How do you keep an international team engaged and not just forced to attend Skype meetings all the time? Keep it social!

The online assessment team for 2015-16, led by Daniel Morillo, has to spend a lot of time on social media to carry out their work. Doing this makes it a struggle to keep engaged given the difficulty to separate work and leisure. So they came up with a plan to lighten the burden and liven up the conversation.

Their Communications Officer, Barbora Hubena (Masaryk University), says, “Online, everybody is tempted to keep meetings as short and efficient as possible, sacrificing personal communication. Yet, it is important to invest in relationships as well. So our team created ‘virtual café sessions’, where we are connected visually and share personal news, and work updates, comments, suggestions while working on texts manually. This allowed us to remain productive while bonding continuously as a team.” In other words, meetings are good; efficient and meaningful communication is better.

Good luck to this team in bringing their projects to completion, with a few more of these wonderful café sessions.