Tips for Connecting Remote Engineering Teams

Keeping remote teams connected is challenging. In addition to an all-hands meeting, we build team culture through weekly department meetings for our technical teams: design, software engineering, and product management. The main focus of these zoom gatherings is not logistics, but sharing knowledge, discussing relevant topics, and co-working on department initiatives.

Learning from Presentations

Most meetings include a presentation by a Revelry team member. Presenters sign up in advance to speak on topics of their choice. Presentations vary widely, from leading discussions of intriguing articles to running a demo of a product’s new feature, sharing personal projects, and more.

Past presentation topics include:

• Typeclasses in Haskell and TypeScript
• Brains and computers
• Imposter Syndrome
• Reverse Engineering Fighting Games
• Context-switching
• Svelte
• Product Management vs. Product Marketing
• Using Tailwind
• Keyboards for a Better You
• And more

We record all our meetings and store them in an archive, so meeting recordings can become resources from which the whole company can learn. Many presentations are also converted into blog posts to share our learnings publicly with the Revelry community.

Asking for Help

Since we partner with many companies, our colleagues can work across different tech stacks and development environments. Weekly team meetings offer an opportunity to ask for advice from coworkers who are not working directly on your project. Getting a fresh perspective on a particularly frustrating ticket can help you speed through a challenging situation. Even if you are on a project with a two-person team, during the team meeting, you still benefit from the camaraderie and shared knowledge of the larger Revelry team.

Working Together

Once a month, each department hosts a working session to work towards company goals. In the engineering meeting session, engineers work to contribute to any of Revelry’s engineering goals, tools, or libraries to improve them. Is something in an internal tool not working quite as expected? Make a PR to improve it. Or you can reach out to your fellow engineers and pair with someone to work together.

Sharing Appreciation

Sitting in front of a screen writing code all day can feel isolating. In addition to sharing shoutouts on Slack and commenting on GitHub tickets, team meetings are a great time to recognize each other’s accomplishments and celebrate successes. Even if a product owner doesn’t realize how much skill it took to solve a ticket, another engineer can validate the effort required. Another designer can appreciate how much you thought through your logo design in a way that non-designers can’t. When you go the extra mile, everyone wants to feel appreciated and like their work matters.

Fostering a creative, supportive, and innovative culture is key to employee well-being and workplace productivity, and team meetings play a huge role in connecting us. Even if you don’t work at Revelry, we are dedicated to sharing the lessons we learn from each other in public forums like this blog.