How Mihoko Helped her Team Bond in a Remote Setting

Mihoko is a Tokyo-based Experience Design Lead at a reputable digital consultancy. She's an early riser who enjoys yoga, bicycling around the city on her foldable bike, and exploring Tokyo.

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By Mihoko Ouchi, d.MBA alum, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt

My company faced a crucial yet pervasive challenge during the pandemic: a lack of bonding between employees. The management board approached the leadership team, which I'm a member of, and expressed their concerns about how an increasing sense of isolation would lead to low employee morale and serve as a detriment to overall productivity. The leadership team was therefore tasked with improving the experience of the working hybrid environment in an era where company outings and dinner gatherings were deemed too risky. 

Initially, our team took a very business-oriented approach, simply brainstorming new ideas and testing and validating them. This phase, while interesting, didn't quite reflect how colleagues were feeling working under these challenging conditions. So, we decided to switch gears and leverage Design Thinking as our methodology to incorporate more empathy into our solution. 

We went through some iterations, just like you would in a design process.

We first conducted a series of in-depth interviews with our colleagues and listened to them about their worries and the status of their psychological well-being. Our findings from these interviews were synthesized to develop a series of employee personas. We realized that the bonding needs of employees revealed some specific patterns and placed the personas on a spectrum of weak-ties to strong-ties. The "weak-ties" were the colleagues who preferred unforced and surface-level encounters and preferred not to undergo the pressure of socializing outside of work. The "strong-ties" were the colleagues who preferred having strong connections with team members in order to overcome hardships and share joy, and these colleagues have a tendency to enjoy social gatherings outside of work. We didn't want to pressure the "weak-ties" into socializing and working in conditions they weren't comfortable with, so we had to come up with actionable initiatives that would serve these colleagues whose psychological well-being was at risk in a remote working model.

An exercise I really enjoyed from the d.MBA is about strategy, where you define the dos and don'ts of a business. I learned that strategy is all about making trade-off decisions to help differentiate and that strategic thinking is so useful because it can be applied not just to overall business strategy, but also to the design of products and services.

So, I decided to leverage this methodology to define the Internal Bonding Team’s Mission and generated the dos and don’ts from the perspective of the personas we’d made earlier. The d.MBA helped me define who the Bonding Team is and what our mission is about.

Our Primary Opportunity Area:

• Weak-Tie colleagues, who prefer small talk and unforced communication with people. (Think of the kinds of chat you have while taking a coffee break)

Our Secondary Opportunity Area:

• Strong-Tie colleagues. These colleagues overcome difficulties together, enjoy spending time with each other outside of work, and might go for a drink after meeting a strict deadline. 

Our Dos Were:

• We observe and find opportunities for cultural initiatives for weak-ties to maintain their psychological well-being at work.

• We create, suggest, and execute these activities with some frequency.

Our Don'ts Were:

• We don't come up with initiatives just for the sake of filling up the calendar.

• We don't organize regular office-wide events.

• We don't host events regularly. Instead, we choose to merge our initiatives with the existing tech toolbelt. This is to ensure colleagues don’t feel obliged to attend an overwhelming amount of events.

We wanted to get back the former atmosphere of low-stakes, casual conversation that used to take place over a coffee at the office for the weak-ties in an online format that they'd feel comfortable with.

We did a couple of things to ensure that colleagues bond without crossing the essential boundary that helped put the weak-tie colleagues at ease. First, all new employees took a personality test and used the famous Studio Ghibli characters to represent each personality type. Based on your "character," you could select which people you'd like to chat with based on your personality compatibility. This activity enabled colleagues to get to know their personal needs and share valuable insights into what their colleagues' personalities are like to understand and celebrate our differences.

We also set up a slack huddle as a gentle push to get people to chat with each other and escape from sometimes tiresome video calls on a “come as you feel like” basis, so colleagues could simply listen in without having the need to log in or out. We'd create the channels on Slack, invite three pairs every month, and have them interview each other using a list of casual questions, (just like Vogue’s 73 Question Interview format), that we had prepared in advance. This interview call was an excellent way for people to get to know each other in a no-pressure, low-stakes format. 

The Bonding Team was able to develop a means of remote working that was comfortable for the weak-tie colleagues, using design thinking and strategy dos and don'ts as its foundation. I presented the Bonding Team's Strategy to the entire company, and the activities we came up with have been recommended to other departments in the meantime. I'm optimistic about the new initiatives we've come up with and feel positive about the fact that we didn't force colleagues to behave differently but instead took their needs into account when coming up with bonding activities for them. Colleagues not only feel connected, but they’re also more aware of their individual needs and feel more comfortable as a whole.