Maintaining esprit de corps while working remotely from home

Kathleen Driscoll, BridgeTower Media Newswires

“Our team has always had a few people who have worked from home part of the time, but now because of the pandemic, everyone is working from home all the time. While I can’t complain about the productivity about the people who work for me, I think they all would acknowledge there is something intangible that’s missing — you can call it “esprit de corps.” What can we do between now and the time when things go back to normal — whenever that might be — to bring that back? Work isn’t fun without it.”

No, it’s not fun without it. In fact, esprit de corps is often the thing that gets people up and going to work in the morning. It can help keep projects moving when they might otherwise languish and help team members stay engaged.  But unfortunately, in today’s locked-down environment, the team vibe doesn’t feel the same, and even the most cohesive teams can find themselves struggling.

“The ‘esprit de corps’ of a team is an intangible part of team culture,” says Tom Klaus, president of Tenacious Change LLC, an organizational development consulting firm that works with organizations in Rochester and across the country. “It is, like so many other effective work processes and elements of culture, dependent on the relationships between team members.”

“In the good old ‘normal times,’ (pre-COVID-19), those relationships were established and tended to on a daily basis through real-time, in-person, physical interaction,” he says. “Then, when you got into team meetings, there was not a need to do as much relationship-building because it was being handled outside the meetings.”

As you know, with Zoom and other platforms, you still can have real-time interactions, but you don’t have the benefit of a person’s physical presence and you don’t have the time to tend to the relationships outside the meeting space, Klaus says.

So how to help this? Experts say communicate, communicate, communicate. Find ways to talk with them and listen to them, perhaps in ways you have not used before.  Take the extra time to build rapport with them and make a more deliberate effort to help people foster the relationships that they might have had in the office.

“Slow down, listen and share appropriately” says Andrew Hinkelman, a leadership coach and consultant in Seattle. “Everyone is experiencing something different right now. Meet your employees where they are. Do not force them into your current experience with COVID-19.”

Beyond that, being transparent with your team can make a real difference. “Employees feel engaged and motivated only if their company is including them in terms of information-sharing and mission-critical planning. This shows respect and transparency, which will then build employee loyalty and engagement,” Hinkelman says.

Be sure to share your company’s plans and concerns with specific details and metrics, perhaps laying out different scenarios for 90 days vs. six months. “What’s the current health of the company right now? How are we pivoting to keep our business secure under the current circumstances? How will we approach re-opening, in terms of guiding principles?”

Klaus also advocates slowing down and allowing extra time for people to hang out and chat, suggesting that you start your virtual meetings 15 minutes early to give people time to gather and chat and then keep the virtual room open for 15 minutes after the meeting. “My spouse, who teaches online Spanish classes to groups of adults, has found it amazingly effective to allow her students this time to connect with one another,” he says. “She has seen friendships continue to grow and some group cohesion emerge.”

But at the same time, you will want to be sensitive to the length of the actual work portion of the meeting and the other concerns that team members might have. “Remember that you may have employees working from home but now they are also child-care providers and substitute teachers.”

To get conversations going among team members, many companies are enhancing virtual meetings through the use of games, ice-breakers or conversation starters.  “During the first two or three weeks, I introduced a question, but then individuals began to offer their own conversation starters,” Klaus says. “Now we really don’t need them, but people still like to do them, so we have one each week. It’s a simple way of getting to know each other better.”

Klaus also recommends encouraging people to “release their inner silly person.” “Everyone knows that everyone else on the video conference is sitting there in their pajama bottoms, golf shorts, or God forbid, underwear, anyway, right?  In this small way, everyone has already released their inner silly person in secret.”

So think about taking the fun “up a notch” by doing something silly together, Klaus says. “For example, have everyone wear the same colors on a call; have everyone show up wearing their favorite hat and briefly explain why it is; set aside time for people to share ‘knock-knock’ jokes in the chat area; have everyone bring their favorite coffee or tea mug and explain why it is their favorite; or everyone use an alias on the video conference — the name of a famous person they admire, an actor, a well-known person in your field.”

Recognizing team members’ accomplishments is another key to building a better vibe among team members. At Windstream Enterprise in Rochester, people make it a point to regularly acknowledge employees in team meetings, both professionally and personally, says Michael Flannery, chief marketing officer. “From launching new products, landing a big client to getting married, earning an MBA, we let everyone know. We also have an internal ‘What’s Happening in the ROC’ web page to share news around Rochester like milestones, birthdays, anniversaries, and kudos for jobs well done.”

The company also holds internal ‘pep rally’ campaigns across the county to keep its remote sales force engaged. “Each week has a theme (wrestling, boxing, Olympics, funny hats, dress for success) and we hold daily contests.”

“We know that nothing can totally replace the intangibles derived when teams are working together in person,” Flannery says. “We have had the unique ability to adapt to the circumstances, leveraging technology to bring us together, encouraging collaboration and having a little fun while we are at it.”

CloudCheckr regularly hosts virtual meetings for fun, including happy hours where employees can discuss anything, ask questions or share anecdotes, says CEO Tim McKinnon. “While these meetings are centrally organized, more common are self-organized meetings at the team or even small-group levels. We highly encourage everything from morning coffee hours to team lunches and regularly scheduled cocktail hours.
Some teams have even engaged in planned trivia nights or other group games.”

“We’ve even gone as far as continuing ‘team offsites’ remotely, including the informal elements like sharing a meal together. It’s challenging, but it’s also a lot of fun.”

There is no question that COVID-19 has represented an unprecedented disruption to how teams conduct business and work together. “I do not believe it will be easy to move into the emerging new normal,” Klaus says. “We have to dare to be different.”

“Several of my clients are reporting to me that they are actually beginning to feel energized as a result of the lockdowns. They are creating, innovating and learning new ways of doing their pre-COVID-19 work that they never would have considered before,” Klaus says. “Frankly, we will be sleepwalking into disaster if we simply try to apply the ‘best practices’ and ‘the way we do things around here’ from the past in the new normal to come.”

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Contact Kathleen Driscoll with questions or comments by email at kadriscoll20@gmail.com.