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I’ve covered “virtual” socialising in Socialising in Remote Teams and Building Relationships in Remote Teams , but sometimes there’s no replacement for real-life get-togethers. Here are a few suggestions for how to enable those in distributed organisations…
Encourage folks who live in the same city (or country) to organise their own real-life meetups regularly. If you have crew channels in your slack (see Crew Channels), consider giving each crew a small budget to do this. And if one or two are a bit further away than the rest, cover their travel costs. You could ask each crew to nominate a volunteer “social coordinator” to lead on organising these local meetups.
Whenever a group of employees meet up in real life, make sure they take a bunch of photos and share with the wider organisation – it’ll encourage others to follow suit!
🌕 Socialising with the Bright Side
If you have people in the same city, pay for a co-working space for them to meet up and work together occasionally – even a few days a month in a co-working space is a great way to keep in touch with others and build connections. These’s no need for everyone to be in the same team, or working on the same projects.
Taking co-working a little further… encourage teams to get together somewhere, set up a temporary workspace and spend a few days working together. If one of your teams has four folks in Ireland and one in Romania, fly the latter to Ireland for a few days.
This can often be rolled up with important team workshops or project kickoffs, too.
My friends Rhys, Chamas and Miriam on a ‘Workation’ in North Lebanon in 2022.