 Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining me today for my first talk ever here at the conference. Thank you very much. Few people couldn't be here today, which are my parents. So let me say hi to them, to Livestream, because they are watching. Also, my parents can't speak English, so please, once upon a time, you can laugh just for nothing. So they are proud, so I'm doing a good job. So, who am I? My name is Andrea Fickova, and I work as an Agile Practitioner at Red Hat. And in Agile, I have about two years of experience, before I gained two years of experience in development. And just a few months ago, I finished my master's degree study on Master's University, also here in Burdenau. Yay! And as you noticed, I migrated from this faculty to another one. That's what people usually do in their study here. I work as an Agile Practitioner with hybrid, but also with remote teams. For clarification, hybrid team is a team where part of the team members are co-located at least in one city, but another part works spread it around the world. And today, I want to show you how I engage these people, so they make close relationships, because in working environment which is spread it, it's not that easy. However, it brings a lot of advantages we already well know, right? So, for employer, he can get various people with a lot of expertise and talent from all around the globe. But for employee, it means that you can get more opportunities and much more flexibility. And when you are not seeing each other, it brings also disadvantages. First one is lack of trust. It is important because when you want to say you made a mistake at work, it's okay to say, hey Fernando, I made a mistake, can you help me? Thank you, I knew that because he is a good guy. If I wouldn't have trust in Fernando, I wouldn't ask him for help, and then I wouldn't be able to solve my issue. Feeling of loneliness. Maybe some people of you are working with your teams in office, but some of you can be too far away from others, working from home really lonely, and that it's not also psychologically safe, and I believe you want to keep your teammates happy. And overall, there might happen in effective communication because when you are meeting each other face-to-face, you are able to break boundaries much easier. There are also cultural differences, and then you know how to speak with each other. With face-to-face team, or team we just collocated and they are meeting each other on daily basis in the office, it's easier because they can go together for coffee, grab lunch together, or play some game that is available in the office, for example, billiard or maybe VR. So what is the solution to connect these people when they are not working together? You can bring these activities to online environment. And ideas for that are to schedule virtual coffees, to schedule virtual team building slash fun activities, to do office day, which is unfortunately only for hybrid teams I was mentioning, and you can engage your team asynchronously. Virtual coffee is event with which you want to simulate situation when you ask your colleague to grab a coffee with you. At this meeting you can chitchat completely about anything you want, but you can also help yourself and set the topic here. You can do this by asking a question, for example, what was the most ridiculous conspiracy theory you ever heard? Or you can do picture sharing with some particular topic, for example, your picture from teenage, your picture as you were a baby, or anything else. Believe me, when you do this on a meeting you will have a lot of topic to talk about and you can spend one whole hour at least talking about anything. Much more things you can do when you are doing fun activities. You can do quizzes, you can do quick online games, or other online games I would like to introduce you at least briefly. Quizzes. Who does not like them, right? First idea, oh no, quizzes. So, in general, you need a facilitator. Unfortunately, that person won't be an active player, but still can have a lot of fun. And there you might create a lot of rules, like taking care of ranking system, you can get plus point or plus 100 point, whatever you like. You can play these games in teams, so within your team you can create two or three small teams, or you can play it on individual, individually. And don't forget to keep the time for questions. You don't want your fellas to think about one question for 10 minutes, right? First idea of quiz is quiz about teammates. For this quiz you need to collect data about your teammates. I used for that Google Forms and there I asked various questions like what's your favorite sport, what was your first job, what's your hobby, and I also leave their space for letting them write any random facts they would like to share about themselves. Then I prepared questions with another option, so I had to made up option B or C. After that I noticed that some questions are really frequently answered, so I created categories so we had much more fun. But before we really died into game, I let my fellas to review and approve their questions about them so they feel safe of what they are sharing and they helped me to make quiz more tricky, which is what you really want. So for game intro I showed rules. Then I created table with names and categories and score table because we need a winner, right? And the game looked like this. I chose Engist for a job for 200 points. Then it got you to another slide. It was made in Google Slides and then you could see the question. And I wanted my team to have TV show experience, so I made a lot of transitions and all the options were like flying from left side, like A, junior QE, B, makeup artist, or C, graphic designer. My lessons learned after this were that at first I could do, I could have done categories and then figure out questions, but I got idea of categories too late. Another idea is to do, not quiz about your teammates, but some general overview quiz or pub quiz. For this you can choose random questions from various categories like sports, music, history, and I can advise you to take a look on Mentimeter.com, but GPT will help you as well. And for example it can be question like Queen Gither is the brand May is an also expert in what science it filled. Who would like to answer? Yeah, Nico? Correct. It's Astrophysics. Good job. Then you can do quiz about guessing the place. So you need to collect pictures or various places. Don't make it too random, so if you live in small village and you will take a picture of random street, it won't work. But if you also take a picture of Eiffel Tower, everyone knows that it's in Paris, correct? So you don't want to make it too easy. And another question. What is there in the right corner? What's the place there? Who would like to guess? Italy. Italy? Great! I don't know, I will take a look later. To do these activities you need a lot of time. Especially quiz about teammates were super time consuming, but I don't regret any second or minute doing that. And my friends, yeah, my teammates are my friends. They had a lot of fun, they were engaged, and making them happy is just everything for me. But if you don't want to spend that much time doing these quizzes, you can play quick online games. Examples are Scrable IO or Gothic Phone. It's more maybe for artists, because you have to draw with mouse there. Scrable IO is really simple. One of your teammates gets three options and chooses one word which they will draw there. And on the right side from the picture, there is a chat where you can write your guess. And when you write it, when it's correct, you get points and the game ends whether when everyone guesses correct answer or until your time runs out. And another, and my very favorite, which I'm too biased for that I guess, is Gothic Phone. You are driving it again with your mouse, and let's say you play in a team of five people and everyone writes some really ridiculous sentence. For example, geography on the moon is placing you as a flag. It can be also something else, an elephant eating a burger. You have five sentences like this and they are reshuffled among your team members. So you can get driving like this. Then you have five drawings that are reshuffled again to another people and they are guessing again. So in this case, they kind of got it that elephant is eating a burger. And it repeats so then you are driving again what you see. And the last person writes what it is. Gothic Phone is a great game. There are multiple playing modes. You can play with time. You can make it faster. Making it faster is even more fun and also engaging. Other activities I can recommend to you are online games we all know like CSGO or Among Us. They are whether for free or they are very cheap. And then two other possibilities. For this, you don't need any online tool-only Google Meet or any other video conference you are using with your fellas. And the first fun game is about taking picture of inside of your fridge and shoving it to others. There is no facilitator who collects those pictures and shows to everyone. Do it spontaneously. You don't want people to cheat and put their all healthy stuff. And endless possibilities. Everyone of you in your team will show one random thing from your household. For example this. Does anyone know who is this? I heard makeup there. It's eyeshadow palette I use for myself. Wait. All right. Office day. As I mentioned at the beginning it's for hybrid team. So when you have few members who are working let's say from Berna but they are not visiting office they are working in home you can schedule one day let's say one day in a week when all of you will meet and you can do activities like coffees etc and you can combine it with activities like garlic phone and when you have team members who are from other part of the world you can connect with them. I believe everyone of us has equipment in the offices for that. For asynchronous engagement you don't need much again just some text communication channel and I believe everyone has that because you just need to type with your fellas and there you can do for example some thread in our team we have a Monday thread and in this thread we are sharing random personal pictures for example from our weekend and we are sharing there what we done or even it can be picture like from last Wednesday right and then you can know something more about your friends. Then you can ask a question if you remember as I was talking about virtual coffee and setting the topic you can do the same there as well so you can ask here again question about most ridiculous conspiracy theory and let people to write it and for all of this I mentioned before you can use chit chat channel where you will talk about non work related topics share memes if you find some super article if you want to show it to everyone you can it has however one disadvantage and it's spontaneity what does it mean when I'm in the office and I come to my friend Heirka do you wanna go for a coffee with me? thanks let's go so it's not scheduled it's really in random time in random day and that is missing because you have kind of schedule everything doing it online but it has still multiple benefits because your team is bonded communication gets better problem solving gets better overall cooperation when boundaries are broken it's better and best practices I would like to share is if you are let's say manager be sure that you have time capacity for these activities don't overload your team too much and have at least one hour in a week to do at least virtual coffee be careful about time zones so don't schedule virtual coffee for 10 a.m. Central European time because you don't want your teammates to wake up at 4 in USA but you can ask them if they want it if of course they ask your team what they want and let them vote for that in my case I did again Google Form and I asked if they want virtual coffee virtual team building, office day etc etc I asked for date and I asked for time and I scheduled the most perfect time for them you can find organizer it can be you or it can be other volunteer specifically for fun activities each time it can be someone else from your team we'll see we'll create activity then Kasha will create activity etc etc you can do fun activities when you are having virtual coffee it can save you time so sometimes during virtual coffee we are asking questions, sharing pictures or we are playing a graphic phone and last but not least don't make it mandatory this is opportunity for your team to become closer and you don't want to force them also someone can be more introverted and does not like talking too much with people and interact that much and it's okay so pick up at least one activity showed you try it you can make changes after some feedback you get from your team and try it again until your team is perfectly happy and now tell me are you doing anything from this already with your team or what are you taking with yourself from today I already do Kasha yeah very nice that's really nice idea someone else wants to share no one great thank you for sharing most difficult part it happens you need to train hard you lost fun right but is it a problem talk about work we talk about work all the time we don't because we are out of the team we can't stand out we can't specifically someone else would like to share yeah in the club we used to have tea which is known as chai we have an event similar like along with that on a monthly basis we also celebrate our team virtually we send them a cake along with some personalized message and some good projects people really feel connected and they great thank you yeah I can share a couple of things one of those is we have our company provide the budget for a team gathering I think it works because my company is located within one country in different areas you can do monthly meetups or quarterly meetups a couple of days ago we had a one day meetup where we rented a house and such kind of things also when it comes to this chatting and stuff it kind of is a continuous thing but a team that kind of works best for the team I've been teamed without FKB is basically having some sort of feedback sessions like the direct feedback sessions where you kind of amputate like anything except the direct feedback that way you prevent people from kind of wondering what the other people thinks about them because a lot of insecurities comes from that as Pauli said you're afraid to fail it's normal because you can always say someone okay you did this maybe we can try to help I believe that kind of encouraging direct feedback and regular feedback basically works more than anything because on that level you're aiming straight to the point where people feel most insecure with your health and growth thank you for sharing that's a good idea and now do you have questions for me? Fernando? I realize the part where you're saying that it's not mandatory so how do you deal with people that are introvert shy and not comfortable for example participating in some specific fun activities how can you include them in something and make sure that they also feel part of the team so far I haven't met with this case because even introverts at least arrived virtual coffee but yeah if you're a manager, scrum master or at least team member you can kindly ask and let him maybe just connect hide your camera, mute your microphone and just watch people and just feel the part of the team you don't have to interact much as much as you are comfortable he had those sorry he had a team member like this he didn't want to join and I asked him like he didn't want to join because he had a right to talk in front of people and he didn't want to participate and he said yes I just want to listen but I don't want to participate and then we did what exactly was done he said okay you can be with your camera or just in the listeners mode and after three months he started to participate and he turned his camera on thank you for sharing Robert that's great so this whole team don't shake because a few months ago I tried to ask team whether you want some team building activity because our team situated in Czech Republic how can we do it and we can meet but nobody say nothing what to do in this case how to shake to make more energy to team not only for job here and social maybe just try directly to send them some voting tool where you will select let's say dates in like two weeks and let's just really ask them to pick something and I believe when they pick something and you will really schedule I believe they would like to arrive the company will pay for dinner I believe they will arrive but those are also difficult questions for me so I can only guess what to do but you can of course here is my contact but we know each other from where you can write me anytime and let me know how it goes and I will be really happy to help you we'll see what you can do and make it from I don't know voting even introverts would find themselves hanging out with us you can be crazy or something and people would choose it's like with children broccoli or chicken or at least eat something or to something else thank you as well some other questions it's a basic question but I think sometimes we need to consider that some people really don't like anything around them so we can become too pushy for them and that will create a totally different side effect so it's kind of like when you have someone who is like really with you introverts those people often have one person in the team and they actually talk we can share something you can approach that person to actually be a person of trust that can give you an insight like this now I think you are trying too hard or maybe you should just leave him big and stuff like that and you would benefit more from doing that than pushing the words being together and so on thank you for sharing this really great advice any other question? I have a question about offline activities because I'm different my team is 9 hours and when we meet we usually discuss more we have very big time so do you have any offline activities and are they actually useful if they don't meet offline activity maybe you can really try this asynchronous engagement and I also had the team 12 hours of time difference and they were meeting on Thursdays and they also did on cameras Thursday so everyone were supposed to or asked to turn cameras on and once per 2 weeks we did really short fun activity however for US friends it was like 7.30 am and for India part it was like 6 or something like that so even in this small slot do like Scribble IO Scribble IO is like for 15 minutes really it's quick and when you set the timer for 10 seconds for guessing I hope I helped you at least a little bit did you try maybe 4 with 2 teams who are neuro time wise like one thing to come to my mind is in chess each draw one draw per day and one group can meet and discuss it which are neuro time wise and the other also neuro time wise and something like that did you try anything like that like creating 2 teams can form to each other because we are neuro time wise yeah it could work did you try it I haven't tried but it's a nice idea but you can create avatar in some game and you can play in games together perfect avatar thank you for sharing any other questions or comments I actually have questions but for others like if anyone has experience with this I don't want to call it a charity it's about work but I mean where you as team mates can meet in some virtual world or something and engage in like voice communication anyone has experience with this my favorite sound where you can but it's still keyboard and mouse yeah that's what I meant I didn't mean like using headset we use it for English classes and frankly they've been amazing for the coming times at least we felt married like a woman if you have never seen the other sound I'm not sure how safe it is to share a workshop there but it's an interesting platform thank you very much any other question or comment if not thank you very very much for joining me today this room has capacity of 90 seats and it's almost full and it makes me just freaking happy and I will be in Dreamland for month at least because of this experience so thank you very much you are a great eye in the audience and I hope I see you maybe other time maybe also at my talk thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your time