3 essential meetings for an emergency remote team

When a co-located team transitions to remote work, some of the biggest challenges are miscommunication, visibility on progress, and staying motivated. On top of these team challenges, a sudden transition can also impact our individual productivity as our well being and focus suffer.

We suggest three practices you can implement during the first week to keep your team sane and make the most of the situation. They are:

• Agreeing communication channels
• Daily coordination meeting
• Weekly wellbeing retrospective

Let’s review each of them

1 — Agreeing communication channels

The first thing to do is agree, as a team, which communication channels to use for which purposes. This avoids both your inbox becoming ramped with messages and the mixing up of urgent or highly important messages with trivia.

How to do it:

Gather your team in a video call (e.g. zoom, google hangouts, skype) or regular call if video is not available. Explain the purpose of the meeting as that of agreeing which channels to use for which type of messages. Then, invite your team to start offering suggestions.

Note, if your team is large (more than 8–10 people), it’s best to recruit a small number of volunteers to have this meeting with and then share with the team for feedback and implementation.

Here is an example of what the outcome can look like:

• Urgent decision/message: phone call
• Simple and not urgent messages/decisions: multi-channel platform that you will review at your own pace (e.g. slack)
• Complex decision: schedule during the daily coordination meeting (see meeting #2) and use an online video call (e.g zoom, hangouts, skype, etc) and a collaborative document (e.g. google docs) to discuss and decide.
• Not a decision, just a report: save it in a shared folder and send the link via the chat platform to read and comment asynchronously.

Ultimately, there are no perfect or standard answers. The idea is to find a set-up that is good enough, meaning something you can try during the week and, if necessary, change the week after.

Pro tip: discuss the frequency at which team members are expected to check the main messaging platform. Otherwise, everyone is likely to be reading messages as they come and will have too many interruptions to get any quality work done.

2 — Daily Coordination Meeting

This practice serves to sort-out daily tasks and dependencies efficiently. As walking over to your colleague and asking for a minute of their time is not possible online (and also interrupts whatever they were doing), the idea is to proactively address those needs in a fast-paced, efficient meeting.

Ideally, a daily coordination meeting should last no longer than 15–20 minutes, although getting there takes a bit of practice.

For reference, a similar format is called a daily stand-up in Scrum (an Agile methodology) as the meeting is meant to be done standing. This breaks the habit of doing longer, traditional meetings where we usually start with small talk or bring in other topics. However, our natural tendency online is to keep meetings more focused, so there is no need to physically stand, unless you want to.

How to do it:

Gather your team in a video call at the beginning of each day (or the closest timezone that is convenient for everyone).

The team leader then invites each person, in turns, to answer the following questions:

• What have you completed since the last meeting?
• What will you work on until the next meeting?
• What do you need from your colleagues to do this work?

The answers should be kept very short, avoiding lengthy explanations or entering into a discussion. The idea is to identify any discussions that a sub-set of the group should have later on and schedule another call with those concerned. Equally, lengthy status reports can be sent via email, voice note, or a chat platform (e.g. slack) for people to review asynchronously and zoom in only on the areas that concern them.

3 — Weekly wellbeing retrospective

Working remotely is a skill, it requires new habits and takes time to get used to. And like any skill, having a support group for encouragement and knowledge-sharing can both accelerate the process and make it more enjoyable -or at least less of a drag.

This practice is designed to help you better manage the transition, increasing the wellbeing and productivity of your team, and had the added benefit of serving as a team-bonding exercise.

How to do it:

Create a collaborative document (e.g. a google slides document) with three sections and mark them with the following questions

• What did you find challenging this week?
• What did you learn this week that helped your well-being and/or productivity?
• what could improve your productivity and/or wellbeing the following week?

A basic document can look like this:

On Friday, towards the end of the work-week, gather your team on a video call and give everyone access to the document. Spend 10–15 minutes reflecting and writing answers, in silence, as a team. There is no need to distinguish who wrote what.

Then, open the space for comments and discussion. The focus should be on hearing each other, and co-creating solutions.

If your team is used to retrospectives, you can use a more process-driven approach. If the above seems like too much process, then just have a conversation, focus on hearing each other rather than finding “the best solution”, and take a bit of time to unwind, relax, and be as a team.

Every team’s process tolerance is different, so the above can be taken as an off-the-shelf model to test, ultimately, be mindful of your team’s unique culture and needs. And have a great week!

More content like this to follow, subscribe here Regenerative Teams