My ingredients for positive engagement with remote teams

Living and working with COVID-19 is hard! No doubt, this pandemic makes life harder on working teams and our families as our governments and organisations attempt to balance the priorities of protecting public health while stimulating the economy.  

This article provides my experiences and reflections (to date) on how to maintain positive engagement while leading a geographically dispersed team. Currently, I’m leading a transformation project with team members, clients and stakeholders across Brisbane, Canberra and Sydney.

We (the team) are maintaining positive engagement with 3 key ingredients:

1. A clear purpose,
2. Honourable principles and
3. Collaborative practices. 

Purpose

Our purpose is clear and simple: In partnership with our client, we intend to support their transformation by an agreed date. 

Principles

The principles we’ve adopted are (in no particular order):

A. Be transparent about what we intend to achieve. We encourage an environment where it is safe to ask stupid questions to avoid assumptions and misunderstandings.

B. Scheduling too many 'check-ins' is as bad as not enough. We’ve spent excessive time and endured too much context switching due to various "check-ins" or "resilience meetings” which have hampered us from actually delivering value.

C. We use the right medium for communicating. For example, short messages with chat, work updates are written in our story cards, complex conversations are conducted by video and voice and we use email sparingly. 

D. We strive for clarity in our communications. When we write, we ask ourselves:

• Am I being clear about what I need?
• Am I targeting the right audience (we don't CC people “just in case”)?
• Am I clear about when and what I want in a response?

If you’re looking for more tips on this specific topic, check out this LinkedIn course: Digital Body Language.

E. We give people the benefit of doubt. Written communications are the hardest to interpret correctly unless your working relationship has been previously well established. Always assume positive intentions.

Practices

Principles are great, but it’s practices (or ceremonies) is where ‘the rubber hits the road’. We adopted a series of Agile based practices or ceremonies to maintain our engagement:

Monthly planning meetings: Based on SAFe, we meet monthly to confirm a) What are our objectives for this month, b) What are the big tasks (labelled as Epics) we need to deliver to achieve those objectives and c) what is our capacity to deliver?

Weekly planning meetings: On Mondays, we break down the big tasks (Epics) into smaller tasks (called Story Cards). This helps us focus on the week ahead after a relaxing weekend. At the end of the meeting, we conduct a 5-finger confidence check (every team member uses one hand to indicate their confidence level on delivering our work for the week; 1 = very low to 5 = very high and then clarify).

Regular stands ups: On Tuesday and Thursday we check-in on our progress and blockers. We encourage ‘stupid questions' to avoid assumptions and misunderstandings and we state what we intend to do (Credit to David Marquet). 

Retrospectives: At the end of the 2 week sprint, we reflect by answering three simple questions:

1. What still puzzles me?
2. What could have gone better?
3. What went really well?

From our discussion, we identify actions to improve our ways of working and also give ourselves the space to vent. 

Showcases: At the end of the month, we demonstrate our progress, tangible deliverables and discuss our outcomes with our client. Their feedback enables us to course correct and provides lessons learnt to influence next month’s objectives.

Virtual coffees: During the month, we have one on one time between individuals to discuss matters outside of team’s regular forums. 

In summary, maintaining positive engagement requires 3 key ingredients: A clear purpose, honourable principles and simple, collaborative practices. IMHO, these ingredients encourage engagement because they empower focus in times of uncertainty, provide a supportive, safe-to-fail work environment and they entrust individuals to influence the way they work.