How do you keep a good team cohesion when working remotely?
That's the question I've been asking myself for the past months.
The current situation forces many of us to work remotely – and maintaining a good team spirit and cohesion can be difficult, especially for teams that are not used to work this way.
We tried a lot of things to stay close and agreed that video conferencing was a good way to recreate what we had when working in the same office – so we've started by using Zoom to create a recurring "morning coffee" meeting.
Not a mandatory meeting – but always here for anyone to drop by and say "Hi"
That was great, but it was only a one-time-in-day gathering and then it was radio silence...
That's when I started thinking about a way for those gathering to be more present in our day to day and spontaneous – I was picturing people being able to just moving around in the office and starting talking to each other... but not in real life.
That why I've decided to build Swingby – a minimalist video conference tool to create space for informal conversations and spontaneous collaboration between remote teams – as if they were working in the same room.
It took me three weekends to build it, so it's really a MVP – but it has been really great for us, so I'll share it with you folks.
I'll be more than happy to get your feedback 🙏
And you? How do you deal with maintaining a good team spirit with a distributed team?
Nice. This is what we need now because people spend too much time in virtual space and lose communication skills. It’s very important for your mental health to stay in touch with other humans.
I also use software to make my conferences better looking and much less boring than usual. Academic conference software helps me to lead a conference in an unusual way and be in control of everything that is going on in the call. Online conferences only seem to be simpler than offline, while you still have to make sure everyone understands what you are talking about. That’s why you need to stay in touch with all the members.
Hey Henri, Congrats on launching on Product Hunt!
We were always a remote team (even pre-covid) so it is interesting now that there are apps and programs coming that even we can use to get the 'in the office' feeling.
For us, we will probably have to ease into it and your casual morning coffee routine seems like a great place to start :) After that maybe we can test Swingby!