Our team structure pre-COVID had grown and evolved quite a bit when our company was in its early stages we had 8 people working in one small room, then it advanced to multiple offices within a building and eventually, our next evolution was building out our own dedicated space.
Yup, about a year before COVID, not the greatest timing.
We had a healthy focus on activities- mid-day walks, team bike rides with the shared bike rentals in the complex, lunch outside, pumpkin painting, office parties, dinner out, group yoga, happy hour, etc. All the things you’d think about that would work if you were in person. But how do you take people on a team bike ride if we’re all remote? How silly would we all look biking while Facetiming? Needless to say, it's not realistic.
Everyone that worked for our company was in the office except one person who lived out of state (who had originally been in the office but moved). I’ll admit it- we got remote work wrong. We joke about it now- but we know with every experience there is an opportunity to grow and improve. (I hope these embarrassing stories help others realize the impact of making sure everyone feels included)
We desperately tried to stay connected. We started a daily huddle, we’d stand around the conference table and put the out-of-state team member on the big conference room TV- in theory, sounds ok, but in practice not so much. It was hard to hear, hard to give feedback, and even hard with the tech setup. Then we moved to have us do Zoom at our desks so we could all be face to face and hear, each person would mute until we talked since we sat next to each other and there was sound feedback. It was rigid in methodology and practice.