2.5+ years as a remote team: some lessons from Mosaik Education
COVID-19 has meant significant changes for how we work between organisations, within teams, and as individuals — and this is likely to continue. Mosaik Education was established as a remote team, so here are a few lessons from our experience.
A few disclaimers to start. We’ve kept this brief and highlighted key messages in bold, as many people are pushed for time with kids+work etc. So please excuse the brevity.
Secondly, this is by no means authoritative, neither is Mosaik’s remote experience perfect, and nor should you expect yours to be. In fact, writing this blog has reminded us of many things we should be doing!
Finally, many of the principles highlighted wont be new, as they are common good practice. Instead, see this as a primer for retuning how you operate to maintain your team’s principles in a remote setup.
Background: How is the Mosaik team setup ?
Mosaik’s team is a mixture of full-time and part-time staff, consultants, volunteers and advisors. Typically, we are working across three or four time zones, although we have reached six on occasion! Team members can work at any time of day they choose so long as they a) deliver all their work and b) join the regular team meetings.
We have no main office. Whilst team members sometimes meet-up locally if they are in the same city, 95% of Mosaik’s teamwork is done remotely. Instead our ‘office’ is a collection of tools: Google Drive, Slack, Whereby, Zoom, Trello, Miro. We use email as little as possible.
Lesson 1: Identify and cultivate opportunities to build trust and positive relationships — perhaps more than you think you need to
It is important to acknowledge upfront that it is really difficult to recreate day-to-day in-person interaction. So, for us, this is about understanding what we gain from in-person interaction and identifying several small changes.
Allow time for social interaction , even if this feels slightly engineered. Apply this to one-to-ones, team meetings and external meetings. Sometimes it is useful to build purpose or ‘gamify’ this for longevity. At Mosaik, we have a bi-weekly photo competition at the start of our regular team meeting: everyone shares a picture from their past two weeks and the team votes on the best pic. We recently switched this to a weekly ‘lockdown recommendation’ (films, books, music, podcasts etc) for the time being.
Managers, try not to cut social interaction off! Even if it’s eating into your ‘valuable’ time. It will pay back in the long term. ‘But how much time!?’ you ask. It depends, but for Mosaik this usually looks like 10–15 mins at the start of each team meeting.
The brain is can be very powerful in ‘holistic’ memory recall: reconnecting events to emotions, sounds, smells, objects present at the time. Try to integrate documents, stories, activities from recent in-person meetings as part of future team discussions or activities that you are doing online to help the team recall settings where they were interacting in-person.
Take the opportunity to (re)establish your team’s values for a remote setup. Hyper Island has a good activity for this. This allows you to forecast challenges of remote work that lie ahead. It can also gives team members a feeling of ownership and sense of identity despite working apart from each other.
Lesson 2: Time spent iterating with the setup and norms of the team’s remote communication is a worthwhile investment
Finding the right setup for your team is crucial, as how the team communicates online will shape all interaction. It will also affect the success of responses to Lesson 1 above. So encourage an open dialogue about tools and practices — and keep returning to this to fine tune.
One fundamental principle of remote communication is that video calls help with engagement, interaction, and efficiency. At Mosaik we try to schedule at least one of our team meetings per week as a video call. There are loads of blogs on video call etiquette, so we wont repeat everything here. But here are three thoughts on video calls we think are worth bearing in mind:
- Don’t be shy about asking team members to use video if they join with audio only — would you feel comfortable attending an in-person meeting where one person has decided to speak from behind a screen in the corner? Probably not.
- But be equally understanding when it is not possible due to factors out of control. Mosaik has team members in Lebanon, where there are daily power cuts that make consistent WiFi more challenging.
- Cultivate a norm of being vocal about technical glitches and be active in finding solutions. It sounds obvious, but the quality of call audio is crucial to meaningful communication, yet is often glossed over or ignored. Prioritising this also signals that everyone’s contribution is valued, which is particularly important when working remotely. Would you continue with an in-person meeting if one participant could only hear half the conversation because they are stuck outside looking through the window? No, that would be very awkward.
From experience, we have found that one type of video call software works better with certain countries or on certain days. In the past, we have established a protocol of video call plans A, B, and C to cycle through should one not be working. e.g. Zoom > if not working, try Whereby > if not working try WhatsApp audio call etc. This means we don’t lose time deliberating over different applications
Another tool that has proved useful has been the ‘Mosaik handbook’ — a short document with links to the relevant tools and their purpose , folders, timings of meetings. This has been particularly useful for remote inductions (this idea was stolen from Jamie Pett, Founder of LIDN).
Lesson 3: Be deliberate in cultivating open spaces for spontaneous interaction and collaboration.
The spontaneity of working in the same office is another difficult element to recreate. Remote teams need to create space, time, activities, and (sometimes) roles that facilitate spontaneous interaction and collaboration.
At Mosaik we try to make Slack the space for discussion, reactions and informal interaction. We have tried to establish a norm of using public channels on Slack as default apart from when it is a) inappropriate (e.g. personnel issues) or b) involves minor logistics (e.g. what time shall we have this zoom call?). This allows for others to chip in or react to information being passed between team members. However, we are not always successful or consistent in this.
Other ideas we have tried include one success/highlight of the week on the Slack #general channel to encourage connections and interaction between everyone’s areas of work. This works but is hard to keep up. We also attempted to create Mosaik ‘office hours’, when individuals would be reachable on WhatsApp/Skype for quick call. This didn’t work for us, as schedules kept on changing with the many part-time roles and time zones. But it might work for you.
Think about who can act as an integrator of team communication in lieu of sharing the same physical space. Sometimes this is the manager, or it can be one or several team members roles to connect and relay information between digital spaces.
Regardless of which ideas you come up with, managers will need to take time to establish and maintain the norms through their own actions and encouragement of others
One risk to highlight here: all members of the team need to be wary of interactions that are minimal or too informal. Emails or messages that are one word answers can leave the recipient with the feeling their work/input is not valued if a relationship has not been built up that allows for quick informal communications.
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We hope this has sparked an idea or two for your own teams. Feel free to comment below with other ideas you come up with.
In the meantime, take care!
The Mosaik Team
