While recently serving on a search committee for an organization on whose board I serve, one of the questions we asked was for candidates to share an experience where they fostered a sense of community with a remote team. The answers ranged from honest expressions of discomfort to an experienced understanding of connecting and engaging with people when you’re not together physically.
One of our GOA core competencies for students is learning how to collaborate with others who are not sitting with them on campus. Our teacher's design experiences allow students to practice that skill throughout the course and semester.
This is not a skill that is on the horizon. We need to ensure that our students are practicing and acquiring skills like this today. And it’s not just comfortable with video calls. It knows how to foster a sense of connection and community with those we don’t see daily. How do you build trust and collegiality? How do you create norms for working together? How do you build a team? How do you participate when you’re part of a remote team?
During GOA’s nascent years, I went through several stages of acceptance regarding remote working, urged on and supported by my amazing team. At first, I thought that if a team was all in the same city, they should be together physically. We had five people working in our Seattle office and eventually grew to four others living on the East Coast (and one in Costa Rica for two years). As our office needs to be changed, we shifted towards an office policy that allowed us to work from home on Fridays. Then Mondays and Fridays. Then it didn’t make sense that we were paying for office space when everyone was working from home 40% of the time, so we went fully remote. When we did that, we needed to really focus on the systems and rituals we had in place to make our team feel like a team. We implemented Slack and created channels for people to share pictures of their dogs and kids. Another channel to share articles and other materials we read or watched related to our work. Teams had channels and pairs of colleagues as well.
We built-in Tuesday Stand-Ups to share what we were working on and monthly huddles for deeper dives into different topics. We restructured the organization so that everyone belonged to a team, which met bi-weekly.
We get together every summer, cook meals together, go boating, take walks. We know the names of each other’s children and share their milestones. We ooh and aww at cute dog pictures and catch up after the weekend.
There is still work to be done. Customs and rituals are a pivotal part of belonging to a tribe, and we need more of those. We need to build systems so that our work feels more transparent, and we need to create more opportunities to share what we’re doing. It’s hard to do that without making it feel artificial, but it’s something on our minds.
The workforce our students are joining is rapidly changing. With more and more people freelancing, new ways of working and connecting are becoming ubiquitous.
Since students do not know how to do this, we have to be deliberate about creating opportunities to practice. As educators, we need to practice, too.
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