Virtual Christmas Party or some ramblings about staying a team in remote times
By: Maria Gebhardt
Tags: Virtual Team Building, Virtual Christmas Party, Remote Work

Virtual Christmas Party or some ramblings about staying a team in remote times

How do you stay together as a team or rather connect as people in a time, where you only see each other on a screen? Maria Gebhardt Follow Dec 24, 2020 · 6 min read

2020 is the year everything is different. Covid-19 has changed the way we live and the way we work. We’re all missing human (like real human) interactions, be it in personal life or at work. As you can read here, our company is basically completely remote.

We would see each other’s faces from time to time during a Zoom meeting, but you hardly saw someone outside your dedicated team and you especially never saw everyone at once.

In most of 2020 there was no chitchat at the coffee machine, deep talks on lunch breaks or going out for drinks after work.

In the beginning everyone was highly motivated to stay connected, we tried hard to keep the office feeling alive. Among other things, we had virtual coffee and lunch breaks, a check-out chat at the end of the day to talk about the day we just had and weekly ChitChat Talks about personal stuff.

I don’t know how you feel about it, but for me seeing someone on a screen is definitely not the same as actually being next to this person. You don’t see their body language, you cannot “catch them” off-guard to learn how they’re actually feeling. It is always staged; these virtual social talks never build up upon the coincidence of two or more people getting coffee at the same time and start talking. It feels a bit forced. Though I only speak about my own feelings here, overall, participation in these social activities slowly died down.

We still have our Hack Days (which we will definitely explain sometime in another post, so keep your eyes open), and really enjoy those. But they don’t happen on a regular basis yet and in the meantime, you do not see anyone outside your own team that often.

One of our virtual ChitChat Talks.

The only virtual gathering having survived the months and months of working remotely is our aforementioned ChitChat Talk. It was never specifically encouraged to not talk about work in there, but most of the time we really don’t and instead talk about our dogs, cooking and other private ventures. But it’s the same here. As the year progressed, fewer and fewer people were taking part. And probably the only reason this is still a thing, are our lovely colleagues Kyrsten and Harry, who remind us to take part.

Like:

Every.

Single.

Time.

And I’m really glad for that. It makes it harder to withdraw, to just pretend it does not happen. Like the inevitable human interactions in a real office, before Corona. You clearly had to talk to someone when you were ending up face to face in the kitchen, the bathroom or out for a smoke.

I mean it can also be a blessing to just be on your own, to have a chance to fully concentrate on your work without that many interruptions and without having to talk. Especially when you’re in a bad mood. On the downside, this way there is also no one, who can cheer you up by accident. It’s more about you all the time. You start to feel disconnected and do not see the whole picture, meaning the “we’re all in this together”, anymore.

But to stop the rambling and get back to the point: virtual team activities died down.