Leaders - How are you staying connected with your employees during this pandemic?
SE/SCs - What are things that your leaders are doing to assist you in these trying times?
I understand that some people have worked remotely for years and this may not be much of an adjustment but, for many of us, we only know life with in-person teams so any advice or tips are appreciated.
Our team is having a daily 15 minute stand up each morning at 9am to kick off the day. No work-related topics are allowed! This is simply a time to catch up on a personal level with colleagues. We have also started a 4:30-5:30 team meeting on a Friday to round off everything from the week, but beers are highly recommended. A substitute for our after-work drinks we often have. A major change to have come out of this current situation is that we are encouraging everyone to turn their webcams on for every interaction. This has been incredibly positive, especially as parts of our sales teams are already based in different countries. We would previously only keep in contact over the phone. I sincerely hope this practice of using webcams continues well after we are back in the office. Interested to hear other people's thoughts as well.
I organised a 9:15 Drop in coffee morning every day, where we can kick the day off and also cover some fun topics.
So far, we have Pick a music track from the year you were born (then +10, +20 etc)
Show & Tell a utensil or tool
Joke of the day
Today/Yesterday I learned
Good news.
Also, we have our team meeting on a Friday afternoon so good to get some interaction before the weekend.
A Tell Show Tell of a utensil I hope Mark!
We've been following a similar process to what both Mark and Thomas outlined. I have a daily stand-up with our sales team (although we talk about calls for the day, I love the thought of keeping it out of the conversation).
If you're looking for a great *free tool that helps with asynchronous check-ins, check out Range.
We also have a weekly "303", starting at 3:03 pm Thursdays, where we review more global topics and will review different topics: Good news and Gratitudes, In the Ditch, Asks for help, Announcements. In the Ditch award is a self nominated "screw-up" for the week and the Good news and Gratitude is nominated by another colleague.
We have started using Kahoot.com to set up quizzes and little games and competitions for fun. yesterday I ran a quiz on Children's TV, just 10 questions and you get points not just on getting the answer right but fastest to answer gets more points etc. It was fun. One of the team is creating a quiz on Friends, another on beer, there's even rumours of someone creating an 80's music quiz. But like others we try to run daily catch ups across the teams.
Ooo! We've used Kamoot before but I forgot about it, thanks for that - am organising a family Quiz night on Friday so will be perfect!