KaizenTip 109: Relating Remotely

If you lead or manage a remote team, you'll know how much more of a challenge it can be to build the relationships and trust that tend to come more easily when teams work face to face. How are you supposed to do it when people rarely, if ever see one another? Where are the examples of it working well, and how could this be replicated in your context?

Many of our readers will know we are big fans of the Solutions Focus as a philosophy, and one of the core components of this approach is to find out what works, and do more of it. So here are a couple of success stories:

One that stands out a mile is the success of The Geek Squad. Founded by Robert Stephens back in 1994, the company employs computer experts across the USA (and now the UK) to go to people's homes and fix their computers. As his company grew, so did the number of employees, and soon he had a large remote team of 'agents' spread across the US. As the size of the team developed, Robert started thinking about how he could develop a sense of community for his geeks, help them get to know one another, build networks and ultimately start to develop a Geek Squad culture. So he asked himself a great question: "What is it that geeks enjoy doing together, even when they are apart?"

The answer, of course, was on-line gaming, so he hosted some of their favourite games and very soon there were groups of geeks cross the States enjoying their favourite games together in their leisure time. To cut a long story short, the gamers started to drive the culture at Geek Squad, developing their own sense of identity and creating a sense of group cohesion that would not exist if Robert hadn't hit on this innovative approach.

Another is the success of an on-line service called Meetup. This gives users the opportunity to get together with other like-minded people in their area. One of their most popular group categories is the Stay at Home Moms category, but how did the people at Meetup hit on such a success? Well, ultimately they didn't. It was their users who decided. Of all the parenting groups that emerged on the platform, this was the one that drew most people and became the most successful. Handing over the power to the user has been a critical factor in Meetup's success.

The learning from Meetup and other similar services is that for every success there have to be many failures, and this is leading us to a new paradigm. Where the old paradigm was around success in spite of failure, the new one is based on success because of failure. Sounds weird, doesn't it?  Yet failure in the sense of what Meetup does is just high-quality research for free, which quickly shows what works, and what doesn't.

So how could you adapt these successes to your context? Here are some ideas to explore:

• Develop a high quality, Solutions Focused question for your context. The question that worked at the Geek Squad was, "What is it that geeks enjoy doing together, even when they are apart?" What would the perfect question be for your team?
• Create an always open, on-line virtual team room where people can discuss whatever they want.
• Create a networking platform on your intranet and hand over control of what gets discussed to the group. Some topics will fail, but because of that, others will succeed.

Have fun exploring these options, let us know of your successes, and if you'd like an informal chat around how to develop a strategy for engaging remote teams in cultural change, feel free to contact us at 01923 262278, or email directors@kaizen-training.com