One crucial bit of shared context that gets mostly missed…lunch. Not having lunch together has been, IME, the single biggest indicator of a dysfunctional team.

One crucial bit of shared context that gets mostly missed…lunch. Not having lunch together has been, IME, the single biggest indicator of a dysfunctional team. The neat thing about lunch is that the conversations are entirely non-directed without feeling like the time is being wasted in a meeting. Conversations can cover a specific project, when a high degree of coordination is necessary, generalized venting, when there are shared frustrations or just be about non-work topics that help a team bond and get to know each other as people rather than workers. It’s like a meeting that doesn’t feel like a meeting that can be strategic or therapeutic as needed. There’s really no way to replicate the beneficial effects of eating lunch together when workers are remote. As a manager, this has also been one of my go-to tricks for successful cross-team projects lasting any significant amount of time. I tell one of my team members to setup a lunch with at least one member of the other team on a weekly basis and use the incentive of authorizing the company to pay for it. For ~$20/person/week, the cross-team communications issues basically disappear. It’s ridiculously cost effective and almost magical in how well it works.