Author: Maren Deepwell

This month is our first full Team Day of the year. This post shares what we did, why and how.

The ‘why’ of our virtual Team Days

As a distributed team we have had a blended approach to individual catch up and team get togethers for a couple of years. Due to the impact of lockdown living and working from home with family, pets and under pressure, we didn’t have formal Team Days last year and instead shorter, more frequent social gatherings online. For example, we used birthdays as a prompt to have a virtual team get together, often with cake or similar treats sent by post to everyone in advance. Things have improved over the last few weeks and months and our team is now ready to come together for a full day.

A full day is a lot of time, particularly in a small team with mostly part-time workers. We don’t have any external commitments on the day and Out of Office messages are firmly ON. So why do we have Team Days:

• To give ourselves time to hang out together
• To work together on something as a team
• To have fun and focus on our social relationships

Preparations

Shaping the day

For us, it’s really important that everyone plays a part in shaping the day and the focus of what we do. We discuss our plans and this year I also set up a survey giving a lot of different options for formal and informal CPD, group activities, fun things and also a catch all space for everyone to contribute their own ideas. The winning “not at your desk” activity for this Team Day is to go for a walk together whilst using text chat and, weather permitting, to do a photo competition of what we encounter.

Team Day Supplies

Virtual Team Days are much better if there are some tangible elements and this year I sourced something for each part of the day, and then shipped a box with all the ingredients to each member of staff. We also looked at options to order ready made hampers or boxes, which work better for larger teams, but in this instance, it was cheaper and more practical to make up a box for each member of the team:

All together it cost around £200 for 7 staff, including a gift for each person (£70), food and snacks (£60) and shipping and packaging (£70). Depending on your budget, that may seem a lot or a little, but in comparison to what it would cost for us to travel to meet up and cater for the day, this cost is lower.

All vegan Team Day

We have some staff who are vegan and usually when we order provisions for team activities, we cater for everyone separately. Comparable food, but different for each according to dietary preference, is usually the result. This time, I chose to go all vegan and also gluten free, which means that everyone gets the same except for the cake, of which there were different ones in the box we ordered. It’s a win for everyone.

We also re-used packaging and wrappings to help limit the environmental impact.

On the Day

Here is our agenda for the day, which we used to help plan what we do when:

Unboxing Team Day

One of my favourite moments of the Day was when we unpacked our Team Day parcels. Each parcel had a contents page on the top, so that everyone could see what was included and what it was for. The parcel included:

• Treats & Snacks: To keep you going through the morning. All snacks are vegan.
• Cake! For lunch is always a solid life choice. Enjoy this vegan & gluten free cake as part of our team lunch 🙂
• Pick & Mix: For the Team Portrait… also vegan and yummy. Which one is your favourite?

And a surprise, which we opened together at the end of the day and which contained a mug in a different colour for each member of the team as well as a special badge for each person.

Reflection

I do miss seeing my colleagues in person. There is no way around that. That said, not all Team Days have to involve meeting up in person and Team Days can be and are amazing online.

We had a wonderful day as a team, working, chatting, eating and having fun. It brought us closer together, helped us spend time together and also focus us on what’s ahead.

The biggest hit of the day was the Alternative Team Portrait with special guest Bryan Mathers. Whilst it was great to have a whole day as a team, it’s always helpful to have some external facilitation for sessions you can all take part in equally.

One thing we want to try for the next Team Day is to distribute some of the planning and preparation for individual activities so that more staff can get actively involved in that aspect of things.

Overall, our virtual team virtual team day was a huge successful and brought joy to us 🙂

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week and here in the UK restrictions are lifting and things are getting a lit bit easier and from next week, the slow return to offices and campuses is entering a new phase. Whilst the weather is still a bit mixed we are slowly moving into a brighter time of year. In this month’s post, we are checking in with mental wellbeing for virtual teams.

We are NOT going back

Over the past year, many of the organisations and individuals we work with have mostly been working remotely, deserting their usual busy workplaces, sometimes willingly and sometimes with regret. Now we are seeing the reversal of this shift and whilst it’s not happening as suddenly or as completely as the ‘great pivot online’, it is happening.

There are a lot of interesting discussions just now about how to return: some employers are conducting pilots and research, others have already consulted staff and taken their decisions… and other again are hoping to return to the routines they knew before March 2020. A great deal depends on context and the culture of the organisation, but it is fair to say that we expect more blended, flexible and all together online working arrangements to be one result of this pandemic.

In our case, we moved online a few years ago and the strategic reasons for our move continue to be valid, more so now than before. Hence, for the second time in as many years, we avoid the practical upheaval that comes with shifting work around. Like many others, we worked from home when all this started, and we will still be working from home when… when the pandemic has loosened its grip.

Mental wellbeing is still at risk

I don’t underestimate how much we gain from being a distributed organisation in terms of strategy, operations and resilience. The gains are huge, especially for a team of 6 working for an independent charity. We made the right choices a few years ago and over the past year, especially last year, that has made a big difference to our organisation and us as a team.

So whilst we don’t have yet another workplace transition coming up, the last year has still put a huge train on everyone’s mental health and wellbeing. Even with some experience and a good home-working set up, working through pandemic times has been extremely challenging and I am mindful that now there are a whole new set of worries to take into considerations as family life, schooling, social activities and work are all changing again.

This Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing Checklist is a good starting point for any workplace to monitor the progress of their mental health support for staff. Although I am aware of what we do, I still found it helpful to complete the checklist and to reflect on how we meet our duty of care, how to communicate what we do to staff and what I personally can do to help in my capacity as CEO.

I am glad to say that we are already actively doing things across the board that the checklist suggests, which I felt was reassuring. Effectively managing staff’s mental health and wellbeing concerns is, I find, quite hard when you never see each other face to face. It’s definitely possible, but depending on the individual, it may take some ingenuity to find ways to achieve the best outcomes, and plenty of busy managers will probably give up well before then.

Mental Health tips for virtual teams

Over the past few years, we found ways that works for us:

• Create time and space to talk: For many people working from home seems to be a never ending marathon of back to back meetings in Teams or Zoom. That’s a tough context in which to create time or space to talk about mental health. I’ve often blogged before about different ways of working, around a document, whilst walking, offering time to reflect and write together… and you really need to find pockets of time and space that suit your team(s) in order to get meaningful conversations.
  In addition to our weekly group meet ups, we have one to one catch ups and we don’t schedule meetings back to back for the whole week. We have informal and formal spaces which are always there, for meet ups, chat and conversations.
• Read the signals: For some, what works for everyone else isn’t a good fit. That applies to in person management just the same, but I feel working virtually increases the danger of missing obvious signals. If you have just come from one meeting and the other person has done something different, it’s easy to talk at cross purposes. So if you are talking about personal stuff, asking about wellbeing or mental health, you need to be prepared to look out for subtle signals, including tone of voice or chat, body language and even emoji.
  We don’t record our informal chats, so that there is a space in which to chat that is safe and personal. We can use that space to talk about things that may be difficult to talk about in more formal settings.
  We also don’t have to have catch ups in the same format each week. Sometimes we go for a walk. Sometimes we have phone calls. Sometimes we have cameras off. We don’t always feel the same, so our working practice isn’t always the same either.
• Talk about mental health: in our small team, we check in on how we are doing every week, we have social times set aside, we talk about it with our HR professionals, at appraisals, and we have organised coaching, therapy and other support.
  Our Team Days are a big part of the way in which we touch base with each other. They give us time and space for personal conversations, to talk about our wellbeing and life outside of work. One of those days is coming up later this month and I am really, really looking forward to hanging out with my colleagues.
  Yes, it will be virtual team day, but it’s not all online, ‘real’ things will be shipped by post for use on the day and this year we even have a guest coming along to help us create what has become a bit of a tradition in our team: an alternative team portrait. It’s a great way to talk about how we are as a team, what working remotely feels like and how we feel about where we are at.

All previous Virtual Team blog posts and podcasts are available here.

Ministers urged to give UK home-workers a ‘right to disconnect’ https://t.co/77NRGHxEZY

— Dr Maren Deepwell (@MarenDeepwell) April 13, 2021

“Ministers urged to give UK home-workers a ‘right to disconnect’ is a headline that grabs my attention as the CEO of a virtually-run organisation. I regularly keep up with new legislation regarding home-working, such as the increase from £18 to £26 for Expenses and benefits for homeworking and the ICO’s guidance for working from home. But currently we don’t have legislation that covers a right to disconnect.

Polling commissioned from Opinium found that two-thirds of those currently working remotely supported the policy and wanted the UK to follow the lead of countries such as Ireland in helping workers who are struggling with keeping their personal and professional lives separate.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/apr/13/ministers-urged-to-give-uk-home-workers-a-right-to-disconnect

It’s not surprising that many people are starting to feel that they are ‘living at work’ and that employers can (sometimes unwittingly) take advantage. In France workers getting ‘right to disconnect’ from emails out of hours made headlines in 2016 and other countries in Europe have similar rules.

In my context, in the lead up to a large, international conference things couldn’t be busier. We work across a number of time zones, deadlines are putting pressure on my team every day… we are really up against it (and I have never looked forward to an event more).

That said, our team transitioned to working from home in a strategically planned way, and we have built the culture that encourages employees to disconnect into the way we work from the ground up.

We don’t send emails at weekends.

We schedule things around working hours and out of work committments including caring responsibilities.

We pay our staff the tax-free monthly ‘home-working allowance’ to help towards costs.

We build the expectation, right from day 1, as part of our induction process, that taking breaks (screen breaks, lunch breaks, tea breaks etc) is the way we do things. We are not too busy to have lunch.

We share resources on wellbeing as a home-worker. And we share our experiences. We blog, in the open, to share how we do, what we struggle with, and what we need to do better in order to improve home/work balance.

We are also a small employer, an independent charity, and we take responsibility for setting the right example, and prioritising the wellbeing of employees. During these days of lockdown, this hasn’t been easy, and there are a lot of challenges to overcome, but there are many steps employers can take without waiting for legislation giving employees the right to disconnect.

If you are in a position to improve the culture in your workplace, and set a more balanced example for everyone, do it today.

Cover Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash