Socialising is important. It's how we build trust – and therefore how we build strong teams. And as humans, we're inherently social creatures.
In an office, we tend to get our social fix through quick ad-hoc conversations next to a water-cooler. In a remote environment this, obviously, can't happen - so we need to intentionally create opportunities to socialise.
We have a very diverse team at Oyster - each of us is unique and carries a whole new world of culture & experiences with us, which we can share with each other. With this great opportunity we can bond as team mates, colleagues and friends.
Staying connected as a distributed workforce has its challenges – we're often separated by physical distance and timezones. But we firmly believe that connection is crucial for our success, and socializing plays an important part in that.
Remember that at Oyster...
Socialising within our teams is important, but as we grow timezones can make it difficult to get enough social time with our close teammates in real-time.
So it's important that we intentionally build relationships with people where we do have overlapping work hours – even if we don't work directly with them. It's easier to socialise with people in a similar time zone or physical location.
But we also need to build relationships with folks in other timezones - sometimes where there is very little overlap.
So just like our work, our socialising has to happen both synchronously and asynchronously
As a distributed company we use slack heavily for both work and socialising. It's a great tool for keeping in touch with everyone at Oyster on your own schedule. Our slack is a very friendly place, so do get stuck in to non-work conversations. You can learn more in our Slack guide.
Although social conversations can happen in any channel, we have some that are specifically for this... we use interest channels to help people connect about things they're passionate about, and crew channels to connect the people from the same area.