Ask most people what they associate corporate travel with, and they’ll likely tell you that it’s about finding new clients and suppliers or cultivating relations with existing ones. Yet while these are obviously among the primary reasons why corporate trips exist, the scope of business travel is much broader than that. One example is how it can help connect remote teams.
We know how the pandemic has significantly increased the popularity of remote work. However, there are numerous scenarios in which the effectiveness of remote meetings is lower than that of in-person ones. The solution lies in combining elements from remote work and traditional work. As researchers at Stanford University also pointed out, this method allows companies to find a balance between the benefits of the two systems.
Sani Gouw, our head of product at TruTrip, has a long experience in product development for B2B companies and managing the early stages of a business. He has a passion for envisioning different ways of developing products and building a team around a common goal. In this article, he details what he learned about the advantages of adding in-person meetings to a remote team environment.
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Remote work certainly has its advantages. As Sani points out, “Recruitment becomes a lot easier because you can hire people from all over the world, and you’re not limited to one city or geographic location”. This is true not only when looking for talented workers but also for finding fellow entrepreneurs to start new projects with. For example, on one of the many projects Sani worked on from his base in Kuala Lumpur, one co-founder was based in Turkey, and the other one was based in Russia.
He also noticed how remote work gives people enough flexibility to work whenever they feel most productive during the day. In some of the remote settings in which he worked, some engineers were giving their best while working early in the morning, while others prefer working in the afternoon or even at night. As Sani puts it: “Traditional companies tell you to work from 9 to 6, but not everybody is equally productive from 9 to 6”.
However, there are also significant drawbacks compared to a face-to-face setting. First of all, remote teams can’t always guarantee sufficient coordination when people work at different times of the day. In a traditional office, you know that most of your colleagues are working at the same time as you, but things are often different in a remote work setting. Some team members may be working in Asia, while others are having dinner in North America or sleeping in Europe.
Another problematic aspect of remote work is that it doesn’t allow you to build and nurture strong human relations with your colleagues. In contrast, a significant advantage of in-person meetings is that it helps co-workers bond more effectively and develop a stronger team spirit, which is essential to build a healthy workplace culture and boosting employee wellbeing. It’s no secret that some of the most successful companies are those where employees have a strong sense of belonging to a group that works towards a common goal.
Sani noticed how meeting face-to-face for the first time with members of his remote team created a sense of closeness and warmth that facilitates collaboration and increases trust. “Once we spent two nights together, working together in a house, doing workshops”, he recounts, “After that, there was a noticeable difference in terms of ease of communications and reaching out to each other.”
When going back to working remotely, he realised that the social interactions between the group’s members were much smoother, making everybody’s job much easier and more effective. Not only were meetings much more natural, but the barrier workers used to feel when having to contact other colleagues for doubts and questions was suddenly gone.
Team gatherings in the form of long in-person workshops were also very useful in shaping how the team approached problem identification and solution generation. These workshops’ impact was evident in the remote day-to-day activities, which Sani began registering more effective and goal-oriented processes.
That’s when he fully realised that a hybrid team was the best way to maintain the benefits of a remote team while eliminating its drawbacks.
While aimed at producing results, work is also a human activity. Relying exclusively on remote meetings risks creating an impersonal environment that makes it difficult for the stream of ideas, problem-solving, and creativity to flow naturally. For remote workers, having shared common personal experiences to reference is a way to remove the barrier and facilitate collaboration permanently. Even small things, like joking about events that happened during in-person events, can make a big difference. It creates an “us” mindset as opposed to the sum of individual workers.
“It’s the small things, right?” Sani explains, “Someone breaks something in the kitchen, and you make a reference joke to that a week later while you’re working remotely.”
Sani also explains how real-life meetings themselves tend to become more effective event after event, as each gathering gives the organisers new feedback to shape the next meeting and cater to the needs of individual participants.
For example, during the first gathering, you may notice that your team members are not particularly outgoing. Based on this acknowledgement, you can organise the next event in a way that includes a dedicated social warm-up activity at the beginning. This occurrence may present itself even when a remote team has been working together for a long time but has never had a real-life interaction before. Sani points out how these situations can be particularly awkward, and an ice-breaking session can make a lot of difference in starting things on the right foot.
We can extract a number of helpful conclusions from this interview.
In these evolving times, it pays off to stay ahead of the curve by adopting the most effective solutions to manage your human resources. Hybrid teams are the way of the future, and transitioning to this model earlier can give you a significant advantage over competitors. This also reinforces the need for innovative travel management solutions like TruTrip that help you organise and supervise your business trips smoothly and in a cost-effective way. Start a free trial and discover the benefits of next-generation travel management.
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