Team bonding budgets
Asynchronous work rests on a bedrock of trust and camaraderie. The stronger the trust and camaraderie on your team, the easier it is to assume positive intent in written communication. The easier it is to default to action without fear. You can’t leave this to chance. Teams need mechanisms to build that camaraderie and I’ll be the first to say that a lot of this should happen face-to-face.
Many companies already have team budgets so people can meet occasionally for lunches, dinners and team activities. I support this and if your organisation doesn’t provide such budgets already, advocate for them. Set aside a monthly sum of money for the team and give them the freedom to use it as they please. In the teams that I’ve been on, we’ve used this budget for many things. The most common one use of such a budget is a team lunch or dinner. There are other ideas as well.
A team activity. This can either be in person, like a bowling night or even virtual, like an Airbnb experience.
An overnight trip. Sometimes we’d save up money for three months and do a fun trip with the cash we accumulated.
Team swag. When many people couldn’t come for a team event, we’d just buy some goodies for everyone, to build that feeling of togetherness, even when we were apart.
Examples aside, the point is to put your money where your mouth is. If you care about culture and building teams - invest in it by setting aside time and money for it. The decentralised team activities apart, I strongly recommend that companies or departments should organise retreats for people to get away from work to just get to know each other better and revisit their collective purpose.
“As remote work goes mainstream and the offsite/retreat (or whatever you want to call it 😅) becomes a cornerstone of how we build team culture and camaraderie, optimising how we spend this precious time together in-person is more critical than ever.” - Chase Warrington, Head of Remote at Doist
My employers, Thoughtworks, organise company-wide events called away days, which I must admit are harder to organise as the company gets bigger. The logistics get too complicated and people can get lost in a sea of unfamiliar faces. Depending on the size of your company, you may need to split up these retreats by team or department. Regardless of how you execute them, make sure you do them. The value far outweighs the cost as some research already shows.