Mental Health and the Key to Successful Remote Teams
Last night I had my first virtual social gathering..! And I needed it.
Let me back up for a moment. Firstly, I hope that you and your family are well and that you have the support you need to stay well into the future. If you haven't heard about the idea of "flattening the curve", please look it up - it is important and it affects us all.
On Monday this week, I was fortunate enough to be encouraged by my employer (and in a position to) join the remote working movement, and so I began my professional isolation. Here is the biggest takeaway for me this week: Maintaining visual and vocal human interaction is key to your mental health. And not all of us are set up properly for this.
The first day wasn't so bad, quiet and relatively productive. The second day I was a bit more agitated than usual but not aware enough to realise what was going on. It was the end of the third day when it hit me. A colleague gave me a quick call at about 5pm to tell me about something funny that had happened on site that day, we laughed about the joke then he said "ok, got to go, cya"........ But I just wanted to talk!!
I hadn't had any social interaction with my colleagues for 3 days, and I felt it.
Professional and social isolation is a serious challenge that most of us are going to be facing VERY soon, and we need to talk about it. Both for our own mental health and for the productivity (and longevity) of our jobs.
I spoke to a friend of mine who is a Commercial Analyst in a large progressive corporation, and she said that her team of 10 (all working remotely) have a scheduled team video check-in every 2 hours...! If you told me about that two weeks ago, I would have laughed.. But now I get it. They do their normal stand-up in the morning via Zoom, then every 2 hours for the rest of the day they do another short check-in: a work and non-work related dash around the call in which everyone contributes. She said that for the first day or two it was a little disruptive, but now two weeks in, it is the best thing for her sanity and her focus.
In my company we collaborate well - we are Agile in our working style as well as in the tools we use. We are all on Slack, we collaborate well in Jira, we're active in Confluence, we've got teams across the country as well as in NZ so our meetings are mostly Zoom meetings anyway. So from that perspective, we're set up to smash this isolated working thing right?!... Yes.. AND it still took an extra effort from each of us to adapt to the human element. We are fortunate (and intentionally set up) to be in a good position to move quickly.
What concerns me is when I talk to people who work in environments that don't have access to the tools (hardware or software) to rapidly move to a remote working environment. We all will end up moving to a remote working environment, it is inevitable. But if you and your teams are yet to jump over all the hurdles of providing laptops, setting up remote access to secure servers, gaining access to or learning how to use collaboration tools like Slack, Teams, Mattermost, Jira etc effectively... then it won't be for a while yet until you figure out how to support your team members to stay healthy mentally (or productively). So let's get on top of the easy stuff so that we can get to the human stuff - for our people's sake and for the business output's sake as well.
So yeh, this virtual social gathering - it was awesome. It wasn't quite the same as getting together in person, but it was the closest thing to it and it's definitely something I'll be doing regularly. I encourage you all to reach out to someone and set up a zoom call to check-in, you never know how they are experiencing the change. And on the work side, let's get set up properly so that we can do the human part right there too.
Have a great weekend!
#mentalhealth #remoteworking #workingfromhome #agile #slack #zoom #mattermost