Hello lovely Community,
I hope you’re having a great start to the week. Today, I’d like to share with you some tips on how to stay connected with your teammates, and get to know each other better in this whole remote situation - without much effort or time investment.
Background
Why did I feel the need for something like this in the first place?
Let me explain. Last year, like most of you, we had to transition into working remotely due to Covid.
Now, when this happens while you are already in an established team where everyone knows each other, that’s not too big of an issue. The collaboration keeps on flowing, and the only difference is that all communications move to online channels. But what if you have a new team forming in such a situation? That was our case.
My previous team, the Demand Generation Team within Marketing, came to life early 2020, and we started working together from an all-remote situation. And because 95% of our online interactions were work-related, we didn’t have a chance to get to know each other properly in the beginning, like we would under normal circumstances.
That made me think: “How could we come together as a team, without having to invest a big amount of effort or time?” (It was a tough quarter, and not everybody could dedicate 1-2h every week for casual video calls, understandably.)
It suddenly hit me that we could use one of our own products - Typeform's video interaction tool, VideoAsk - to bring us closer together. In case you don't know it, it's a tool for recording video messages (like saying hello, or answering questions) and sharing them with your audience, who can then reply through video, audio or text - directly through your link, without the need to download anything. (You can check it out here, if you’re curious.)
Step forward our new tradition: the weekly “Getting-to-know-each-other” videoask.
How did it work?
Every week someone from the team would create a videoask, asking a random, but personal question like “What’s your favourite film?”, or “If you could eat only one dish for the rest of your life, which one would it be?” and share the link. The rest of the team would have the whole week to reply to the videoask (via the video option, of course ).
At the end of the week, the question creator would then post the video with the answers in our Slack group, and nominate another teammate to create the next videoask question.
Real-life example
Curious about how that looks in reality? Here is a recent example we did with our Community and CS teams. My question was:
“If you won the lottery, what would you do?” https://www.videoask.com/fcahvi1mt
And here is what
https://www.videoask.com/rbprb3eh0fhv2e3l0f54xbix2o4v5qmgeehjc1pw

The result?
Everybody loved it! I think what appealed to them was this casual and fun way of interacting while learning curious facts about each other, in a time when there was this lack of human connection. And yes - it might sound like a cliché - but week by week, videoask by videoask, I had the feeling I knew my team a little bit better.
Get involved ️
Question to you folks: how do you guys feel about having a regular videoask to answer here in our community, for more personal interactions? It could be either business-related for the exchange of tips and learnings, or personal questions like in the example above to get to know each other better.
Curious to hear your thoughts! And also, here is a test videoask, in case you want to give it a try: