“Leading services are made by agile, elite, teams, not sprawling bureaucracies” is one of the tenets of “LINE STYLE,” the behavior policies of the LINE Group. One of the LINE Group's policies for 2020 is also "creating the best team."
Despite that, as a measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19, LINE Fukuoka is currently promoting working from home. The venues for face-to-face communication we previously had are gone, which presented a few issues. Specifically:
① Psychological loneliness/unease
② Inability to see their co-worker's work status
③ Weakened connections with the company
In order to overcome issues like this, in these times, what's the best way to improve teamwork? In this post, we'll tell you about some of the creative solutions that we tried for building team spirit when working from home!
Members of the department tell us that sharing these stories are a spark for lively communication!
The Creative Department has been trying this since changing to working remotely, and now that everyone's shifted to working from home, they're starting to see the results of brightening communication within the team.
For details, please be sure to check the Creative Department's note!
■ Create channels for casual conversations on chat tools
We also utilized chat tools in our initiatives.
The Global Operations Department we covered in a recent article, which belongs to the Value Management Center, has created a dedicated channel for casual conversation. The channel doesn't have any particular rules, and members are free to write about anything they want. A thread about baking at home has gotten really popular!
They also hold “quiet meetings.” In these meetings, participants connect to teleconferencing tools and just go about their work. By creating an environment similar to the office, some participants said that seeing others focused on their work also helped them focus as well.
■ Online welcome parties
③ Ideas to eliminate “weakened connections with the company”
Each month, LINE Fukuoka holds “Leader's Meetings” targeted at all managers who hold a position of Assistant Manager or higher, and recently the first online meeting took place. In conjunction, we also sent a video of the meeting to all employees.
Our COO, Mr. Yusuke Suzuki, chose “Enjoy the Challenges” (one aspect of the LINE STYLE) as LINE Fukuoka's primary STYLE for 2020 and stated:
The true meaning of a challenge is something that's “difficult but rewarding in the end.” This difficult situation that requires LINE Fukuoka to adopt a working from home policy for the first time since establishment is truly one of those “challenges.” There may be times where you're thrown off by carrying out your work or communicating with people differently from before, but once we've overcome this LINE Fukuoka will surely be a stronger team for it.
The day when we'll all be working together again will definitely come. And until that day comes, let's come together and face these challenges, and create another “WOW” from Fukuoka.
We're sure that many other companies are also going through a similar process of trial and error. We are also searching, and using the knowledge of each of its employees to explore “how to create good teams in our current situation.” It's a process of repeating trial and error, and there's no right answer, but we hope that the projects we introduced in this post give you some helpful hints.
LINE Fukuoka will continue to strive to create the “best team,” and take on the challenge of considering what communication should look like in current times, and how to build strong teams.
Note: We're also waiting for reports from all LINE Fukuoka employees to tell us what they're doing within their teams!