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How to Keep Teams Engaged Remotely

Two months into lockdown, we’re all pretty good at this work from home thing. As states and countries begin to ease restrictions, some of us are going back to the office. Others will remain in a remote setup for a while longer. 

While we’re in these mixed working situations, it’s important to keep teams connected and communicating. The last thing you want is for people to feel lonely, or siloed due to the lack of interpersonal connection. Or, for productivity to suffer in the monotony of days that all look the same. So here are four easy, low-cost tips that are sure to keep the work fam going strong! 

Keep it Creative 

One day, we were all chatting about how every day feels the same and how hard it is to differentiate time passing. Cue: an opportunity for one filmmaking trick that we’ve always wanted to try, inspired by Donald Glover’s TV show, Atlanta. What better way to scratch that itch than to do something fun for ourselves? It was really fun to be our own end client for a change. And, to work as a team to create this piece together.

Have a #teaminning

A couple of weeks ago, we all received an email asking for our home addresses. Cryptic! Most of us assumed it was for mundane HR info reasons, but instead it was for a secret plan of fun. 

Our management team ordered pizza delivery for everyone across all 3 offices, perfectly timed for a Friday afternoon happy hour. We all ate pizza together on Google Meet & went off into the weekend in great spirits. Easy, low cost, in line with current restrictions, and supporting local businesses. Win-win-win!

PizzasExec Producer, Lexi's pizza + an NYC view.

Nick Pizza Disaster

Co-founder Nick, DROPPING HIS PIZZA ON HIS KEYBOARD cause he wanted to show us how good it looked. 12/10 would do it again for the #memories [it was a really great pizza - Ed.]

 

Daily Team Check-ins

It’s pretty standard to have a stand-up or two or three with your team but we take it one step further and do two check-ins a day. A morning coffee stand-up, and an EOD goodbye.  

We kick off the day at 9 a.m. all saying hello to each other with a cup of coffee. Sometimes we are discussing work priorities but other times we’re just enjoying each other’s company. These meetings can last 2 minutes or 30 minutes, depending on how the team feels every day. 

And at 5 p.m. we all meet to sign off the day together, somewhat replicating the ‘bye, have a good evening!’ chats you’d have in the office in pre-COVID-19 times. 

It’s a great way of keeping everyone connected, but also an easy opportunity to discuss stuff that you may not have otherwise gotten a chance to. Almost as good as an impromptu chat in the office kitchen.  

 

Try Some Zoom Games

Every Wednesday at 5 p.m. our team attends a meeting called “Hump Day Zoomies.” Sounds strange, sure, but it’s jam-packed work-family fun: 30 minutes dedicated to some sort of game.

 Zoom games can be anything! Here are a few of the ones we’ve done: 

  • Guess the Zoom Background: everyone dials into Zoom with their background changed to an image of some unidentified location. Points to whoever guesses it! Great way to see how much you know about each other & see who’s traveled the world a bunch. 
  • Where’s Waldo: we each photoshopped a filmmaking object into a photo of our choice. Whoever spotted the object got a point! 
  • Pictionary, corporate filmmaking style: everyone drew an interview background of one of the videos we’ve worked on in the last year. 1 point if you guess the video it’s from! (We watch and rewatch every one of our films hundreds of times to the point where we quote lines from them like they’re movie references.) 

At the end of the month, we tally it all up and see who won the most points, and the winner will get some kind of mystery prize! 

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