Photo courtesy of Geben Communications
Wondering where we’ve been this week? We’ve been together as a team in Columbus, Ohio for the Ohio Growth Summit! Follow along with us on Twitter and look for the blog to be back in full swing next week. – Kate
Startup Lessons Learned: Build (or Strengthen) a Virtual Team with these Ideas
So far this year, I have had the opportunity to invest a lot of time into building a team. To do this, I’ve sought advice from other business owners, read everything I could about the topic and am now experimenting with a variety of team-building activities. My goal is to be the best possible leader I can be and empower my team.
A challenge that we face is staying connected without being able to pop into each other’s offices since we’re a virtual agency. Of course, the benefits outweigh the cons but being virtual has worried me when it comes to team building.
I started this year with a full-time employee and a contractor who served as my assistant. I then added an intern and decided it made the most sense for my business model to move away from using contractors. In my experience, working with a contractor can be extremely helpful when starting your business or if you have a need for help that doesn’t require the time commitment (or financial responsibility) of an employee. Now, with our current goals as a business, it makes sense for us to have team members solely focused on one brand.
Now we have three employees and an intern and I’m absolutely thrilled with the team dynamic we’re building. Over the past six months, I’ve found some ideas have really taken off and brought us closer as a team and a couple ideas either won’t work or aren’t a good fit for us right now.
I’m still learning and as we grow as individuals and a team, I’m sure there will be an abundance of lessons to learn. I do want to share what is working so far so that you can benefit from our trial and error and I hope you’ll share your own lessons learned when it comes to team building in the comments below so we can continue to learn from each other. Here are a few things we’ve tried that work and a couple that haven’t worked yet.
Daily Check In
I was talking to a friend of mine about the challenge of feeling connected due to our team being virtual. I was concerned that we weren’t staying in touch enough. She encouraged me to incorporate some form of a daily check in as a team. So, we started checking in for 15-minutes in the morning each day via Google Hangouts.
The result? We’re able to touch base on projects, ensure we actually get to see each other each day and have a little fun while we’re at it.
Weekly Individual Meetings
Once a week (usually on Mondays) I meet with each member of my team to discuss their projects, what’s happening in their world and whatever else they’d like to discuss. These one-on-one meetings are a time where we can discuss any questions or challenges they’re having and I can get a better sense of how they’re feeling.
Establishing a Formal Team Structure
This blew my mind a couple weeks ago. Everyone on our team knows which tasks they’re responsible for and we each help on multiple accounts. It was working fine (so I thought) but I found myself wanting more ideas and ownership from the team to support our clients.
It had been on my list for a while to create a formal team structure with responsibilities. My hope was to more clearly define roles within each client team as to how they should work together with task responsibilities. I made a simple spreadsheet in Google Docs that demonstrates, for each client, AE, Account Coordinator and Media Coordinator roles and how they work together.
Like magic, I began seeing immediate changes in team ownership and individual team members began bringing up ways to improve processes and ideas for the clients they were assigned to. I’m still in awe that something so seemingly simple could empower a team the way it has. Of course, this works because each member of my team is an all-star 😉
Personality Tests
This is really fun. So last month we took two personality tests as a team:
The Shapes Quiz
DISC Assessment
Personality tests will be a part of our employee onboarding process from now on and I’m really excited about it. The Shapes Quiz in particular is really quick and it gives you insight into how you can be easier to work with and how others can work best with you in a team setting.
Facebook Groups
This is something that hasn’t really taken off the way I’d hoped it would. Maybe it will in the future but for now, we’re using Facebook messenger and our daily Google Hangout check-ins to stay in touch. My hope for the private Facebook group was that we’d interact with each other throughout the day but so far it hasn’t really been consistent.
It will be interesting to see where we are six months from now in this whole team building process. Who knows, maybe the Facebook Group will take off after all!
What best practices do you use within your team to help keep everyone on the same page and connected?
