Building a team culture among remote workers:

Live events, asynchronous events & activities that can build a sense of team among remote workers.


Coming together face-to-face, in the same room, does not automatically create team cohesion and a strong sense of team. Yet, many people think having online meetings automatically means it’s difficult for staff to have a strong sense of team.

When thinking about creating a sense of team online, try to get away from that aforementioned belief. People feel a part of a team if they feel heard and included, whether online or off. And they will attend meetings and pay attention to those meetings if they feel the meeting is relevant to their work - on or offline.

The most important element for any meeting, online or off, no matter what your activities: set and follow a clearly defined meeting agenda, and start and end on time. This shows you respect everyone’s time, and helps participants better value meetings.

Many people feel that online meetings lack the spontaneous or unplanned learning of onsite meeting spaces. With that in mind, here are suggestions for online meetings, both so that they achieve something and so that they build some informal learning opportunities and reveal valuable skills and knowledge of team members you may not be aware of:


Informal Activities

Once a week, every other week, once a month - whatever you think would be best, depending on your team - do any ONE of the following:


Work-related Activities


Be careful in that you don’t want any team building exercises that make someone feel LESS a part of the team. For instance, asking people to share wedding photos or prom photos – and there are team members that aren’t married, didn’t go to the prom, etc. Or if your team is international, remember that cultural norms can vary hugely among different team members, especially with regard to what is appropriate to talk about or take a photo of. Or perhaps a member is sight-impaired and is unable to take photos.

If you want to delve in-depth into working with volunteers online, there is this exhaustive, detailed resource, which I co-authored with Susan Ellis:


 The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

available for purchase as a paperback & an ebook

Published January 2014, there is no more detailed resource on using the Internet to support and engage online volunteers, from using the Internet to screen candidates to providing appropriate support to virtual teams and absolutely everything in between. This book represents more than 20 years of research and experience from many different sources and is written in a way as to timeless - no matter how technologies evolve and social media fads come and go, this book will, I hope, remain an essential tool for mission-based/caused-based programs.
 

Also see:
  • The dynamics of online culture & community
    Working with people online means building trust and communicating clearly and regularly. This resource, the only one by me in this list of resources, explores the many different ways people read, post and interact online. Spoiler alert: there's no one online personality and no one way of communicating effectively online.

  • Get to know your volunteers now on a new level (thanks to meeting online with them in their homes!)

  • Leading in a virtual world
    There is a plethora of information about leading a team online, but not much about online leadership-on engaging in activities that influence others online, that create a profile for a person as someone that provides credible, important, even vital information about a particular subject. What does it take to be a leader online? This web page explores that.

  • Why Every Staff Person Should Regularly Read At Least One Online Discussion Group
    Participating in online groups will contribute significantly to your professional development, helping you both on the job you have now and the jobs you will have in the future.

  • Handling Online Criticism
    Online criticism of a nonprofit organization, even by its own supporters, is inevitable. It may be about an organization's new logo or new mission statement, the lack of parking, or that the volunteer orientation being too long. It may be substantial questions regarding an organization's business practices and perceived lack of transparency. How a nonprofit organization handles online criticism speaks volumes about that organization, for weeks, months, and maybe even years to come. There's no way to avoid it, but there are ways to address criticism that can help an organization to be perceived as even more trustworthy and worth supporting.

  • Virtual Volunteering research and other articles
    A compilation of publicly-available research and evaluation reports regarding online volunteering, online activists, online civic engagement, online civil society, and online mentoring (not PR pieces but, rather, reviews and research that more than mention these subjects); AND a list of various research documents and articles relating to telecommuting, virtual teams and Internet culture.

 
Return to my list of resources relating to online culture & communities of volunteers

 
Return to my volunteer-related resources

 
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