1:1 Spaces and Onboarding for remote teams

My personal mission is always to increase the sense of team and belonging for our remote team whether it be team building activities or adjusted work practices. In using Wrike, I have found two features in particular that have made a noticeable improvement in increasing transparency and ownership of spaces.

1. Selective Sharing

I created a space for my leads and direct reports to access, but each person only has access to their folder within the space. This allows me to provide additional support to leads in the form of major announcements and tasks that need to be shared with their sub teams and onboarding tasks when they have new direct reports joining. For my direct reports, I keep their 1:1 folders here only accessible to myself and the report. Within that folder, we share our 'agendas' for our get togethers (basically my replacement for my beloved sticky notes that forever went missing just before my meeting) and other general learning tasks that they may not want shared out to the broader team. It has worked extremely well for our 1:1's and collaborative planning and research.

2. Automations

Within these private spaces, we've set up automations for our regular agendas that duplicates our templated agenda formats (given that recurring tasks do not copy over tables/checklists this has been our saving grace) upon completion of the current meeting. This ensures no one is forgotten about in recreating agendas and gives us a collaborative space to leave notes in between get togethers so that the items that are worth talking about, but not urgent don't get lost in our day to day shuffle. We also determine when we'd like reminders to check out certain regular tasks within the space and set up automated reminders for those.

While these may not be ground breaking use cases, it has made our remote life a lot easier in terms of giving priority to our face to face time.