Overcoming Boreout In Remote Teams

"Zoom fatigue is not burnout. It's boreout. New study: when meetings are virtual, we're not overwhelmed--we're understimulated. Cardiac measures show drowsiness, not stress. The antidotes are common sense but not common practice: fewer, shorter, more interactive online meetings." 

- Adam Grant, Author of ‘Originals’, ‘Hidden Potential’, and ‘Think Again’

Apollo is an all-remote company, and we have team members working in 30+ countries. We are constantly building on our offerings and readjusting or reevaluating processes to support all team members the best way we can, but remote collaboration can sometimes be challenging. So, how can we best collaborate and continue to move fast while working across different time zones? Or, more importantly, how can we avoid reaching Zoom fatigue and the seemingly inevitable state of understimulated ‘boreout’?

I believe ‘interactive’ is the prominent keyword here that will make your remote meetings and rituals more productive and inspiring for everyone. Interactive rituals or habits can look like a culture of turning cameras on, actively participating in collaborative whiteboarding activities, turning yourself off mute to speak up about feedback, or leaving asynchronous comments on other designers’ files in Figma. Interactive rituals are naturally more engaging because they call upon participants to think outside the box and tap into their creativity. They require all team members to participate and make collaboration and over-communication a habit, and therefore a cultural expectation of the team. Nailing down effective design rituals and creating an interactive remote culture can be hard to establish and systematize at first, but it’s absolutely crucial for fostering collaboration and creativity so the team can move fast, innovate, and build a safe and fulfilling team dynamic.

Drawing inspiration from Apollo’s design team and previous remote-first companies I’ve worked for, let’s explore various practices that can enrich your own remote design team’s dynamics and foster more habitual, engaging rituals.

Design Team Rituals For a Thriving Remote Culture

Asynchronous Feedback: Slack & Loom

The design team Slack channel is a cornerstone for asynchronous communication. This virtual space allows designers to seek feedback and share ideas at their own pace, mirroring the flexibility of remote work. Leadership figures like your Chief Design Officer or VP of Design will play a crucial role in nurturing this digital community, fostering a sense of connectedness and support. This is a space where designers should feel safe to regularly ask for asynchronous feedback. At Apollo, we use Loom to record quick 1-5 minute walkthroughs of a design and then other designers can chime in with their thoughts in the Slack thread.

A note about good design feedback:

Asking for feedback as a designer: 

• Make sure you are specific about what type of feedback you’re looking for, and what you’re *not* looking for feedback on, so you can focus the attention on the goal at hand. Mention this at the very beginning of the Loom recording, and again at the end.

• To get the best feedback on your designs, make sure you provide context about the problem you’re solving and communicate clearly where those designs currently fall in the design process or lifecycle. By setting the stage and educating other designers on the team before jumping into the designs, you’ll set better expectations for what type of feedback would be most helpful.

Giving feedback as a designer: 

• Chiming in with feedback regularly (either synchronously on a call or asynchronously in a Slack thread) will help position you as a thought leader on your team and is a great way to build trust and develop your career, so don’t be afraid to speak up often

When it comes to asynchronous Slack culture, sometimes designers need a little prompting before they will show up with thoughtful engagement.

A note to design leaders to boost Slack morale on your team:

• Be prepared to ask your team fun or thought-provoking questions to spark conversation and build connections. Do this every week.

• Create a safe space where the design team can air any grievances in a remote working environment so you can have an honest pulse on what’s going on. One way to do this is by making your design team’s Slack channel private for only design team members.

• It’s your job to really set the culture here and show your team how to use this channel and keep them engaged.

Synchronous Weekly Design Critiques: Figma

Tailored for remote work, these 1-hour synchronous meetings focus on providing critique at any phase of the design process. Designers book their sessions through Notion ahead of time with how long they need and what type of feedback they’re looking for. This ensures structured and efficient feedback in a remote setting, enhancing the sense of collaboration. Sharing and participating in giving feedback is also highly encouraged, as it not only helps all the other designers on your team, but it can help you grow your career and point of view as a designer.

I’ve found that the most successful design critiques in my career have used a structured sign-up-form approach. Not only to ensure that everyone shows up prepared and with the right expectations, but also to maintain documentation and allow for asynchronous feedback from team members on the other side of the world.

Synchronous Weekly Design Jams or Workshops: FigJam

Weekly design jams can act as a 1-2 hour virtual playground for whiteboard exploration, creative collaboration, and remote learning or problem-solving. The goal and intention of this meeting is for it to be a true working session, and not a share-out presentation, status update, or design critique. Think of these as the remote version of those ‘hey, do you have a second?’ or ‘wanna grab a room real quick?’ drive-by meetings you used to have in person at your desk. 

These design jams could be an opportunity to work together on exploration, discovery, or workshopping in FigJam or Miro, it could be a place to share new information or inspiring products or learn the latest Figma features.

The goal of this jam is to work together on something in Figma and get your hands dirty, often with multiple designers and explorations in one file, then each designer goes around and shares their explorations (no matter how messy) so they could learn from each other and get new ideas. This is a safe space for playful creativity.

My personal favorite design jam activity is something called ‘Lightning Demos’ where participants will bring examples of products, apps, websites, or experiences that currently exist in the world to use as inspiration. These examples can be within your industry, outside of it, competitors, or just cool stuff that might inspire participants to think about new patterns to explore. If you’re interested in trying a Design Jam with your own team, you can start from this FigJam community template here.

Add-Ons to Make Connecting More Fun

Design Buddies

When a new designer joins the team, provide them with an ‘onboarding buddy’ on the design team to mentor and coach them through design rituals at your company. This is a great opportunity for more experienced designers to mentor new designers and grow their careers into leadership or management roles. Plus, it just feels good to give back and share valuable context and learnings with the next generation of designers! 

If you’ve volunteered to be someone’s design buddy, I’d recommend setting up a 10-minute daily standing meeting (over Zoom or Slack) at the end of each day where the new designer can ask questions, give feedback, or share their experiences in a safe space. After about 1-2 weeks, you can move this daily check-in meeting to a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly 1:1 as needed.

Monthly Design Parties

Of course, I can’t overlook the vital culture-building rituals we've established as a design team for the sake of pure enjoyment and team bonding. Every month, the Apollo design team gathers for our Monthly Design Party, diving into games like Among Us or Scribbl.io. These moments are our chance to unwind and bond beyond our regular day-to-day design tasks. Being designers, you'd expect us to excel at a drawing game like Scribbl.io, but in reality, we all face a wildly humbling challenge with the game's chunky, Microsoft Paint-like brushes, especially under intense time pressure. 

It's these moments, filled with hearty laughter, that bring us closer and allow us to discover more about each other as colleagues. Ultimately, the rapport with your coworkers significantly shapes your work experience and how you feel about a team or company. We're committed to maintaining this connection on the design team, ensuring that our culture feels rewarding and positive every single day we work together.

In-Person Offsites

This week, the entire Apollo design team is gathering in Los Angeles for an offsite to learn about and implement our new design system. Since we’re a remote-only company, we don’t have an HQ location or any offices, which I absolutely love because this levels the playing field for all employees. That said, we turned to Peerspace (the Airbnb of venue rentals) for our 3-day event, which also gives us an opportunity to experience new environments and create new memories together as a team. This is the first time I’m meeting my Apollo teammates in real life, and I couldn’t be more excited for a week of design jams, component workshops, dinners, and fun get-to-know-you activities!

Though this week’s offsite is a design team-only event, I’ve also participated in highly successful XFN (cross-functional) hackathons and design sprints in the past with team members from design, product, and engineering. During these hackathons or sprints we chose from a list of experiments or user problems that we could feasibly prototype and test within a week, and presented our work science fair-style. By the end of the sprint week, each team has prototyped something slightly outside of our day-to-day roadmap that would push us to think more innovatively as a company and reinvigorate our sense of wonder as a design team.

If you work in a remote-only environment, I highly recommend getting together for in-person collaboration once per quarter to boost morale, inspire and excite the team, and rally around interesting and complex design challenges. This will give your team’s productivity a jumpstart and give everyone a chance to connect and experience each other as a whole human beings, not just a two-dimensional face on a screen. These intensive retreats will also aid the team in gathering any necessary context that might’ve been missed via online communication.

Prioritizing Design Rituals

It’s important for design team rituals to be highly attended and prioritized by every designer on the team, because design team alignment also leads to better cross-functional alignment. These are the spaces where we’re able to consistently learn and understand what other squads are shipping or working on, align or collaborate on end-to-end experiences, or catch overlapping efforts so we can work smarter, more systematically, and more holistically.

‘Mandatory’ can be a scary word for busy people, but I believe the somewhat mandatory nature of these virtual sessions is the starting point to creating an intentional, highly-committed design culture with team members who actually stay aligned and updated on various projects.

Adopting these remote-optimized design rituals can significantly enhance the effectiveness and cohesion of remote design teams. By embracing the flexibility and collaborative potential of remote work, we can bust through understimulated ‘boreout’ and create more interesting, innovative, and interactive moments for designers every day.

Thanks for reading!