Simon Sinek says remote teams need intentional informal time to replace casual office moments. He recommends weekly 30-45 minute huddles with breakout rooms, annual off-sites, and hackathons where core members work together in person to build trust and connection.
Questions this video answers
About 30–45 minutes.
Isaac Stern ("music is what happens between the notes").
Chapters
Especially in this modern day and age where we have blended workforces or we have virtual workforces, it actually requires more work to actually maintain cohesion and trust in an organization. So Isaac Stern, the famous violinist, said, music is what happens between the notes. Well, in a company, trust is what happens between the meetings. It's the sauntering into the conference room, it's the walking out of the conference room, it's the, it's the chatter you have in the hallway, it's bumping into somebody. Be like, oh, I forgot to tell you, it's going to get a coffee, it's going to get lunch, it's stuff like that. All of those things by themselves, innocuous. But in total they start to build cohesion, trust, relationships and all those other good, mushy, mushy things. In a virtual scenario, for example, we don't have between the meetings, we just have the meetings. And so we have to artificially create those things. So one of the things we do as a company is we do a weekly huddle. We come together about 30, 45 minutes every single week, the whole team. And except for some high level announcements, there's very little to any business discussed. It's just a how you doing? And we break out into little breakout rooms that you can do on Zoom and we talk about whatever, there's no subject set, we talk about important things, unimportant things. What somebody did that weekend, it doesn't really matter. And the point is we're getting to know each other. And these meetings, these huddles have become absolutely essential. I'm a great believer in bringing people together, especially if you have a virtual organization, the annual off site. The other thing that I'm a great believer in is the hackathon, where if you have a difficult problem to solve, if you have an initiative that's coming up to take the core team of people who are working on it, two, three, four people, have them all go to one city and work together and come out with a solution or options. And now and then I also believe in taking somebody who's not from that team because you want a completely different perspective and add them to that hackathon as well, so they can offer us something. So the most important thing that in Will's advice is the discipline to always do these things, to always do these things that bring together human connection and allow people to contribute and have their point of view.
