Build common (virtual) ground with unstructured remote calls

Building trust through unstructured remote calls

As a remote consultant working with teams across North America, I've learned that the challenges we face are well beyond technical work—it's getting genuine face time with the people I'm working with. Remote consulting brings unique obstacles that folks in the same office do not have to navigate.

While witnessing companies everywhere pushing for a return-to-office, I've realized that championing the benefits and capabilities of remote work requires stepping up beyond the expectations of traditional workplace meetings and communication styles.

Over the past few years, I've discovered something powerful for my own work style and communication style: the unstructured, ad-hoc video call. I haven't come up with a clever name for these yet—sometimes I call them "coffee and code" or "open co-working calls."

How it works

The concept is simple. Using whatever video conferencing tools the team already has, I post a link to a call where I'm sharing my screen. I don't schedule these—I just paste a link whenever I have a free moment (usually I find myself doing this in the mornings) and encourage people to join if they're available.

As you'd expect, most people have conflicts or other priorities. But more than half the time, someone does join, and that's great!

During my first week with a new client, I'll often set up these calls while doing my own onboarding—setting up the codebase, configuring my development environment, and reading documentation. I'm not necessarily asking people to join so I can pepper them with questions. Instead, it's an opportunity to spend unstructured time together.

Sometimes I'll sit in a call like this for 45 minutes to an hour completely alone. Other times, people will pop in and out. Some just want to say hello or chat for a few minutes. Others expect to watch me work or work alongside me. I intentionally don't enforce any structure to these calls, especially early on.

Building trust as an outsider

I've learned that consultants can come across as intimidating. People are rightfully wary—they may have had experiences with consultants who came and went quickly or left a mess behind. What I want to do first is establish basic trust. I want to show up as a person who's genuinely interested in being part of the team, not just someone there to extract information and disappear. Luckily for me, this comes easily—I really enjoy this part of my work: meeting new people, learning from them, hearing what's going on for them.

But to do any of this successfully, you have to set realistic expectations. An ad-hoc call is never guaranteed to have attendees. In fact, I expect no one will show up. When I first started doing this, I recall feeling disappointed when people didn't show up. Over time, I learned that what matters is demonstrating intentionality—showing that I'm available and people can join if they want to. This creates a leisurely, welcoming atmosphere rather than the formality that can come with scheduled meetings.

That's not to say that scheduled meetings don't have their place! Realistically, when I want to meet and get to know my new team, I need to book time on their busy schedules to have a coffee chat and get to know them.

When people do show up, we usually chat for a bit, then I return to my work. I might ask a few questions, especially if I'm new to the team, and more often than not, I speed up my onboarding thanks to help from my new team members.

Embracing productive awkwardness

The most challenging part for me is transitioning from social time to actual work while people are still in the call. What I'm trying to simulate is sitting beside a colleague at say, a coffee shop, where both people can work in comfortable silence.

This concept can feel awkward in a remote-only workplace context. Embracing the discomfort of silence until it becomes comfortable takes practice; our orientation toward screens is almost always the act of "watching", rather than sharing space.  But, it's my hope that flipping video calls upside down like this is something that can be modeled and eventually become institutional.

The closest thing to serendipity

One unexpected benefit is that these meetings become less about obligation and more about freeform communication. This is the closest I've come to simulating the serendipitous conversations and moments that happen when sharing physical space with people.

There are some tools that facilitate this atmosphere really well (I'm looking at you Gather.town) but they're not always available in every company's toolkit.

Setting boundaries

Once I've established a presence through these calls, I work on setting clear boundaries and intentions once we know each other. After a few moments of chit-chatting with someone, this might sound like: "I'm going to continue working on this independently, but I'd love if you stayed to work on something too. I might occasionally ask questions—"What do you think?"

Over-communicating like this can feel uncomfortable without body language or facial expressions (especially when people are off-camera). It requires deliberate verbal tactics to set intent and establish boundaries. I am still not an expert at this; it certainly takes practice.

Making remote work more human

These unstructured calls won't solve every challenge of remote consulting, but they've become an essential part of how I build relationships and integrate with new teams. They turn the screen from a one-way-viewport into a window, and create space for the kind of organic interactions that make remote work feel more personal.

In a world where every meeting seems to have an agenda and a purpose, sometimes the most valuable thing we can offer is purposeless presence.

Tyler Sloane is a Senior Software Consultant at Test Double, and has experience in building complex web applications, and getting teams to talk to one another.

‍