Do you work with team members in remote locations? I do. Whether it is people scattered around one continent, like the Americas, or truly global teams with people in America, Europe, and Asia, these days a lot of my time is spent working on the phone and via email and Skype with remote teams.
Challenges of Remote Teams -- If you work with remote teams then you are familiar with the challenges. You may have to deal with time zone differences, less than optimal phone connections, language or accent barriers, but I wonder if you've considered the biggest challenge: Lack of social bonding. Even if everyone is in the same building, if they aren't working together in person then there is a lack of social bonding.
The Neuroscience of Social Bonding -- If a team is to function well, it has to go through some amount of social bonding. People are social animals. In order to work together they have to have social interactions. There are complicated hormonal and chemical changes that occur in your brain and throughout your body when you bond with others. In this article I'm focusing on just one mechanism of social bonding -- laughter.
Laughter is Serious Business! -- Considering how universal laughter is and how much of it we do, it's interesting that we don't think about laughter very much. Laughter occurs in all cultures throughout the world, and even in non-human animals. All primates, and even other mammals laugh, although they don't make sounds exactly like human laughter.
Did You Know? -- We laugh to communicate. We rarely laugh when we are alone. Laughter is contagious. Most laughter comes at the end of a sentence, not in the middle, and the person talking does more laughing than the person listening. Also, women laugh more than men during social situations.
What Does Laughter Have To Do With Remote Teams? -- If your team is working primarily through email and via collaboration software and documents, they will have a hard time bonding. Consider at least having periodic phone calls so that there can be some laughter. If they talk on the phone they at least will hear the laughter, even if they are missing the in-person cues. If at all possible, have the team get together in person for at least one meeting. That way laughing and social bonding will occur, and even if they work apart the rest of the time they will have had some experience of social bonding.
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