<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> This page is part of The Toolbox by Danny Smith.
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Socialising is important. It's how we build trust – and therefore how we build strong teams. And as humans, we're inherently social creatures. In an office, we tend to get our social fix through quick ad-hoc conversations next to a water-cooler. In a remote environment this, obviously, can't happen - so we need to intentionally create opportunities to socialise.
Staying connected as a remote workforce has its challenges – we're often separated by physical distance and timezones. But we firmly believe that connection is crucial for our success, and socialising plays an important part in that.
In great remote organisations…
<aside> ➡️ Exercise: Think about your previous office-based jobs... where did you make friends or form close social relationships? How did these relationships form? How do you think you could replicate that in a remote environment?
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Socialising within our own teams is important, but timezones can make it difficult to get enough real-time socials with our teammates. So it's important that we intentionally build relationships with people where we do have overlapping work hours – even if we don't work directly with them. It's easier to socialise with people in a similar time zone or physical location.
But we also need to build relationships with folks in other timezones - sometimes where there is very little overlap. So just like our work, our socialising has to happen both synchronously and asynchronously
Slack is a great tool for keeping in touch with everyone in your organisation on your own schedule. It’s usually a friendly place, so do get stuck in to non-work conversations. Although social conversations can happen in any channel, you might want to create channels specifically for socialising... you could call them interest channels: places where folks can connect about things they're passionate about.
If you’re spread about geographically, it’s a good idea to set up crew channels for people in similar locations to discuss local things.