How to sustain Inclusion and Belonging in remote and hybrid teams? - Intro

Thanks to the pandemic, over the past few years we had the opportunity to work for quite a long stretch of time in a full remote set-up, at any level of the company.

(🤔 It’s a bit weird to open a blog post thanking the pandemic, but, well… it has created the conditions for experimenting at global scale with new ways of work, and it has brought at the forefront topics such as mental health and wellbeing, flexibility, work-life balance/integration, so… yes, at least in this respect, “Thanks to the pandemic”!)

Even now, full remote work is still the reality for some of our teams, while the vast majority of us work in a hybrid capacity.

I’ve asked a bunch of colleagues to share what supported or actively damaged inclusion and belonging in the team in a remote set-up / in a hybrid set-up, and this is a summary of their learnings.

For info, the paragraphs formatted in this way are their quotes (which are a subset of the feedback I’ve collected).

What supported inclusion and belonging in the team in a remote set-up?

1. Intentionally plan some ‘non-work time’ together

Different teams tried out different activities to stay connected, but they all have one thing in common.
In a nutshell, they are all about intentionally planning some ‘non-work time’ together:

Virtual coffee.

Synchronous learning & knowledge sharing activities (such as Reading club, and cross-cultural sharing).

15 minutes coffee time after lunch, when it is ‘forbidden’ to talk about work, and anyone is encouraged to talk about him/herself or weather/news…

Join daily stand-up call earlier to talk about anything.

Community activities around a specific topic.

2. Be mindful about communication

Second most relevant strategy: being mindful about communication, and compensate for the lack of proximity, which makes easier to understand whether what you say has been received by the others.

Make the effort to consistently communicate in English.

Acknowledge a message is read in Slack through emoticons.

Ask for feedback from colleagues to improve communication between all.

We are an international company, so the advice to consistently communicate in English may sound obvious, but when in a distributed team the majority speaks a different language than English, say Italian or Polish, it isn’t!

3. Create your own virtual team space

Finally, some teams created a virtual space of work that reinforced their identity as a team.
Some had day-long video calls where people could chime in when they felt the need to, and others adopted the same background image for all team members to use in their video calls for the day (different picture every day, selected by one of the team members).

What actively damaged inclusion and belonging in the team in a remote set-up?

Sub-optimal communication

Everything revolves around sub-optimal communication, which takes different shapes:

Webcam off (the ones suffering the most about it were the newbies during their first weeks in a team where some people never turned their camera on…🤦‍♀️).

Leave people hanging without providing context as to why you may not be available, for example not responding on Slack, or being late for meetings or even not showing up without saying anything to the team.

Wrong devices making communication difficult.

Ignore raised hands in video calls.

Parallel conversations in Slack during meetings.

Country-based jokes that some people in the team cannot understand.

All of the above is also true in a hybrid set-up, and on top of that, people identified some winning strategies or problems peculiar to the hybrid set-up.

What supported inclusion and belonging in the team in a hybrid set-up?

Awareness

In a nutshell: awareness of the challenges of hybrid work, and adoption of appropriate tools.

Intentionally design for hybrid interaction.

Awareness of how difficult hybrid is.

Join calls from own laptop even in a meeting room.

Switch to digital collaboration tools.

What actively damaged inclusion and belonging in the team in a hybrid set-up?

Clumping at the office

Do you remember the day-long video call that some teams used to stay in touch throughout the day?
In one team the people living close to an office one day decided to go work from there. First thing they did was having coffee together, and the remote team members were left alone in the call, with no clue of why nobody else was showing up.

Nobody meant harm, of course, but clumping makes the ones who work from an office more likely to forget to include remote folks in the interactions. In the long run, the sum of all the small incidents that keep piling up may cause real damage to the sense of inclusion and belonging to a team.

People at the office didn’t connect to the team call, and also during the day I felt like I was missing out on stuff.

People at the office doing sub-meetings during the meeting, that cannot be heard by remote members / Multiple conversations in the meeting room - people from remote were not able to follow anything.

Lack of appropriate tooling for video conferencing on the office side.

One of the places where exclusion is more likely to happen are hybrid meetings - which is what I’ll be covering in the next blog post ✌️.