Even during these unprecedented and challenging times, companies are continuing to thrive in growth and expand into new global offices. It’s amazing when your team goes through positive growth stages, but it can be daunting to try and make everyone feel connected as one team when everyone is all over the world

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Learn about the best tips and tricks on how you can help support and engage a global team and make everyone feel like they are all in one office together.

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TLDR: Provide virtual opportunities where employees can have the opportunity to meet other employees in all the different offices. Consider running asynchronous events. It is a great way to ensure everyone feels like they are actively a part of the event regardless of their time zone.

Connect with an employee in each office location to serve as your point of contact. They will help provide information on the location’s culture and navigate how to properly promote events to their local co-workers. All in all, the goal is to make everyone feel like one big team.

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Meet Global Team Members 🌍

• Before the remote-first workplace environment, it was very rare to get to meet or chat with co-workers working in an office across the world. Now with constant video calling with tools like Zoom, we have the capability to get to meet the entire global team over time.

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Idea: Host a virtual chat roulette event using breakout rooms on a video calling platform. Sort employees into groups with 3-5 employees located in different offices. Give a set of questions for everyone to talk about and allow them to get to know new people. Now, each individual gets to meet global team members that they normally wouldn’t get to. This event idea could be recurring (either monthly or weekly) and switch up the groups and questions each time.

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Run Asynchronous Events ⌚️

• The best way to make employees feel engaged from all offices is by running asynchronous events! This trick will give you excellent employee engagement options for a busy global team. With asynchronous events, time zones are no longer a barrier. Employees will love the flexibility of these events as they can participate whenever they would like, on their own time.

Here are some asynchronous event ideas:

• Trivia Kahoot quiz - employees can complete it on their own time.
• Water Colouring Class - pre-recorded water colouring tutorial video and send out art supplies to employees.
• Wellness Wednesday - weekly active challenges to get employees to step away from their desks and take a break (you can look for local yoga studios or an online video to stream together!).
• Themed Event-In-a-Box - send out to employees for times of celebration.
• A global employee newsletter - allows all employees to feel connected to what is happening in the company and make everyone feel like one big team.
• Recipe challenge - post a recipe in Slack and get employees all to make the same dish and share pictures - here’s an example of Malwarebytes’ recipe book!

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Slack Engagement Activities 🎊

• Creating fun and engaging activities for employees on Slack is another great way to accommodate those in other time zones. Employees can participate when it suits them and they will never miss out as they can always catch up on the ongoing conversations.

Slack channels/challenge ideas:

• Spirit week channel - a new weekly theme and daily questions to answer to start up a conversation.
• Little moments of happy challenge - where employees can spread positivity and share their wins no matter how big or small.
• Dad jokes channel - where the class clowns of the office can have a space for constant jokes and laughs.
• “Show us your...” challenge - choose a weekly object for employees to submit photos of like their coffee mug, home office setup, lunch of the day, etc.
• 2 truths and a lie challenge - have employees share and guess each others’ lies for a fun challenge and get to know your co-workers at the same time.

Record Virtual Events & Host Screenings 🎥

• You may run into the issue of having a single event that is only happening once (like a Q&A or AMA guest speaker series) but, you want the entire global team to be able to attend or view it. The solution is to record the event and then hosting screenings for the different time zones. That way you can still have a live discussion like the original event and it makes it much more meaningful than just sharing the video recording.
• Loom is a great tool for screen recording and then easily shares the video.

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Internal Influencers for Each Office 💼

• Since you don’t have the ability to be in all offices/locations at once, finding a point of contact (internal influencer) for each office location will make your life much easier!

• Simply outreach to these outgoing and influential individuals to create a relationship with these leads and help each other out. Whether it be for them to share your events amongst their local co-workers or you help them plan their own small event, it’s a win-win for all.

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Keep Events Equal for all Time Zones 🌐

• If you can’t run a global event asynchronously, no worries! Just remember to keep the events equal for all time zones. For each synchronous event, you run for the team, rotate the times of the events (weekly or monthly) to be a prime time in each time zone at one point.
• By doing this, it shows that you value each office location equally (HQ isn’t the only office location that events are made for).

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Pay Attention to Different Cultures 📍

• Take the time to learn about the different cultures where your team’s offices are located and cater events to their interests. Also, reach out to your internal influencers who are based in those locations to help get their tips and more information on the culture.
• This way, your events will be more inclusive and other employees will get the chance to learn more about different cultures and get accustomed to locational themes.

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Properly Promote Events 📣

• When hosting a themed event, have a corresponding Slack channel for the event details and announcements. This will help create a community of attendees to build up excitement before the event and continue the conversation afterward. 
• Find internal influencers in different Slack channels and/or different office locations who can promote events and get more employees to sign up.
• Don’t forget to also send reminders to your attendees when the event is near. The last thing you want is for employees to forget about it and not attend when they were excited about the event.

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One Big Team 🤝

• By following all these tips and tricks it will help to make all employees feel like they are one big team, regardless of geographical location. By putting in all this effort to support your global team it will help improve morale and make employees more productive.

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