Remote Meetings, Episode 3: Team Building Remotely with User Guides
Are you still working from home? Ya, same here. Some of us might even be working from home permanently, as more and more companies are finding their teams are just as (or even more) effective remotely. That makes life easier in some ways, but presents new challenges for facilitators and team leads or anyone who is part of a team really. In our first week, we covered off how to kick off a meeting virtually with a check in question. Last week, we looked at ditching the video call. For our last episode in this series, we’re going to talk about getting to know your teammates and starting to build trust and empathy through a simple tool called a user guide. Being heard and empathy create psychological safety, essentially a human security blanket. Not a person or a blanket, or a person that’s trying to be a blanket. You know what I’m trying to say? While presenting content virtually is challenging, remote team building can be even tougher - you now need to create a virtual security blanket. It’s pretty hard to do trust falls or create a tower from marshmallows and spaghetti when you’re not in the same building.
Enter the user guide. These are famously used by consulting firms and a quick 30 minute way to get to know a person’s work style, preferences and strengths in an informal setting. They’re like the user guides that come with new tech toys and guide how actual people work (so don’t throw them out or stuff them in your junk drawer thinking you’ll look at them later). All you need is a template (here’s ours), 30 minutes with a buddy and 3 minutes each at your next or subsequent team meetings to summarize what you learned about your buddy.
Here’s how they work in 3 easy steps:
Step 1: Create a user guide template for your team or use our template. The questions will probably vary from team to team depending on your industry, location, etc. Here are some sample questions to inspire you:
What do you do? (What is your role on this team? What are you an expert in?)
What is your working style? (Where are you on the introvert/extrovert scale? Do you want to share your results of a personality test? How do you process information?)
What do you value? (What is important to you? What gets you motivated on a daily basis?)
What is the best way to communicate with you? (Do you hate email? Are you a whatsapp junkie? Do you want just the facts or the whole story?)
What is the best way to help you? (What should we know about working with you, what are your quirks?)
Is there anything else we should know? (Do you have the best restaurant recommendations in town? Are you an expert mountain biker? Do you have a shop on Etsy for your passion projects?)
Make sure you include space on the template to add a picture of the person. Not everyone turns their cameras on during remote meetings and it’s nice to see who we’re meeting.
Step 2: Pair people up to fill out the user guides. This works pretty well if you do it randomly. Some people might already know each other and appreciate the opportunity to spend some time together, some people might be complete strangers and find out they have a lot in common. No need to overthink this step.
Once the teams all have their buddies, give them a deadline (a week, two weeks, whatever is reasonable) and ask them to schedule 30 minutes to interview each other and complete the questions in the user guide. There might be some push back on this initially, people might be worried about their workloads or too many meetings, but we have done this exercise with a ton of people and pretty much everyone has said they loved it and wanted to do it more.
Step 3: Have the pairs present each other’s user guides at a team meeting (approx 3 mins per person). It’s uncomfortable for a lot of people to talk about themselves, but talking about someone else (especially when you had a super fun conversation with that person) is a LOT easier, so have the pairs present their partner’s user guide back to the group. You can either go through the full team in a longer meeting or stagger them to kick off meetings for a few weeks if you have a lot of team members.
Bonus points: If you’re facilitating the meetings where the user guides are shared, ask a follow up question at the end to the subject to get them talking a little more. If you just found out that Molly is passionate about house plants, ask for a recommendation for your home office or how she came to discover this passion.
As always, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know if you’ve tried out User Guides and how it went!
Up next…
In our next series, we’ll focus on your goal and connection planning. Connectedness is critical to our happiness and even more so during the pandemic. In fact, the statistical correlation between connectedness and happiness is significantly higher than the correlation between smoking and cancer! Whoah!