Porobic Group Aces The Challenge of Team-Building & Communication in a Growing Remote Team

About the company

Porobic Group is a fast-growing and dynamic e-commerce solutions agency. Their main focus is helping their partners reach new heights in online sales by accelerating their growth through advertising channels, SEO, Influencer Marketing, website development and content creation.

The problem

Porobic's primary challenge was encouraging informal communication. Their team operates in a fully remote environment, which provides little to no opportunity to have the types of face-to-face interactions that typically lead to bonding and more productive collaboration.

Since the beginning of 2022, their remote team has grown by 50%. With this increase in the number of remote employees, some team members never even had the opportunity to get in touch let alone get to know each other.

Most teams in a similar position rely on remote communication tools like Slack or Google Meet to imitate the informal water cooler moments. However, these tools alone are usually not enough to truly bring the team together.

How Kosy Helped

Porobic's team turned to Kosy for a remote communication solution that would help with their primary challenge -- allowing team members to communicate effectively while also getting to know each other on a personal level.

Kosy is a customizable virtual office space and remote team collaboration platform. It's designed to help remote teams with the exact type of communication problems that Porobic was facing.

Porobic Group was able to bring their remote team together and improve communication across the board.

Here's how they did it.

Building a vast infrastructure of communication spaces

One of the first things Porobic Group did was create a variety of virtual rooms within Kosy to help their remote teams communicate more effectively -- whether they needed to collaborate or just have a quick chat.

Porobic Group set up a dedicated room for company-wide team meetings, personal offices for their team leaders, an open co-working space where team members could drop in and work on projects together, and a few different pods where teams could stay on the same page during collaboration sessions and host one-on-one meetings.

Kosy's Miro integration was also key to Porobic's success. The Miro integration allowed Porobic's team to access all of their mind maps and documents from within Kosy, making it easy for team members to find what they need, communicate effectively and stay on top of their work.

Introducing fun into remote work communication

While businesses often aim to improve remote team communication to stay on top of projects, they often underestimate the importance of personal connections in the workplace.

Interestingly enough, according to the Rutgers University study, by not encouraging informal communication in the workplace businesses are actually missing out on a valuable productivity boost and knowledge sharing among teammates.

Team bonding and socializing are essential for enhanced employee performance across the board. However, it is not as easy to encourage in a remote team as it might be in a traditional office setting.

This is where Porobic's introduction of fun into the workplace through Kosy really shined.

Porobic Group used Kosy's many features to their advantage and, first, created a cafe hangout spot in their virtual office. This gave their team the opportunity to informally interact with each other, have fun meetings, get to know each other on a personal level, and be able to take a breather while they work.

Also, if there is anything that is bound to incite team building while working remotely, it's a pool party -- and that is exactly what Porobic did.

They set up a pool in their virtual office space and invited their team to come and hang out, chat, and get to know each other better using a variety of games.

This simple yet fun activity not only helped improve communication among teammates but also strengthened relationships and overall employee performance.

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Implementing aesthetics into virtual office space

Research has long shown that office aesthetics have a direct impact on not only employee well-being but on their productivity as well.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the way a virtual office looks can impact employee productivity and job satisfaction. To capitalize on that, Porobic built a beautiful outdoor place in their Kosy office, complete with a pool (and floaties), which helped team members feel more relaxed and inspired while they work.

Moreover, Porobic's team is mostly made up of young people who found Kosy's design, interface, and interactivity similar to video games. Gamification (i.e. the use of game mechanics and design techniques in a workplace) is known to have a positive impact on employee productivity, so this was yet another way that Porobic was able to encourage their team to communicate more effectively.

According to research from Netsuite, technology plays a huge role for attracting and retaining Gen-Z employees, with 91% saying that it could be a dealbreaker when choosing between work offers. Younger employees typically switch between workplace tasks every 19 seconds as well as show preference for more advanced communication technology – all of which makes a virtual workspace such as Kosy a spot-on addition to a young dynamic team’s working environment.

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The Results

Meaningful remote communication and building personal connections, especially in a constantly expanding team, can be a challenge. However, with the right tools and approach, it is possible to overcome these challenges and bring remote team members closer together.

Porobic's story is a great example of how Kosy can help improve remote team communication and overall employee satisfaction.

By building a variety of fun and interactive activities into their workplace, Porobic was able to create a strong sense of community among teammates and encourage more effective communication.

The virtual office space also played a role in promoting employee productivity, as the team designed virtual office rooms for collaboration sessions, company meetings, and top leadership talks.

Porobic's experience with Kosy highlights the potential that businesses have to use virtual office spaces as a way to not only improve communication but also build better relationships among remote teams.

Although our company grew 50% since the beginning of this year, some of our employees have never actually been in touch. Now that we use Kosy for meetings, collaboration sessions, socials and hang-outs, team-bonding became an organic part of our workday

Jovana Markovic, Operations Manager at Porobic