A couple of weeks ago, we were invited to the vibrant offices at Intuit for their Learn Together festival. The topic? How to maximise in-person connection.

Where do we start?

Well, counter-intuitively we started by thinking about remote work. What we love about it. Where the rough edges are.

The benefits we get from remote work are really all about making the best use of the time we have. It’s about being intentional with our time - and our environment. So, I asked the team…

What elements of the festival of learning have made you feel special, energised or connected today?

Some noted down the decorations, fun touches to the experience; for others it was reconnecting with team-mates; some talked about the new things they learned, ideas that sprung up.

Yep - environment | learning | connection. All super-important elements of a truly impactful in-person experience.

Personal preferences

Next up: we reflected on the projects, tasks and challenges we’ve worked on, where being in the same room as other people really helped.

Not just the 1:1 face-to-face discussions, but also the group sessions, the unplanned casual chats, or the energy of being in a buzzy, populated environment. Like background music for the soul.

What type of work you do best when you’re in an environment with other people?

Everyone wrote down their top 3-5 types of work, each on a separate post-it.

Common - and uncommon - ground

Now comes the interesting part. We split into arbitrary groups - about six people in each - to look at where our personal preferences intersect with each other.

Start with the person whose name is first alphabetically. Lay each of your post-its on the floor (or wall), with plenty of space around each.
The next person then places their post-its: if you have a similar type of work listed as something already down, place it next to the post-it already there; any that are different, place in a new space.
And so on, until everyone in the group has gone.

What you end up with, of course, are clusters of similar types of work - and usually a few outliers.

This is your map to how your group (or your team) can best use the time you have together, in-person, to supercharge your work. Use it wisely.

What research says

A lot of very smart people have researched team dynamics and the effect of in-person gathering versus virtual. It’s fascinating stuff.

According to an experiment done at Stanford, idea generation is the greatest benefit of in-person work. They found that in-person teams generated about 15% more ideas than virtual teams.

For McKinsey, it’s all about long-lasting learning. Their report on psychological safety and leadership calls for teams to “invest in leadership-development experiences that are emotional, sensory, and create aha moments. Learning experiences that are immersive and engaging are remembered more clearly and for a longer time.”

MIT’s Human Dynamics agrees that creating psychological safety is the key - and that it’s primarily driven by informal exchanges: “conversations outside of formal meetings are the most important factor that contributes to team success.”

Practical application

Every time we do these exercises, it’s clear there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach to maximising in-person connection. Each team has a unique make-up of personal preferences and common ground, so it’s really at the team level that we have to look at this stuff to make sense of it.

Once you have that data, you can use it in a bunch of different ways.

At an individual level, we can weave in-person meetings strategically into our working week. If you’re going to be in the office (or a co-working space) two days a week, why not arrange your calendar so you can focus on work that really benefits from that environment? Every day doesn’t have to look the same. Use your location to your advantage.

At the team level, look at how in-person gathering could supercharge your work. How often do you do this type of work? Do you need to meet once a week, once a month, once a quarter? Create a team schedule so no-one has to do the thankless task of calendar chess. If it’s in everyone’s calendars well in advance, everyone can plan their responsibilities around it and (crucially) everyone buys into why they’re meeting in-person in the first place. You will get so much more out of that time together than if you do a boring status update you could have done asynchronously in ten minutes.

Julia has nailed it: let’s be more intentional about how we spent time in the office, to make it more worthwhile.

Do’s and Don’ts

If the evolution of work is about using our time well, the key is being intentional about what we do online and what we do offline - gathering the benefits from both modes of work.

The Challenge

We left the Intuit team with a challenge:

Map out what a perfect work week would look like for you, as an individual, using your remote-working days and in-office days to maximum benefit
Run the ‘common ground’ exercise with your team
Use that data to design a team ‘in-person’ schedule: how often will you all come together and what are the types of work you’ll focus on? Get it blocked out in everyone’s calendar!
Communicate your preferences and schedule to those who would benefit from knowing - at the least it will allow them to respect how you’re working and they might want to join you!
Reflect regularly on what’s working (or not) for you and the team, and try out new things

You won’t get this right first time and the needs of your team will also change, so our parting advice would be: go into this with a spirit of curiosity.

If you’re feeling inspired, why not give it a go?

Check us out on LinkedIn and let us know what you learn!

How to maximise in-person connection