After more than six months of at least partial remote work for roughly a third of U.S. workers, managers have largely implemented the basic best practices for overseeing their remote workforces.
Now, as many companies are continuing to work remotely — and some are shifting to permanent WFH policies — many leaders realize that they need to develop new practices and habits to support their remote employees over the long term. Creating opportunities for employees to connect with one another is at the top of the list for many managers I speak with as part of my research and executive training.
Studies have shown that jobs requiring high levels of collaboration are more challenging in a remote environment, because it’s harder for employees to informally share information and ask questions. Remote workers often report more feelings of social and professional isolation than when they’re in an office. While social activities such as virtual lunches, happy hours, and online team-building games can help, they don’t really replace our informal, day-to-day work interactions.
To learn more about how managers can recreate those informal office interactions, I turned to an executive with substantial experience in remote leadership. Mark Strassman has led remote workforces for nearly 20 years. Currently a California-based senior vice president and general manager at the communications technology firm LogMeIn, Strassman leads a 2,000-person global business unit that was about 25% remote before the pandemic. LogMeIn has indicated its intent to move a majority of its workforce to at least part-time remote work, even after Covid-19 restrictions end.
The key, Strassman says, is to give employees opportunities to spend unstructured work time together. Such moments can reduce social isolation and increase spontaneous collaboration and creativity — while not adding more meetings to already-full calendars. The added energy and focus among virtual coworkers that Strassman describes is most likely related to the mechanism of social contagion. It’s similar to the dynamic found among students who study together and friends who pair up as “workout buddies.”
Strassman told me about three of his favorite techniques for connecting and collaborating with colleagues virtually.
Virtual coworking. Strassman advocates using video calls for people to simply work in one another’s (virtual) presence. This requires no more than a videoconference link and an agreed-upon time. Strassman suggests as little as 30 minutes or an hour for those new to the practice, but he has colleagues who cowork virtually for half a day at a time. “Having people around lets me focus more,” he says. “Then, if I want to stop and ask a question, I can.”
He emphasizes that setting ground rules is important. For example, people on his team sometimes turn off their videos to step away or to eat, a practice the team has agreed to. Members don’t mute themselves when they’re coworking, so they can quickly ask questions or chat with one another just as they would in an office. If answering a question requires more than a few quick remarks or evolves into a full-fledged conversation, those involved move to a breakout room or use a separate videoconferencing link so as not to disturb others. “There is an onus on people to not go too deep [in conversation] and to hold others accountable if conversations are getting too distracting,” Strassman says. “It is up to everyone to make sure this ends up being useful presence.”
Strassman’s team typically spends more than 90% of the time working silently. Rather than serving as a distraction, he says, virtual coworking allows members to focus on their independent work while also benefitting from reduced social isolation and increased opportunity for spontaneous collaboration.
“Hotwalls” to connect to the office. The practice of connecting two offices with a dedicated video connection – often known as a “wormhole” – has existed for more than a decade. Network operations centers commonly use continuous video feeds to connect centers in a rich, real-time way.
A more recent version, which Strassman calls a “hotwall,” has been making inroads into companies that wish to connect remote and in-office employees.
Hotwalls are intended to encourage casual interactions. Typically, a company installs a large monitor (connected to a camera and a computer) on a wall in a central, highly trafficked location, and remote workers can drop by to “visit” their colleagues. A hotwall in a lunchroom or a break room can enable remote workers to connect with others during breaks, while a hotwall located among a set of desks or in an open workspace lends itself to informal connections throughout the workday.
A hotwall “gives people a way to peek into the office and see what’s going on and feel like they’re part of something, or that they’re not missing something,” Strassman says. It can enhance collaboration, as employees can have more impromptu conversations than would normally occur over scheduled calls.
Teams should agree in advance on norms regarding sound levels and side conversations at the screens, depending on where in the office the screens are located. Companies can experiment by turning the hotwall on for a fixed period of time each day (such as two hours during the middle of the day in a break room). Experienced users often connect the hotwall early in the morning and leave it running all day.
Open office hours. Strassman holds a weekly office hour to which his entire 2,000-person team is invited. “It’s an hour on the calendar every week,” he explains. “I [vary] the times so that people in all time zones can attend. People can submit questions in advance if there are things they want to discuss, but if people don’t have any topics, I just talk about what’s gone on during the week and things that I’m thinking about. I also ask question of the team, about how things are going, but there is specifically no agenda.”
I asked Strassman if the number of people attending office hours could be overwhelming in a team that big. He said that because the office hours are recurring and predictable, attendance is very manageable. “If it’s a busy week with lots going on, 20 or 30 people show up,” he says. “Other weeks, it will be just one or two.”
Office hours are another way Strassman’s team members connect in spontaneous and unstructured conversation. He says, “I constantly hear great feedback [about the office hours], about things that came up in those sort of watercooler moments, when you don’t have an actual watercooler or lunchroom to go to.” A side benefit, he adds, is that office hours can reduce the need for some scheduled meetings.
Virtual coworking, hotwalls, and office hours aren’t complicated to implement and can be accomplished with the videoconferencing technology that already exists in most firms. As companies move to second-generation remote-work capabilities, expect to see these kinds of unstructured virtual interactions become a more visible and important part of many firm’s workdays.
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