It All Starts With a Smile: How To Foster a Sense of Belonging in Remote Teams

### Overview Eleni Katsula, Engineering Operations Manager and former Engineering People Lead at Collabora, explores how to establish and maintain a genuine sense of belonging in distributed and remote engineering teams. Highlighting that belonging is a core value of the open-source community, Katsula explains how creating an inclusive and empathetic environment increases job satisfaction, supports work-life balance, provides meaning to daily work, and mitigates employee turnover in volatile job markets. She outlines practical leadership frameworks, company policies, and interpersonal approaches drawn from Collabora's practices to support remote workers as complete human beings.

### Key Topics - **Importance of Belonging:** A strong sense of belonging reduces remote isolation, boosts engagement and retention, and reinforces the collaborative ethos foundational to open source. - **Success Criteria:** A successful culture welcomes individuals of all backgrounds, identities, and skill levels, creates avenues for genuine connection, minimizes workplace dread, and ensures employees trust that their feedback and concerns will lead to real organizational action. - **Core Interpersonal Pillars:** - *Empathy:* Understanding colleagues' stress, joys, and struggles beyond hierarchy or job titles. - *Flexible Communication:* Adapting communication modalities (text chat, voice call, or video call) and cadence based on individual comfort and needs rather than forcing a uniform standard. - *Constructive & Frequent Feedback:* Providing 360-degree feedback focused on growth, support, and guidance rather than punitive criticism. - *Leadership & Professional Growth:* Fostering autonomy, offering technical direction (pair programming, code reviews, progress reports), and investing in career development.

### Technical Details & Organizational Frameworks Katsula details the specific engineering framework implemented at Collabora approximately three years prior to divide technical guidance from individual people support: - **People Leads:** Focus entirely on individual professional growth, well-being, feedback, and regular non-technical 1-on-1s. They organize regular informal "cluster calls"—cross-domain social gatherings that encourage connection without rigid work agendas (e.g., sharing hobbies or astrophotography updates). - **Business Strategy Leads (formerly Domain Leads):** Steer technical and commercial strategy alongside senior management, directing R&D investments and initiatives. - **Quests & Guilds:** "Quests" represent strategic R&D projects exploring emerging technologies. "Guilds" serve as bi-weekly technical affinity groups (such as Rust, Kernel, Multimedia, and Hardware Enablement) where engineers share progress and presentations. - **Open Source Citizenship Policies:** Engineers receive paid travel and time to attend community conferences and hackathons. Collabora maintains an explicit "upstream policy" providing engineers time to maintain personal or upstream projects independent of commercial consulting projects. - **Recognition & Well-being Tools:** Use of a Mattermost "kudos" system to celebrate peer achievements, alongside company-wide health initiatives, expert-led wellness talks, and team photo challenges (like the "paparazzi challenge").

### Takeaways - **Maintain Healthy Boundaries:** While practicing empathy, leaders must shield themselves from absorbing personal trauma, recognize the boundary between coaching and professional medical/psychological help, and balance individual advocacy with business responsibilities. - **Embrace Authenticity and Vulnerability:** Genuine vulnerability and humor from leadership demystify authority, normalize human imperfection, and foster deep mutual trust. - **Autonomous Respect:** Trusting engineers to manage their own time without micromanagement respects their professional expertise and reinforces belonging.