What do Chips, Tim Tams, and Squiggles have to do with remote team culture?

Remote work isn't just about having people working from home, in order to do remote work effectively you need to setup a great supportive culture and do things a little differently than you would in the office.

A key ingredient for a productive team, is celebrating your successes. If you have been slogging away at a really important deliverable, its great at the end to celebrate your success as a team and look back at what you achieved. This gives you a great team bonding moment, it boosts morale and gives everyone a shared moment to remember. I found this helps teams move onto the next piece of work, feeling great about what they achieved and being happy and productive as a result.

So I ran a little experiment to figure out how to celebrate in a remote-first way that was fun, personal, and helped the team connect beyond work.

I secretly asked each team member to provide me with their favourite snack. Then I proceeded to put together a showbag for each team member with a collection of all of the snacks that their colleagues chose. I posted this out to all of them and instructed them not to open it until the celebration.

On the day, we all jumped into a Miro board (a remote whiteboard) and had everyone join the celebration and open up their boxes. I could see all the amazing smiles on their faces. We played a guessing game of "who picked which snack". People told stories or shared childhood memories, cultural traditions or random cravings. A few people tried things that they'd never had before (And yes, we catered for dietary needs too.).

Overall it was a great way to have a shared experience with the team, even if they are in different parts of the country.

How do you celebrate success in your team? Do you have any ideas on some great ways to celebrate remotely that have worked well for you?