Hi Gemma,

It sounds like you have a culture that most companies would be envious of! A fully remote workforce can certainly hinder that culture of collaboration and connectivity especially when everyone is still getting used to it. What you’ve considered so far as alternatives to counter this are great options. To add to this:

–  Another way to look at your first option of team-to-team stand-ups is to consider a SPOC approach if getting entire teams together may prove to be difficult. So, have a single point of contact in each team and these SPOC’s help to oversee cross-collaboration between the teams.

– When bringing together the SPOC’s or entire teams together consider having a clear agenda prior to the meeting about what you want to achieve and have short bursts of 30 minute activity so you keep the interest rather than scheduling hour long sessions.

–  A great example of a company that keeps its teams connecting and collaborating remotely is GitLab. They use asynchronous communication through their Slack Channel or a google doc through which geographically distributed team members write their questions and comments and trust that other team members in distant time zones will respond at the first opportunity. One benefit to this approach is that employees are more likely to share early-stage ideas, plans, and documents and to welcome early feedback; the pressure to present polished work is less than it would be in more formal, synchronous team meetings. GitLab calls this process blameless problem-solving.

When it comes to knowledge sharing, they are quite aware that with the inability to tap a colleague on the shoulder to have a question answered, knowledge ends up residing in ‘people’s heads.’ At GitLab all team members have access to a “working handbook,” which some describe as “the central repository for how we run the company.” It currently consists of 5,000 searchable pages. All employees are encouraged to add to it and taught how to create a new topic page, edit an existing one, embed video, and so forth. Ahead of meetings, organizers post agendas that link to the relevant sections to allow invitees to read background information and post questions. Afterward recordings of the sessions are posted on GitLab’s YouTube channel, agendas are edited, and the handbook is updated to reflect any decisions made.

We touched on this in our latest webinar yesterday- New Approaches to the Workplace. You can check it out here.

Please keep us posted on how you decide to approach this!

Best wishes,

Disruptive HR Team