Revealing the true state of your home workspace is all about bonding with remote colleagues

Revealing the true state of your home workspace is all about bonding with remote colleagues.

In an office you feel compelled to keep your desk at least minimally clean — no used cereal bowls or constellations of coffee rings. But when you work from home there’s no such social contract to uphold

Looking for ways to promote team spirit among your remote workers?

Remote work experts at tech giant Atlassian suggest “messy desk Thursdays”, with virtual teams sharing photos of their home-office desks, is one exercise for team building.

Bonding over “the abysmal state of our workstations” is a way to get people talking who don’t share the same physical work spaces, says Atlassian writer Sarah Goff-Dupont on its Work Life site.

Australia’s most successful tech “start-up”, valued at more than $50bn on US stock market NASDAQ, employs several thousand people across five continents, Atlassian has become an expert in managing a remote work force.

Some 12 per cent of its workforce of several thousand were already working remotely before the COVID-19 crisis.

“We’ve had plenty of chances to hone our virtual team building game,” Goff-Dupont says.

Scheduling a weekly peek at your colleagues home office is one of her tips for team building.

“When you work in an office, you feel compelled to keep your desk at least minimally clean,” she says.

“No used cereal bowls, or constellations of coffee rings. But when you work from home there’s no such social contract to uphold. So one of our rituals is messy desk Thursdays in which we out ourselves for the abysmal state of our (remote) workstations. It’s also a chance for your preternaturally tidy teammates to do some humble bragging about their austere, magazine worthy office spaces.”

Goff-Dupont says building connections and team spirit is an important part of managing remote workers: it’s not as easy as going out to lunch together on Fridays.

While teams of distributed and remote workers get together on video calls and chat tools such as WhatsApp and Slack to discuss work projects as a matter of course, she says managers also need to work out ways for the distributed work force to have some fun to help build team spirit.

“The teams who perform best and enjoy a high sense of wellbeing weave team building into the fabric of their daily work and take time out together to have fun daily,” she says.

Other tips for building team spirit include the “virtual lunch” with team members allowed to expense up to $25 so they can splurge on takeaway or cook up something special as they sit at their remote desks chatting to co-workers in video meetings.

She also suggests remote worker teams can set up separate group chats for non-work discussion, allowing workers to exchange thoughts on anything from standing desks to sharing hot dish recipes.

These can help recreate some of the personal tip sharing which goes on in a physical workplace during the day.

Another idea is having a five-minute ritual at the beginning of weekly team meetings when workers are asked: “How you doing?” and use emoji-like cards to answer.

“Maybe they’re struggling with something in their personal life and are a bit low energy,” Goff-Dupont says. “Maybe they finally ran that 10k over the weekend and are pumped for the week ahead.”

Other remote working Atlassians use Spotify for collaborative music playlists with several teams members sharing the curation: “Try creating an upbeat, ‘get S#it done’ playlist, a soothing ‘de-stress’ playlist or any other theme which suits your team,” she says.