STOP TEAM BUILDING, start telling stories
Want your hybrid and remote teams to feel safe enough to collaborate and innovate? Start telling stories
Picture this:
It's back in the days of co-working offices before the internet was a ‘thing’. Today is the day you meet that new team mate you have been excited to work on a super cool project with. Your first working session is at 9:30, but you’re introduced at 9 and you decided to show them the awesome coffee machine in the kitchen. While you are making your almond decaf frappuccinos you get talking about the weekend that just passed, why they moved jobs and you even hear about how they love crocheting toys that they donate to the local children's hospital (you may even ask for your own crocheted carrot because…you like carrots). All the usual ‘corridor conversations’ that used to happen when we actually had literal corridors to converse in. 9:30 hits and you go to your meeting room, open up your computers and start working on that cool project.
The fact is that humans need to hear stories about the people they work with because we need to feel safe enough with each other to take the risk to: suggest new ways of working, give feedback so we can work better, and generally learn from each other. Basically, it’s the ol’addage: I can’t collaborate with someone I don’t trust.
The stats suggest this is a real problem for managers wanting to create highly effective collaborative teams:
‘75% of hybrid & remote employees report disconnection with colleagues (and) 58% of workers feel collaboration is negatively impacted by hybrid & remote work’ [AHRI, 2023].
We love hybrid and remote working AND it’s not going anywhere - so, without our literal corridors to have the important chat that build relationships that make it safe enough to play with our work, how does a hybrid or remote company do that at scale?
A company needs to build into the fabric of their remote office the capacity to hear and share stories that allow everyone to build the trust that high functioning teams depend on. It needs to be authentic, repeatable and scalable. Oh, and it’s got to be done fast because trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets. We call this ‘intentional cultural design’, and we think it’s going to be the leading feature of hybrid and remote teams that build amazing stuff and do amazing things.
Here’s a simple thing you can do right now to start your amazing team leader brain thinking about the utility of storytelling to help your team connect:
In whatever channel you use to communicate as a team, share why you got into the industry or field you work in. Tell the story of what first sparked your interest. Doesn’t have to be long, it could be a five minute story at the start of a meeting. Then see if your people liked hearing it (they will) and ask if anyone wants to share theirs. Simple.
If you want to get the cheat code and get your own scalable process that builds authentic connection via storytelling, we've developed a story mining and sharing process that embeds into how your teams work that improves engagement and productivity. Find out more here.
