Connectedness in a Remote Team
What I noticed when connectedness became a systems question, not a cultural one
In October 2024, I joined the Gryffindor team as an Engineering Manager. Around the same time, Atlassian’s biannual Employee Wellbeing Survey results were shared.
One question stood out:
Do you feel connected as a team?
Roughly one in three people felt this was an area that needed serious improvement.
There were reasonable explanations. The team had operated without a direct manager for over a quarter. Nearly 30% of the team had less than three months of tenure. In many ways, the team was still forming—while delivering.
What surprised me wasn’t the score itself, but the realization that followed.
Until the survey, no one had articulated this as a problem. Work was moving. Rituals existed. Meetings happened. It was only when people were asked to name their experience that a shared awareness surfaced.
Disconnected didn’t look broken.
It looked… quiet.
Two problems, not one
Except for a brief stretch during COVID—when everything felt provisional—I had mostly managed co-located teams.
So I was facing two things at once:
A team that didn’t feel sufficiently connected
A 100% remote setup, where many of my instincts were untested
I didn’t have a playbook, and I was cautious about importing one.
Instead of starting with solutions, I started with a question:
What does connectedness look like when proximity is removed—and what small things does a system need to make it easier?
A working lens
One idea stayed with me: belonging often comes from shared context, not forced interaction.
In remote teams, many low-effort ways of discovering common ground disappear. You don’t overhear conversations. You don’t walk out of meetings together. You don’t casually learn what people care about.
Over time, my hypothesis simplified:
In remote environments, connectedness erodes not because people don’t care—but because the system removes easy ways of caring.
Small experiments in shared context
One of the earliest conversations we had was about companionship.
Not friendship.
Not closeness.
Just the feeling that someone is alongside you while the work happens.
With that in mind, we tried something small.
A Secret Santa, reframed as “Know Your Peer.” Each person was randomly paired with a teammate, with one condition: the gift had to come from understanding the other person’s interests. We quietly announced a small prize for the most thoughtful gift—not the most expensive one.
Alongside this, we kept a recurring, optional Monday prompt: “How was your weekend?”
And a few lightweight discussion spaces—interest groups people could drift in and out of.
None of this was mandatory.
None of it was positioned as culture work.
They were simply invitations. In hindsight, these moments made it easier to notice where shared interests already existed—something we leaned into later, asynchronously.
Time that was explicitly not productive
Remote teams are efficient by default. Over time, that can signal that presence must justify itself with an agenda.
We experimented with no-agenda, fun-only sessions. Not offsites. Not quarterly events. Just time.
Games changed—Among Us, Pictionary, meme wars, even investing simulations. The specifics mattered less than the signal.
I was careful not to delegate this away or attend selectively. Systems learn from attention. When “fun” is optional, it becomes expendable.
Letting go of synchrony
One constraint I had underestimated was presence.
In remote setups, synchrony can quietly become the price of inclusion. If you miss the moment, you miss the connection.
So over time, the team leaned into asynchronous participation:
Interest groups — spaces where people could engage with peers who shared a common interest, whenever they wanted, without expectation or cadence.
Social threads during festivals, work anniversaries, and birthdays — no commentary required.
Lowering the cost of participation mattered more than increasing frequency.
Restraint as a design choice
Scale was tempting—but fragile.
Instead, we kept things small and repeatable.
Two principles guided us:
It should always be okay to skip
Those who do participate should leave feeling lighter, not obligated
Every so often, I reminded the team why we were being intentional—not to enforce consistency, but to make the intention visible.
Connectedness doesn’t sustain itself silently.
My role in all this
I didn’t build connectedness. I didn’t drive culture.
At best, I was a participant and a catalyst.
What made things memorable was the team—their willingness to show up, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes playfully, but genuinely. The shared moments, inside jokes, and memories were created by the team, not by design.
I simply helped create conditions where those moments were easier to happen.
No conclusions (yet)
In the two biannual surveys that followed, Gryffindor scored 100% on the connectedness question.
I’m cautious about what to make of that.
Surveys are snapshots.
Teams mature.
People settle in.
I don’t read this as proof that anything worked. At best, it suggests the environment shifted—enough for people to answer a question differently.
What feels more durable than the score is harder to measure.
People now reference shared moments without explanation.
There are inside jokes that don’t need context.
Names come with stories, not just roles.
We know each other a little more as humans.
Those memories will likely outlive our Atlassian avatars—and that feels like the right place to pause.
Reading lineage
A few ideas in this post were shaped by earlier reading. I’m listing them here as context, not explanation.
First, Break All the Rules
Harvard Business Review Emotional Intelligence Series
These aren’t playbooks. If anything, they nudged me to notice how often connection emerges from conditions, not instruction.