from the others. We are very passionate about this and have written extensively in the past - most of those was about the team actually in spot where they are face to face. Making the gel happen virtually over online calls is really hard but it’s not impossible. Here are some ideas we use.
Non-work virtual meetups
Think a zoom call but with no work agenda but just talking about life. In Bangla we call it “adda” - there is nothing better than spending some time together joking about things and sharing a laugh to create a bonding within a team. It gives the remote members time to “humanize” their workmates from thousands of miles away. It’s vitally important that no work agenda is pushed into such meetups, so the event should only be about socializing. To keep the conversation rolling you’ll need an “ice breaker” in your team, but more about that role on the next suggestion.
A designated “chief Ice breaker officer”
A Chief Ice Breaker Officer (CIBO) is someone who has been given specific job responsibility (on top or their usual ones) for making the team members feel comfortable with each other. Software professionals tend to be more reserved than others, there is some truth in the stereotype of the nerdy engineer. So it’s usually hard for a group of them to start having fun conversations and feeling relaxed over virtual meetups (even in real life meetups it can be difficult!). So there needs to be the CIBO who takes the actions needed to break the ice and keep the relationships relaxed and open. The CIBO needs to be someone who is a great communicator. Someone with good sense of humor and a sense of fun. And enabling the CIBO to make things happen is also important, so supporting her with arranging events, with budget for such events and other activities is important.
Team based online games
Online team games are a very good way of getting remote teams to play together and bond. These games can be specially designed workplace games that are specifically made and manage for team bonding (here’s one: virtual murder mystery) or they can be the more common online team based games like racing, shooting games (example: EA’s Apex), etc. These online games have the essential ingredient in a team gelling event that usual events don’t have: element of risk. It’s been proven time and time again that when a group goes through a certain level of risk taking stress they become better bonded. Online games could be your easy way of getting this introduced into the remote team.
“Share your story” sessions
We always connect to stories. When you know something your team member’s life experience and when it’s shared by him with all the emotion he felt about that experience it forms a connection that is purely human. And that’s what you need to gel a team - human connections. Ask team members to talk about themselves or write about themselves in a way that is shareable - maybe a short “about me” video or photo album with some comments, it really doesn’t matter how the story is shared, as long as it’s genuine it will help bring the human side of a team member that others meet only for short periods of time over a virtual call.
I remember once we were doing this project with a German company and one of the developers was sometimes late to come to the virtual standup call that they had every morning. The developer would always just say “traffic jam” to explain his delay. It just would not resonate with the others in the call who were all small towns in Germany. So there was a distinct stiffness in the team’s interaction. But one day he made a short video of his trip from home to work and it was showing huge traffic snarl ups we sometimes get in Dhaka and how he navigated that with his cycle! And suddenly all the ice was broken - one of the German developers then made a video about his mountain biking trip and others came up with their own interesting stories. A team discovered themselves as real humans and a team gelled!
Pizzas and a movie together events
This is another technique that works great across different cultures. Both pizzas (or burgers, subs, etc.) and Hollywood movies are favorites of everyone. By arranging an event where the teams at different parts of the world have the same food and watch the same movie together with some kind of virtual meeting setup that let’s them converse makes for a great way of finding shared feelings and laughs. Selection of the food and the movie should also be left to the teams to decide - which can be done days beforehand and the process itself brings in a lot of fun and collaboration. Food and entertainment are basic human needs and it’s easy to find common elements there and this creates new bonds within team members outside of their work commitment. Just perfect for a gelled team.
Plan a face to face meet asap
All of the above are just replacements for a face to face interaction. So plan for visit, a trip or an event where separate members of the remote software team can meetup and spend some time together ideally in a non-work setting. Obviously COVID is a big blocker, but sans COVID this should be top goal - at least an annual meetup of the team members.
Remote software development teams is the new way forward for the software industry. This is a great solution for finding talents and skills around the world. As more and more companies take this route we have to adapt our work culture and process to find the right way of building team spirit and morale in these geographically spread out teams. Hope today’s post gave you some ideas about how to do it. In the next posts on this series we’ll cover other elements of getting thing right for remote software teams.
