Need tips on keeping your remote team connected? Kasim is here to share our secrets to success with nearly 100 remote employees all across the world. We understand the importance of building strong connections within a remote team and the struggles of doing so. That's why we want to share our tips and tricks with you.

From celebrating wins to weekly all-hands meetings, we'll cover it all. We all want to cultivate a positive and productive work environment, regardless of where your team is located.

So, what are you waiting for? Let's dive in and learn how to build strong connections with your remote team. And don't forget to tell us how you encourage connection with your remote team in the comments below!

Mentioned links:

Learn more about the Solutions 8 team here: https://sol8.com/about-us/

Employee Spotlight blogs: https://sol8.com/employee-spotlight/

Related videos:

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0:00 Encouraging Connection with Remote Teams: Tips & Tricks

0:44 Challenges

2:29 Themed Slack channels

3:43 Celebrate wins

6:02 Weekly all-hands meeting

6:40 Employee spotlights

7:56 Team-based pods

8:53 Distributed groups

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We have almost a hundred employees all over the world.

Europe, south Asia, east Asia, middle East, north Africa, south

America, Canada, the United States.

They're everywhere.

And the thing that's really important to me is making sure

that we foster team connection.

You want people to feel like they're a part of something that's more than just,

remote resources and, spokes to the hub.

In the hub and spoke system, if I'm getting that analogy right.

here's some ideas for you to foster remote team connection.

And by the way, I'm not an expert by any means, but I've been at this

for, nearly two decades and these are some of the things that we've

stumbled upon that have really worked.

None of these are my idea.

They're all borrowed or stolen or inspired by members of our team.

Actually the first one is a really good example.

We host challenges that are so much fun and they're usually

recommended by members of our team.

We have month long fitness challenges, reading challenges, meditation challenges.

We always have a cash prize, and it's never like, insane but it can

be tax relevant, especially depending on where you are geographically.

I think the last cash prize was a hundred bucks.

Which, it's not too shabby.

And what's nice about it is we build a slack channel specifically

for the challenge, then people are asked to participate by logging

their hours in a Google sheet.

So if there's a reading challenge, for instance, every hour that

you read is logged in the sheet.

Now the person who reads the most doesn't necessarily win, because if that happens,

then what we've noticed is like within the first couple of days whoever's taken

the lead kind of un inspires the rest of everybody else to be like, all right, I'm

never gonna catch up with that person.

Instead, every hour is like one.

Ticket in the raffle bucket, then we do a random drawing based off of how many

hours or how many tickets you have.

And then that's the person that wins.

And so it's really fun.

We get to announce the winner at the end of the month.

And we usually do that on the Friday call.

But it's just fun to have these things that people can connect with and over

outside of work, which is so important.

as an employer, an entrepreneur, a business owner, or a manager

When you're trying to catalyze connection over work alone, I think

that's a one-legged bar stool.

I think you can connect over meaningful work for sure,

but add other things in too.

Add other interests, other opportunities, other things that have nothing to

do with work, which is a perfect segue to our theme Slack channels.

We have Slack channels, not just for the challenges.

We have Slack channels for reading book clubs, pets, food

the foodie Slack channels.

I'm worried about those people, to be honest with you.

They're special.

With their obsessions.

it's a good opportunity for water cooler talk.

It's like, Hey, go talk about something.

The pets channel is so much fun.

People are uploading pictures of their, pets all the time.

We have one young lady that works for us.

She's gotta have 50 cats, like an UN and I think she fosters cats.

And you know, she's like, she has birthdays for her cats and she uploaded a

picture most recently and the cat's got a little birthday hat and there's a hole.

Dead fish with a candle on it.

And it was just like the most picturesque thing.

I would've thought it was AI generated meme if I didn't know her.

But like, what a fun way to get to know people.

And what a fun opportunity to check out for a minute too.

you're overwhelmed or you're bored, or you're tired, or you're sick

of work, and there's a lot of places that that energy can flow.

What if it flows into building, with your team and engaging with other employees.

Like what a good opportunity that is for you to help foster closer connections

with your work with your staff.

And speaking of Slack, we have a kudos channel.

And what I really wanna do, I'm obsessed with the kudos channel.

I want everybody to drop kudos all the time because, You have to

catch people doing things right?

I'm not nearly as good at this as I should be cuz I should

be leading the charge there.

I should be setting the example.

I'm so far removed sometimes from the day to day that I'm, I'm just, it's no excuse.

There's no excuse for that.

But at work, you're going to be corrected at one point or another.

And it's always, so I remember that I've had like, 30 jobs.

When I was a kid before I struck out as an entrepreneur, I was a horrible employee.

But I just remember the feeling of like, oh, you didn't fill

out the TCM report, right?

And I'm gonna just sit in this room across from this jackass

that really doesn't care.

And he is gonna walk through what I already know and I

just, happen to have missed.

And I'm gonna be treated like a child and it's gonna feel condescending, and then

I'm gonna be demotivated the entire day.

and that's going to happen.

That's the thing.

People are gonna mess up and you're gonna have to talk to 'em, and you're gonna

have to make sure that they understand.

And those are, conversations that are going to take place no matter what.

The way to mitigate the negative impact is to make so many deposits

ahead of time that one withdrawal doesn't bankrupt the account.

So you can't soften the blow because then you don't address the issue properly.

Instead, you make sure that you've built an environment where people

are celebrated on an ongoing basis for everything they've ever done.

Right.

That way when they do something wrong and say, Hey, dude, it's no big deal.

there's a whole slack channel full of everything that you've ever done, right?

you're amazing.

We're so lucky to have you.

It's just this one mistake that we have to address and I have to make sure that

we're on the same page with, now people feel like that's not just lip service.

When you celebrate people, it makes it feel like they're important.

Cuz guess what?

They're important.

Like people are so important we forget that we lose sight of it.

Especially in the agency world, people are the most important thing you have.

the agencies only have three things to sell.

I say this all the time.

They have programs, processes, and people, programs, easily purchased, processes

easily developed and easily stolen people.

That's it.

Like celebrate.

People find a way to really love on people.

Which I already shot a video on this, but we have a weekly all hands meeting.

If you want to see details on the all Hands meeting, go check out that video.

It was recent.

But the all hands meeting includes an open mic segment where one employee

is chosen to present on any topic of their choice, and you get to see

really who they are as a person.

you're not a Google ADSD specialist, bet money.

That's not like of all the things about you.

the 10 most important, not one of 'em says what you do for a living, really.

Let's find out who you are.

and putting people in a position to be able to showcase that

in front of their peers.

That's how you make them more than just work associates.

And then we also do an employee spotlight, which is so much fun.

You can see it on the Solutions Eight website.

Our content team writes, it's basically a blog, but it's, a

spotlight on every employee gets one.

and we have a superhero avatar for every one of our employees.

They're on our About Us page.

And so you take your superhero avatar and then you take the spotlight and we

just explain, like, oh, this is Usama.

And Usama lives in Toronto and think he's got a master's degree

in like, Brain science, which is what dumb people call, whatever it

is, he has a master's degree in.

And he's insanely brilliant and he's entrepreneurial.

And his family's from Karachi and he likes Chinese food.

I don't know if that's true.

I forgot what his employee spotlight says, but you should go read it.

Cause your son was like such an amazing person.

He's so much fun.

And he's so sarcastic and he's so hysterical.

But you wouldn't know that.

the thing I like about the employee spotlights too, is they,

they give us the opportunity to share more with our, clients.

You know, a new client signs on and I can be like, all right, well

here's your strategist is Usama, and you might talk to him twice, right?

you don't really know who this guy is, but if I can send you the

superhero avatar on the spotlight now it's like, oh man, this dude's a

super impressive, and B, interesting.

Like I'm actually excited about getting to know him.

So that's the employee spotlight.

The other thing I think we do really well are team-based pods.

So we break our staff up into smaller groups.

Anything more than 10 is massively excessive.

As a matter of fact, I really like groups of five.

Somebody, I think it's Bezos, had the one pizza rule.

Never have a group bigger than one pizza can feed.

You wanna be able to sit around and straight up kumbaya with everybody.

Sometimes that's just not practical.

Fine.

Where possible.

Break up your groups into smaller groups.

And then as that group grows, break that group up too.

And as that group grows, break that group up too.

what you'll notice is this helps make sure that people don't get lost.

it's easier to build trust.

, easier to maintain accountability.

When you have these small groups, and so you'd have like a pod leader,

which by the way doesn't even need to be a supervisor per se.

It's just somebody who's responsible for making sure everybody gets seen and heard.

But I like those small team pods and incidentally make sure that

you're distributing your groups by skillset, not by country.

This is really important for remote teams.

We have a ton of employees in Canada.

We have a ton of employees in the Philippines.

We have a ton of employees in India.

I'll stop at those three examples.

Okay.

We have more, more people in more countries, and I, don't mean to,

under-represent them, but just for the sake of our discussion,

there's 2 trillion years of evolution at play when it comes to your and my

in-group preference and novelty response.

And I'm not talking about prejudice or unconscious bias or any of those things.

I'm just talking about.

When in doubt, you tend to.

Gravitate towards that which is comfortable, familiar.

if I live in India and I speak Hindi and I celebrate Hindu cultural, Traditions

and holidays and I'm on this time zone in this city and so I have these traffic

patterns and I, watch these shows.

it's so obvious that I would just be more comfortable talking to other people

that have all of those things Also true.

I don't have to explain myself.

I don't have to struggle to understand or be understood.

And so what you'll notice in distributed teams is all your Filipino employees

end up kind of, gravitating towards other Filipino employees, and all

your Indian employees gravitate towards other Indian employees, and

all your Canadian employees gravitate towards other Canadian employees.

and then you end up with a, with a lack of integration that hurts.

And that lack of integration can sow seeds that are much more damaging

later because, There's already not the bridges built that would

necessitate understanding and empathy.

what we like to do is instead of breaking up country employees by

country, we break them up by skillset.

So it's our quality assurance team.

And our quality assurance team has, whoever's responsible for

quality assurance in that team.

Now, sometimes that's not possible.

We just built a Latin American team.

We needed Spanish speaking employees.

And so it's like, all right, well we're dealing with Latin American customers

and we need Latin American employees.

Fine, but where possible distribute groups based off of skillset.

I don't care how it sounds.

You should have a meritocratic environment.

We have strategists are the highest ranked employees that we have to be a strategist.

Basically be a triple PhD at Google Ads.

And some organizations might not take an employee in India.

They're offshore and put them hierarchically speaking over employees

in the Western world for whatever reason.

I think that's flawed.

I think it's massively flawed.

I think it's shortsighted.

there's some awkward conversations to be had when you do things like that.

Mostly that stem to be frank, around cost of living.

But I think that those conversations are worth.

Having, and I think that making those moves are worth making because then you

show people there's no ceiling here and it has nothing to do with your geography.

It has to do with your merit.

and to be frank, I think everybody on both sides of the aisle really respect it.

for whatever that's worth, I'm trying not to get too dicey.

These conversations can always go off the rails and, either be

virtue signaling or offensive, I'm never good at navigating that.

So I'll stop here, but I'd be really interested in how you

connect with your remote teams.

How do you encourage that connection?

How do you create a community?

Drop it in the comments.

I'd love to hear from you.

I'd love to learn from you.

I appreciate you watching, and I'll see you tomorrow.