Remote collaboration: wellbeing of people

[malvikasharan]

Summary

• How to manage resources and share them across the different stakeholders when collaborating remotely

What needs to be done?

• Collect ideas below
• Create bullet points
• Add a short descriptive list in Turing way

Who can help?

Team members named below

[KirstieJane]

I'm going to write some paragraphs about remote coffee hours here 😄 ☕️ 👋

Coffee chats

Motivation

All work and no play makes teams anxious and sad.
If all of your group's conversations revolve around work and are scheduled as meetings, the team will lose both the serendipity of informal knowledge sharing and the enjoyment of taking a break away from their work.
(It isn't just fun, their productivity will be higher if they take regular breaks and socialise with others! [REF])

When a team is working remotely, they can get together at specific times for online "coffee chats".
These are scheduled in advance, so that everyone can plan their work and other meetings around them as needed, and specifically have no agenda.
The purpose is to share a social break together.

Design the coffee chat

The first step in running a remote coffee chat is considering the purpose of the social break, who will be invited and to set the time for the conversation.

Converstations where anyone can join may be what you want.
In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kirstie Whitaker hosted online morning coffee chats on Zoom which she promoted on twitter.
Different people joined at 7:40am every morning to match her early morning chats at the Turing Institute between when her train arrived and when she usually started working.
The purpose of these calls was to have social contact with anyone else who was up early and looking for motivation to get started.
It didn't matter who came along, everyone was invited to join for 20 minutes.

If the purpose of the coffee chat is to build connections with a team, you may want to consider restricting the invitation to the specific group members.
Although this appears less open it may be more inclusive.
Joining a conversation where anyone can join is quite a daunting proposition for some people.
Knowing who is going to be at the coffee chat on a regular basis makes attending the call more appealing and introverted and less confident members are more likely to participate in the conversation.
You are more likely to build trust within a group if they can make accurate predictions about who they will be interacting with during the break.
A good example of this purpose are coffee chats for members of a research group.

Finally, the safest spaces are 1:1 conversations.
If the purpose of your cofffee chat is to check in with a friend or colleague, particularly if you are worried about how they are doing, consider organising an individual and private coffee chat.
Remember that the purpose is not to talk about work or to progress an ongoing collaborations.
The purpose of individual coffee chats are to make each other feel supported and heard in ways that can be difficult to replicate in an online space.

Identify the online medium

There are many online tools that allow you to have online face to face conversations with others.

• Zoom
• Google hangouts
• Facetime
  ???

Schedule the coffee chat

Once you know what you want the purpose of the coffee chat to be, you can schedule it.
Try to ensure that the times are predictable if not always identical across different days.
Send a calendar invitation to the invited participants so they are reminded to take the break at that time.

[malvikasharan]

@KirstieJane Should I add your text in the well-being section under the title "Creating opportunities for social interactions" or something similar (do you have a suggestion)?

[orchid00]

hi @malvikasharan here is my review of the checklist
in response to this tweet.

These are only suggestions, pick what suits :)

• I'll add this to the "arewemeetingyet" https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
  and this https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedform.html
• to plan definitely doodle helps coordinating
• "Identify a most suitable slot that is time zone compatible for all the members " if you are planning a meeting that includes Americas/Oceania, there's definitely a need of two sessions, because not all members what to wake up in the middle of the night for a meeting. (12+ difference)
• "Distribute the shared document a few days before the meeting" I fully recommend adding this to a calendar invite so that people have it handy when needed.
• Under "Remind everyone to arrange microphone or headsets " Ask people to check their headset before the meeting.
• "Clearly share the participation guideline, code of conduct and contact information of people who can help with any issues regarding the meeting" This can be added to the document agenda item
• under "Create slides or presentation that might be needed from organiser's side (welcome, wrap up)" add contact details, date and location of resources and licence, if reusable.
• These could be merged "Explain the basic protocols for participation " and "Remind the guidelines for participating in discussions " and " For gathering opinion and response, use silent writing time rather than open discussion" On this item I'll also add have clear instructions of what's expected for writing exercises and how long it should take. I usually have a reminder in the last minute to wrap up if the exercise is 7+ minutes.
• Start the meeting with an icebreaker question (optional) depending on how many people. (that part probably needs to be moved up on the list)

thanks for preparing this Malvika it was great to read :)

[orchid00]

btw @malvikasharan do you want me to help with this: "Checklist for managing and participating in a distributed team" should i add some points to this issue?

[malvikasharan]

Thank you so much @orchid00 <3 I will integrate your review in the checklist.

If you have the time and capacity, I would love to have you take a lead on the distributed team section! 🙏🎉

[orchid00]

Hi Malvika, @malvikasharan
Checking in, how is it best to contribute? Should I make a PR with some bullet points under the section distributed team? or do you prefer that I write here in the issue?

[malvikasharan]

Hey @orchid00, please head over to this PR to add your contributions: #962

You can also comment there, but better to have your PR so that we can record your contributions fairly. This chapter will benefit so much from your perspectives. 🙌

[malvikasharan]

Added to a subchapter in the PR #1566