Ask HN: How do you pay attention to emotions in your remote teams?
If you're in a remote team you know how difficult is to "connect" with other colleagues. Everybody is always in a hurry so there's no deeper synchronization.
In my team, we're doing a "check-in/out" inside each meeting where we take turns by answering "With what emotion you're entering/exiting this meeting?". From time to time we change the question with something different in order to build awareness. This helps with establishing mindfulness and understanding what is the emotional climate in the team. For a team of 5-10 people, it takes 5-10 minutes to do it. It makes space to slow down before jumping to the agenda. We also do retreats every 3rd month but a lot of stuff can happen in 3 months...
What are your habits for increasing your team's emotional intelligence?
Disclaimer: I'm doing product research in this field by implementing a tool[1] which helps teams to harmonize their emotional states.
[1] here's a sneak peek https://imgur.com/a/dDkfRVg but I won't go into details as I fear it may derail the topic. Part of it is inspired by research from Yale and Geneva universities and their departments for EQ.
63 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 51.6 ms ] threadI suppose you never participated in support groups, mastermind groups or others where there's psychologically[1] safe space for "opening up"?
I agree that if not done properly it will become creepy and insignificant and will burden the meeting making it toxic :(
So I suppose in your teams you rely on 1:1 conversations but aren't you afraid of guarding[2] too much information this way?
[1] https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_silo
It's inappropriate to keep emotional dossiers on your co-workers and I can't imagine that "for their benefit" is anywhere near the median use case for a tool like this.
What guarantees would someone have that this information would not be shared, intentionally or not, with interested third parties in the future?
for the record: I agree that if there's no consensus from the team to volunteer to create habits for psychological safety, it will become a recipe for disaster if it's made mandatory. People will leave, lie or disengage totally.
1) "safe spaces" for emotions is inherently at odds with corporate culture, point blank. They exist to use you. They pay you, you provide them a service and/or your time as written in the contract. It is in your best interest to not be the nail that sticks out from the wood if you wish to keep the money coming because ultimately the power exchange lies heavily with them.
2) I don't do support groups, though this is more of a personal decision. Keeping vulnerable facets of my life completely air-gapped from cash flow and from other untrusted and un-vetted individuals has never failed me.
Now - water cooler-ish 1:1's a la "hey, you hanging in there?" can be done with tact and sincerity by select individuals if there's a previous rapport. But there is an art to sniffing out whether it's meant with a sincere no-bullshit-humanity-centric angle, versus "can we optimize this individual's output" angle. It's demeaning to think one can be the other.
[1] https://camplight.net/
Also, when you've declared something explicitly, you're now tied to it. Emotions are fluid and changing; nobody wants to have to establish some artifact, some fencepost of where they're at and then be tethered to it for the entire conversation.
Expecting to do that before every meeting with your employees just makes you sound like an aerospace engineer who's never hear of "O-rings".
Afraid of guarding? My mental state is my own business. I may choose to share it with my manager or my coworkers (in fact, I have), but to have it become a required part of a meeting? No. No. No. Especially on a remote team where I just don't know the other people. This is not the right way to build rapport.
It's telling that so many of the comments on this post at the time of my writing are negative. Please heed them.
And please keep in mind that as the team lead, or manager, or whatever your role is, there is a power imbalance. People will not have an easy time saying no to this activity, even if they want to.
I would honestly feel more comfortable with my employer taking everyone's vitals at the start of a meeting, because physical health is so much less stigmatized than mental health.
It struck me that you don't know your remote peers. In what setting are you working? I suppose you have a physical office with colleagues and a remote extension of teams with whom you occasionally collaborate?
about my role: I'm part of a digital cooperative and we too have power imbalances but not that direct as in a hierarchy. Our power dynamics stem from seniority but we all volunteered 2-3 years ago to do something about our team mental state and we're continuing to do it. Now it's part of the culture and this, of course, will alienate newcomers who dislike deeper harmonization but at the same time, it's strengthening the core team. Like everything, it has pros and cons :D
It would be like like bringing a parent or spouse to psychotherapy (pair/relationshop therapy is structurally different) - that simple presence automatically destroys the possibility to "open up" properly.
If there is no rapport, I don't trust a supervisor trying to poke at my feelings. Demanding I talk about my feelings as part of my job duties? No thank you. Gross overstepping of boundaries. If I thought it was a temporary dumb idea that would blow over I might wait it out. Otherwise I'm looking for the exit.
At one point I had to attend another non technical teams team meeting to present some information that was important to them and was quite taken aback that the first 15 - 20 minuets of the meeting consisted of an around the table with each individual telling what they did on the weekend and how they were feeling. It was an extremely bizarre experience. Needless to say I refused to share my private time with what were essentially strangers. They were very surprised that I didn't want to participate and could not understand why I would find the whole process somewhat offensive.
I suppose that there are certain cultures where sharing everything is considered polite, but personally I don't get it.
People have things come up in their personal life. These emotions still exist while working. Part of the job is being able to keep a lid on them and put on a good face when you have to.
I would quit anywhere that tried to do this.
If you’re trying to replace human interactions and relationships with your employees with single question surveys, you’re going to miss out on all the important context.
Getting good output isn’t about rushing as fast to a goal as possible and not taking time to make sure things are going well. It’s about setting goals that are measurable, coming up with hypothesis about how to get there, and checking in regularly with an objective lens to see if you’re on track or if there’s a better approach.
Although my goal is mostly onboarding, knowledge transfer, and general help, it also keeps me in tune with other team members emotions.
But, I should add that I'm rarely honest about my feelings and goals until I've built a lot of trust with someone. I usually treat a job as something I don't get emotionally involved in, and thus I'm reluctant to share feelings with a manager I don't have a lot of history with.
You already answered your question: "Everybody is always in a hurry.. ." If you care about the quality of human interaction you'll fix that problem instead of trying to engineer a quick fix. Find more time to be social. Play video games. Hack on stuff. Cause mischief. Figure out whatever it is people want. And never make any of it mandatory (whether explicit or implicit). Meet in person more.
That's the issue though - remote teams are not how humans normally interact.
I think it's a pretty good question. It's easy to communicate about code or something specific, remotely, less so to just get a general idea of how a colleague is doing and the nuance of their feelings about things.
"Normal" communication is pretty varied - Think of for how many people Snapchat is the primary way they communicate with their friends. You can probably say that the median conversation looks like two people about a foot apart flapping their lips, but it veers in many directions from there.
My idea of effective group communication, and mine alone, is that I'm frequently bullshitting in one space where chitchat and cat pictures are being posted, and talking about serious matters in another space where threads are long but infrequent. Simultaneously and privately, I will intersperse chitchat and serious conversations with team members 1:1 in private chats - I expect most planning to be done in public and "work" to be done in private. I will frequently, say 4 times a day for 15 minutes, open up a video call with one or more other members of the team. I will also spend about 30-60 minutes on planning meeting videochats per day.
You may have been doing this for long enough that you're pretty good at it. Most haven't.
Also: one thing are friends online, another is a random assortment of coworkers, who you may not have had the time to get to know that well, or have somewhat different personalities, that are all under pressure to get stuff done together, and quickly iron out any disagreements.
When you know someone better because you talk in person every day about work, but also life in general, and maybe have lunch every now and then... it's easier to have frank (yet still professional) discussions about difficult decisions.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtZ0sc1HHNtGGWZFDRTh5A
I gauge my teammates emotional states based on personal interactions and available context. Nor is it something I would want tracked. But perhaps kept in mind when adding tasks to their plate.
If you want honest feedback, I'd say use the power of anonymity. Engagement surveys with the right questions can pull this data. Keep in mind that the emotional statements can be hyperbolized one way or the other.
TL;DR - talk to your people "face to face." And reach out to those they're close with if concerned. Or directly and up front. Which avoids complicating with subversion.
That sounds horrible and almost cult like by my view. I would be looking for the proverbial door if I were in a team that wanted me to contribute this way in front of everyone.
Just talk to people, if they're quiet talk to them. Pick up on context, treat them like humans not machines that can just have their handle pulled to reveal their internal state.
This is the only option if you want an honest connection. There are no shortcuts.
From my experience, this is best accomplished by connecting in-person on a semi-regular bases.
Video chat.
I've seen an entire remote office fall apart because of an over-reliance on slack.
- Text doesn't convey emotion, so one person's joke often gets misinterpreted as another's jab
- Text is low-bandwidth and asynchronous. When those two pair together, you get people writing novels back and forth over the entire day when it could have been a 15 min chat
- Text makes it hard to empathize, which means it's really easy to soapbox and grandstand, which makes conversations very unpleasant and brings out the worst in people.
What works is limiting text communication and actively encouraging video chat. A peer review can have a comment, response, and rebuttal, but anything further should be done over video. Encourage "office hours" for knowledge transfer or "why is this done like this" type questions. Find ways of minimizing friction for video chat -- if it can be done casually it will be used more frequently.
Predictably, 7 ended up equalling "pretty shitty".
[EDIT] in case anyone's wondering what's wrong with that, it's the same thing that can make a top-50% score in IMDB still very bad, plus everyone using different standards for what the numbers mean—with that many available it'll happen even if you try to label them. Scale compression plus no common understanding of what the scores mean. That particular case probably needed no more than four options, maybe even just three.
I think the best way to achieve team spirit and to reduce emotional frictions is actually to break up the remoteness here and then.
Currently I see my colleagues once every week or two and I love it. On fulltime remote projects I try to convince colleagues to meetup once every X months or so and work together for a week.
The amazing thing is, once all of your mates realize that you could do this meeting anywhere in the world, you can turn this week into a great experience. Even more so if one of your colleagues lives in that place.
To me, this seems like a good faith effort to improve work life for your teammates, and build a company where people feel well-cared for.
Remote teams inherently have more communication friction than co-located teams, and - if we want to bridge some of the resulting emotional gap - we'll need new practices to do so.
Incidentally, what OP suggests isn't anything new. Just Google "red yellow green check in"[1].
I've found three ways of building emotional honesty and openness: 1/ regular 1:1s to listen to your direct reports and build trust 2/ lead by example 3/ every week we have a team meeting. During that meeting, everyone on the team answers a question. The question gives them the opportunity to open up about some aspect of their life -- to be better known and understood by their teammates.
[1] https://blog.travis-ci.com/2016-06-09-start-meetings-with-pe...
That said, fishing for 'emotions' seems uncomfortable to me, and maybe asking for trouble with HR down the road.
> If you're in a remote team you know how difficult is to "connect" with other colleagues. Everybody is always in a hurry so there's no deeper synchronization.
I'm not sure I agree with this premise. I don't think it's difficult as much as it just requires some explicit effort and habits. For example:
- We have video standups over Zoom and ask people to turn on video as often as possible. This helps a ton IMO. It's tempting to just do async Slack standups (and we do on occasion) but it shouldn't be the norm.
- Our broader group uses Tinypulse to send out weekly questions. Answers are anonymous. If the questions are good (ours are), you'll gain a lot of insight into how your team is feeling. I might learn, for example, that I'm not spending enough time with ICs discussing their career path or that people overall are pretty happy.
- Weekly one-on-one's with my team. Again, over Zoom with video on. This is the best way I connect with my team and get at their emotional state.
- Code reviews. We do them traditionally in GitHub (every PR requires 2 approvals) but we also have synchronous code review sessions 3x/week in Zoom. These are just 90min blocks on the calendar and attendance is optional. During these sessions, anyone can present a PR, walk us through the code and demonstrate the feature. We don't do pair programming but I think this approach is even more valuable. It has increased our velocity, reduced bus factor, and provided another form of "connection" for our team.
- Every quarter we either do a team visit to the office or an offsite for our broader group.
> In my team, we're doing a "check-in/out" inside each meeting where we take turns by answering "With what emotion you're entering/exiting this meeting?".
To echo what others have said, this feels like a weird thing to do in a meeting. People already don't like being in meetings, so making them longer with this won't help. That's my 2¢.
Again, maybe I'm just spoiled with a great team, but I would start with some of the basic things I've outlined above. YMMV.
Of course I would not be truthful. Most likely would be looking for a new place unless $$ was amazing and work itself great.
Quote from a book on corporate HR I read years ago stands out. Only suckers tell truth to HR, it(HR) is there to protect company not for your benefit. Exactly same applies here
Why not just slow the things down a bit?
That's what I like to do with my teams. Before dailies we chit-chat for a few minutes while waiting for everyone to connect. No rush, no agenda or HR/psychological playbooks, just friendly conversation for those interested. Who doesn't feel like it can stay muted. Also giffy and witty remarks are highly appreciated on internal Slack channel to make it feel more laid back. As a lead I feel it as a part of my job to make people feel good about working with us, but you can't push people into it by applying more rules. Less rules are way more helpful.
I think this fails the normal sniff test I have where if you wouldn't do it in an office environment, you shouldn't do it in a remote environment. It's not really all that different other than communication being harder because folks don't talk as much.
Remote work has many of the same problems as office work. People can be just as abusive. I had a remote coworker halfway across the country say openly and in anger in a team meeting that he was going to drive to my house, knock on my door and shoot me in the face. Because we were remote, HR didn't treat it as a real threat.
As a manager, to protect your team's emotional health your job is often to do the opposite of what the company would have you do. Rather than aiming for peak utilization, introduce slack time (the concept, not the app). Rather than prescribing duties, trust your team. Rather than encouraging them to go above and beyond, mandate they go home at the end of the day. Etc, etc. But I don't think the answer is to demand intimacy from them - instead, it's about giving them space to feel safe on their own terms.