Today we’re talking about our experience building a team during a pandemic.

Here in Melbourne we endured quite a long lockdown, all whilst growing our business. We’re lucky to be in this position but it did have it’s challenges, and we anticipate these challenges will now become the norm not just for us, but for many businesses who have remote team members.

All of our hiring and onboarding has been done remotely, with a courier company helping us deliver our tools of trade, which for us is mobile phones, computers and other things they need to do their job. It has worked really well considering this has been our first time operating like this.

We have found that there has been a bit of a disconnect between getting new people on board, and giving them the capability and tools to connect to the team, the business and the brand. Now we are out of lockdown, although we now all fully work remotely, we have decided that we would all get together and run a strategy session. It worked so well to get everyone in the flesh in one space. We have managed to put together a team of people who, despite never meeting in real life, really get along and enjoy working together. Everyone really put a lot of effort into sharing their skills and expertise and to learn from each other.

Whilst working remotely we used lots of tools to help us do this from our home offices, such as Miro, Zoom and Slack. These tools have been really vital to getting work done as a team. Going back to tactile, real life tools and techniques, with pen and paper with post its on the walls, in front of one another worked really well to build those relationships and connections with one another.

Technology is a great tool and we know everyone will be continuing to work remotely, but we feel that it’s really important to understand different people like to work in different ways. A real effort now needs to be made to get in front of one another. Blending both real life and digital tactics is working really well here at Exo.

But as usual, we are always open to learn and hear from other experiences.

Have you found an amazing tool or tactic? Or do you need help and support in implementing some of ours? Get in touch with us today!