Feeling connected in Remote working

This is concise list of activities our team of 6 did everyday for 15 days to feel connected while working remotely

Collaborative music playlist

Music connects hearts. And that’s what it did when we were sitting apart. We were expressing our feeling of the ongoing song on whatsapp chat messenger.

We used Spotify collaborative playlist feature. It was quite easy to set it up. And to make the experience more engaging, we even changed the image of playlist to our team logo.

Once the playlist was created, each one of us started adding song/music of own choice and one of us kept sequencing. For simplicity we sequenced the songs by alphabetical order of our names. That was fun.

And the most engaging part was when anybody added the song, others looked at the title, heard it and commented their liking on whatsapp. Discovering the same song that I like chosen and added in playlist lit up the mood and engagement became more friendlier. We were no longer sitting apart.

While doing all this we came up with lot of ideas on how to make this experience richer.

Have a chat option in spotify and ability to see what others are playing

Collaborative StoryTelling

Stories are at the heart of any conversation and one of the prime binding force of team. Stories are also an effective way to remember moments and a great way to spark conversations.

So for the next collaboration activity we chose collaborative StoryTelling. The normal collaborative story telling method was adapted to take cues from the random images presented and create a story part spontaneously. The fact that same image is perceived differently by different people brought surprise. When the player in the current sequence looked at the image and wrote the portion of story others felt moment of amaze to read her of the story inspired by the image.

And for this activity we chose an amazing collaboration tool called Miro. Using Miro we were able to put up rules, sequence of player with their names, reference images and story blocks. And all of us were able to watch the story unravel before us. Since we were time constrained we gave each player time of 2 minutes to think and write the story. Miro supported with a timer.

Fun element was brought in by ability to see whether the other players are pointing, making the collaboration and conversation richer.

We built 2 stories in an hour and there were lot of ideas shared.

The list is growing with experiments happening every month.

Do try these out and tell me how it went in the comments.

Feel free to comment what are your go to things for keeping the team spirit high while working remotely.