Meeting my team for the first time
Summary
Face-to-face team meetings don’t always need an agenda. Sometimes, it’s about taking a leap of faith with your teammates and letting the agenda emerge from what’s on everyone’s mind.
Remote work is comfortable. We can hammer away at work in our customised home offices. Natural light, ergonomic chairs, large monitors, height-adjustable desks — if we need them, we usually have them. In a country like India, remote work also offers a virtual pay hike, while protecting us from a dangerous and toxic commute. I argue that it's also a more productive way of working than noisy, distracting open offices. But “remote-first” should never be “remote-only.” Not if you want to build healthy teams.
The trouble with “remote-only”
I joined my current team about six months back. The three of us work from three different countries and had never met face-to-face. Productivity was never an issue. I’ll be honest, though. At times, it felt like we were more a collection of individuals than a team.
When we work remotely, our interactions are intentional. We set up calls to discuss specific topics. We use asynchronous collaboration patterns to solve specific problems. And yes, we have weekly and fortnightly slots to check in on each other, but it takes some discipline to set aside work priorities and connect as human beings.
Before we know it, the unspoken sentiments inside a team pile up. If you’ve never met someone, never shared a joke with them, and never broken bread with them, you build an incomplete picture of who they are. You tell yourself a story about them that may or may not be true. And these stories become intellectual barriers that affect how you collaborate at work. You may still complete the tasks on your board, but you never build a sense of belonging to the team. I always crave this feeling, but seldom get to enjoy it.
Attenda with no agenda
So, when I found out I had to travel to Spain for a series of business meetings, I asked my teammates if they’d be willing to join me in Madrid for a few days. They agreed. And here’s what may invoke a sense of dread. We met with no agenda. None whatsoever. Yes, I broke my “no agenda, no attenda” rule.
Look, I love myself a good agenda. But agendas make sense when there are more knowns than unknowns. They also make sense when you have a specific problem to solve. Remote collaboration is brilliant in such situations. The value of in-person time, however, is your ability to have high-bandwidth, to-and-fro communication, to embrace context switches between different levels of detail, and to express yourself in a three-dimensional space through body language, eye contact, humour and emotion. An agenda can often constrain us from realising this unique value of face-to-face interaction. That said, starting without an agenda doesn’t mean that you don’t end up with one.
Embracing a reflection-powered agenda
In our team, we conduct at least one retrospective a month. As it turned out, by the time we met in Madrid, we had a long-pending team retro. So, that’s where we started. The format? What’s going well, not so well, and what puzzles us. No biggie. Just a simple reflection.
Pausing to reflect was the perfect start for our time together. It revealed the topics that we were thinking about, and in a team of three, no topic is too big or small. If it was on our minds, it was important enough to discuss. The retrospective led to a discussion backlog that we categorised as:
Rocks: big, hairy, emotionally-charged topics that could need deep discussion and debate.
Boulders: complex but well-understood topics that just needed a sizable time block.
Pebbles: quick-win topics that we could get out of the way whenever we needed some instant gratification.
And, you know what? Call it effective teamwork or plain, dumb luck — we discussed every topic we laid out on the board. Without staying back late in the office. Without working lunches. Without rushing through discussions, only to tick a box. After all that, we still had time to connect as human beings.
Dinners and chit-chats
Our discussions weren’t exhausting. If anything, because we did justice to each topic, I felt energetic even at the end of the day. We made time for two team dinners — one between the three of us and one with local colleagues from adjacent teams. I still have so much more to learn about my colleagues, but I came away with a stronger sense of connection after just two meals with them.
We even had time for deep, one-on-one conversations. When we speak online each week, we’re hostage to a timebox. When we were together, there was no such constraint. We spoke for as long as we had to. When I was ready for a one-on-one with another colleague, they were right there; as ready as I was.
Work isn’t the centrepiece of my life, but it occupies a lot of my mindspace. And the people I work with are always close to my heart. By the time I was ready to head away for my adventure with the Iberian lynxes, I felt like the IRL time with my team had given me a warm feeling on that side of my chest. My social battery felt charged, and I say so even as an introvert. I’d lowered my intellectual barrier. Now that I’m back home, remote collaboration feels more fulfilling because my teammates are people I know a bit better. What’s the dollar value for that feeling? You tell me.
So, here’s the lesson I’m taking away from those three days with my teammates. Meeting in-person should have a different energy from the intentional, mechanistic routines we follow in remote settings. The greatest value is in feeling like a team and the opportunity for high-bandwidth interactions. It’s about leveraging three-dimensional space, being able to high-five and hug each other.
And yes, work will happen. But perhaps we can do without the pressure of a predetermined agenda. Perhaps we can trust our collective judgment to surface the right topics. At least in our case, the best way to work emerged, because we didn’t worry about the work for a while. Maybe the same approach will work for you too?