Team Building – Promote remote team cohesion!

Remote work, and more particularly teleworking, is becoming more widespread with the development of new digital tools. This choice has many advantages for both the company and its employees, but there are also consequences that should not be overlooked.

Indeed, telework does not favour the development of interpersonal relations, interactions between colleagues or with their hierarchy, it actually slows down direct communication and employees may feel a sense of compartmentalisation and isolation from their work environment. This may in turn lead to a loss of insight into collective objectives, reduced knowledge sharing and, above all, has many potential negative implications for the loss of corporate culture.

In order to mitigate these consequences, the role of organisations and therefore of direct managers is to encourage a feeling of belonging to a team, for example by:

– Cultivating optimism (positive spirit, humour);

– Cultivating team spirit;

– Taking advantage of remote opportunities to develop the team.

The primary objective is therefore to create and maintain team cohesion. To achieve this, it is necessary to refer to the most widely accepted definition of team cohesion: “Team cohesion is the result of all the forces that act on the members to make them join and stay in a group, which encourage them to participate and cooperate, to nurture a sense of solidarity“.

The manager’s role is therefore to coordinate, monitor tasks and assess the work of his/her team members from a distance, but (s)he must also encourage interaction and adopt a transparent style of communication, so that close links can be formed and maintained between them even at a distance.

To do this, there is a simple tool you can use: Team building.

Whether at a distance or in a physical meeting, this solution brings team members together by proposing activities aimed at activating and strengthening ties in order to create a professional environment that is conducive to team cohesion.

In the context of telework, the periodicity of these activities, the how and when to implement them should be taken into account.

It is therefore advisable to plan team meetings by setting up team building routines on a repetitive and regular basis.

These practices will support the sharing of common values, the definition of common objectives, a clear assignment of roles and missions for each team member, as well as clear and transparent communication, and thus ultimately promote a healthy social climate and a sense of belonging to the group. All of these factors will enhance good team cohesion, even if the members of a team are physically separated.

The benefits of improved cohesion are multiple both for the manager and the company, namely:

– Better collaborative work;

– A better understanding of each other;

– An increase in team productivity;

– An increase in team motivation and commitment.

Here are a few examples of activities that are easy to implement:

To sum up, the concept of team building means having regular fun together as a means of promoting better teamwork and of course this also applies to the virtual world.