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content and communications

Remote First: Communication and Collaboration

7 April 2021 · by Margit Grobbel

This post is the latest installment in our new “Remote First” series. We’ll be exploring what becoming a fully remote company means for the InterNations Team and how this policy will be implemented across different workstreams — from HR to IT support.

In the second half of 2020, working remotely had turned into our “new normal” due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. When it became increasingly obvious that certain restrictions on where and how we were able to work would apply for longer than expected, our management board also started discussing what working at InterNations should be like in post-pandemic times.

It was then that the idea for our new remote-first policy — as announced during the InterNations Kick-Off 2021 — was born. In the future, the team members of InterNations and InterNationsGO! will be able to work from anywhere in Germany or Portugal, respectively, at any time. Even working permanently from another country may be possible on a case-by-case basis. Once this game-changing decision had been made, the first step was to define all workstreams that it would affect. Several project teams have been busy working out what exactly will change with regard to legal and financial issues, HR, our internal IT infrastructure, our office setup, our corporate culture, and — last but not least — communication and documentation.

Actually, we began to change the way we communicate and collaborate on the very first day of remote work. “We started planning a new concept for internal communication the moment we all went remote back in 2020, but we’ve had to rethink our way of organizing it since then,” says Caroline, our Team Lead Corporate Communications. In short: It was time to systematically evaluate our approach, not only to internal communication, but also to meetings and documentation, and see whether it would hold up in a remote-first setting.

“We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, though,” adds Franziska, our Team Lead Product Content. The aim was rather to come up with best-practice advice on what is most relevant for our organization, drawing inspiration from Silicon Valley tech companies, such as GitLab, who have embraced remote work for quite some time now. Building upon the technical infrastructure we already have, the tools we have all been using, and the team culture we’ve established, the project team wants to ensure equal participation for everyone, regardless of their location.

Since we went remote, we’ve intensified our communication on messaging services.

No Such Thing as Too Much Communication

The abrupt switch to remote work in March 2020 highlighted the importance of internal communication for a large team such as ours. Though it might often be deprioritized in favor of communicating with an external audience — for instance, reaching out to media contacts or replying to social media comments — internal communication is now more vital than ever, and not only to keep all team members informed of the ever-changing COVID-19 regulations!

A situation where all or part of the team work remotely makes it more difficult to keep everyone up to date and engaged, simply due to the lack of casual interactions at the office. Therefore, internal communication needs to be as timely as possible and create maximum transparency. “Basically, there’s no such thing as too much communication,” Head of Content & Communications Kathrin emphasizes. “The physical distance created by the situation should not lead to an emotional distance or to people feeling left out of the loop. That is one of the challenges internal communication faces in a remote setting.”

To adjust our internal communication strategy, we relied on the tools we had already and intensified our scheduled communication on the instant messaging service Slack. It has also become a little more personal in nature, focusing on posts that will spark engagement and discussions among our team members. Off-topic and off-beat questions can help recreate those casual conversations that would normally happen in the hallway or the office kitchen. Be it favorite meals or childhood cartoon heroes — such non-work-related chats get a bit of social interaction going. (For example, I was quite relieved to find out that I wasn’t the only one majorly obsessed with Sailor Moon as a kid!)

As the novelty of working remotely has worn off and we all settled into our routines, we are planning to return to a stronger focus on the InterNations community in the near future. For the past year, posts promoting our events in Munich and Porto among our team have been rare as there have also been fewer events during the various phases of lockdown. But one of our goals in internal communication is still to bring the members of our community closer to our team members who may not interact with them on a regular basis.

Internal communication can be used as a tool to help us understand who our members are, how we can support them best, and what kind of impact our work has. “We are currently brainstorming ideas for sharing personal quotes and stories from InterNations members,” Caroline explains. “For example, we might use Slack to showcase some stories from a member survey on how COVID-19 has affected their expat life.” 

A remote-first meeting culture means that all future meetings will take place online.

A Meeting Culture to Ensure Equality Regardless of Location

While internal communication is probably the most visible part of the whole communication and collaboration workstream, the rest of the cross-departmental project team — Kathrin, Franziska, and our CTO Lars — has been hard at work behind the scenes.

“Like in the other workstreams, the starting point and the goal of a remote-first meeting and working culture is to ensure equal participation independent of location. Nobody should feel left out or disadvantaged because of where they work,” Kathrin explains. “Being able to come to the office in person shouldn’t give you any advantages in terms of infrastructure, participation, or access to information.”

Even when we no longer have to stick to COVID-19 health-and-safety rules at the office, every meeting will still take place online by default. There should never be a situation where part of the team is in the same room together while just a few team members are joining remotely. This setup automatically creates a hierarchy where the people sharing the same physical space have an advantage, whereas the remote participants aren’t on an equal footing. For them, it’s always more difficult to really get involved in the conversation. So, everyone will be joining all future meetings with a headset from their own laptop, even if they are at one of the InterNations offices.

This one decision has various implications for our meeting culture, for instance, concerning the technical setup and functionalities required for a virtual meeting. “Most of our guidelines are dictated by common sense, but it’s still worth spelling them out,” Kathrin stresses. Best-practice recommendations vary depending on the type and size of the meeting, but some rules always make sense: keep background noise and visual distractions to a minimum, mute yourself while not talking, use the software’s reaction features instead of interrupting the speaker, to name but a few.

In addition to this, the presenter needs to keep in mind that Zoom fatigue is real and videoconferencing can actually be more exhausting than attending an in-person meeting. They should always include some interactive elements to keep the participants from mentally checking out in long meetings with a large audience. Fortunately, remote meetings do have certain advantages too. They often tend to be more focused and effective exactly because the participants may find long video calls tiring. And they also enable collaborative notetaking during the meeting to keep the relevant documentation as detailed and up to date as possible.  

Once introduced, the new meeting culture guidelines should become second nature to our team: all future colleagues will also hear about them during our remote onboarding process. The guidelines might even impact the design of the new and improved InterNations office in Munich. Huge meeting rooms might become obsolete, for example, while smaller spaces reserved for video calls could accommodate our virtual conferences.

Documenting important tools and their functionalities should make working together as easy and smooth as possible.

An Increasing Need for Documenting

While collaborative documentation during remote meetings can be a huge benefit, a remote-first policy also increases the general need for documentation. “The purpose of the documentation project is actually twofold,” Franziska explains. “First of all, there should be a certain shift in everyone’s mindset.” All team members should be aware of how important documenting their work is and be able to quickly find the information they need. “Such a change takes time, though. People need to get used to it, and they also need role models who foster this spirit among the team.”

Franziska and her Product Content Team are setting an example: they have been busy expanding our company wiki with an overview of all the tools widely used for remote communication and collaboration across the entire organization. GitLab — one of the role models for this project — has published their entire documentation on their internal tools and processes for an all-remote team. This has, in turn, inspired Franziska’s team to document the way we work with specific tools. “For example, if our new meeting guidelines specify that team members should make sure their Outlook calendar shows their standard working hours, we’d better provide them with a quick how-to,” she says.

The documentation focuses on best-practice tips to make our day-to-day work as easy and frictionless as possible, reacting to actual questions asked by colleagues and pointing out options that might be especially helpful for some team members. “One of our colleagues is using a screen reader, for example. So, you can’t just share your desktop as a video. Instead, you need to share the actual PowerPoint presentation in MS Teams to enable the reader to ‘view’ your slides, and our documentation tells you how this works,” Franziska explains.

On top of the various wiki pages, organizing personal trainings for specific tools is the next step. Of course, like internal communication, proper documentation is never finished. “That’s the other thing about documentation,” she adds. “Tools get updated, workflows keep changing, and the work is never done.” It is an ongoing process — as is changing our company to a remote-first organization with a remote-first mindset and an adapted team culture that’s stronger than ever.

Filed Under: InterNations Corporate Culture, Remote First Tagged With: content and communications, corporate communications, remote work, working from home

Job Profile: What Does a Copywriter Do All Day?

9 October 2020 · by Margit Grobbel

In the series “Job Profiles”, we talk to various members of the InterNations team about their position and the work that they do.

For the latest instalment, we’ve interviewed Crissy, a US American expat who works in our Content & Communications Department.

Crissy’s official profile picture
[Read more…] about Job Profile: What Does a Copywriter Do All Day?

Filed Under: InterNations Team, Job Profiles Tagged With: content and communications, copywriting

Gaining Work Experience as an Intern in the Social Media Team

26 May 2020 · by InterNations_CC

When her internship was coming to an end, we asked our Social Media Intern Darcie to sum up her experiences at the InterNations office in Munich.

[Read more…] about Gaining Work Experience as an Intern in the Social Media Team

Filed Under: Behind the Scenes, InterNations Corporate Culture Tagged With: content and communications, guest author, interns, internships, social media

Job Profile: What Does a Corporate Graphic Designer Do All Day?

7 February 2020 · by Margit Grobbel

In the series “Job Profiles”, we talk to various members of the InterNations team about their position and the work that they do.

For this installment, we interviewed Salim, a Lebanese expat and graphic designer working in our Content & Communications Department.

Salim’s official team picture
[Read more…] about Job Profile: What Does a Corporate Graphic Designer Do All Day?

Filed Under: InterNations Team, Job Profiles Tagged With: content and communications, corporate design, graphic design, visual design

Behind the Scenes: A Hands-On Introduction to the World of PR

10 January 2020 · by InterNations_CC

Our interns from the PR Team have all collaborated for this guest post, which provides a handy summary of their shared experience at InterNations.

Natalia, Lewis, Siham, and Amelia in the InterNations Team Lodge

A Bit about Us: Who We Are and What Brought Us Here

The Public Relations (PR) Team has four interns: Amelia, Siham, and Lewis, who are from the UK, as well as Natalia, who’s from Spain. We are all in the third year of our undergraduate degrees. Amelia and Siham are both at the University of Bath, with Amelia studying politics and international relations and Siham pursuing an international development degree with economics. Natalia, who is at Bournemouth University, studies media production, and Lewis has opted for medieval and modern German at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

Since Natalia has been an expat in the UK for the past two years, this internship in Germany is not her first time living abroad. Likewise, prior to starting university, Amelia spent six months in Australia, living in Melbourne for five and spending her final month travelling along the East Coast. After that, she explored Southeast Asia for another two and a half months, visiting Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

“Due to my love of travel, one reason I applied for the internship was the opportunity to discover a new city, whilst simultaneously gaining experience in corporate communications”, Amelia explains. For Lewis and Siham, on the other hand, it’s their first experience living abroad. “I applied because I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and learn something new”, shares Siham.

Like Siham and Amelia, Natalia found her internship on her university’s career hub and decided to apply as “the job seemed to offer a lot of challenges for me, so I could grow personally and professionally”. And Lewis states, “I wanted to see what doing public relations was like, and I think the skillset that comes with the internship is useful to learn” — something we can all agree on.

The application process was quite straightforward. After doing some research on the company culture and working in PR, we first sent in our CVs and personal statements. The next stage was to complete a short English test by answering a competency-based question, then we each wrote a longer press release within a four-hour time limit. The final part, and maybe the most nerve-racking, was a one-on-one Skype interview with Caroline, the Team Lead Public Relations, about our interest in PR.

Building relationships with journalists is an essential task for the PR interns.

A Day in the Life of a PR Intern at InterNations

Throughout the year, the PR team, alongside several other teams in the company, plays a major role in preparing our two biggest press campaigns: the Expat Insider survey — one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive surveys on life abroad — and the Expat City Ranking. As interns, we get a wide scope of responsibility during these periods, from researching media contacts to building relationships with them, for example, by sending them our press materials or by answering their press requests.

While we were working on these projects, our confidence in the use of Excel has grown. We’ve also gained experience in interpreting survey data and transforming them into digestible press releases. Aside from our project-based work, our day-to-day tasks include keeping track of InterNations’ news coverage, updating our internal wiki with company news, and monitoring the press account, the PR Team’s joint email account.

This internship has allowed us to develop both our written and verbal communication skills, mostly when contacting journalists and answering press requests. In this role, we have been quite lucky to be able to learn to use PR specific tools, such as Cision, a program used to contact journalists from our database, while gaining a deeper understanding of the PR realm.

An Array of Projects within the Company

It is not just PR that we’ve learned about during our internship. Other external projects have provided us with the opportunity to apply our creative flare, such as the Interns’ Project and our Creativity Newsletter, a compilation of clever advertising and marketing campaigns put together by the Content & Communications Department. Some of us — Siham and Amelia — have also had the opportunity to hold their own workshop for the other members of the Content & Communications Department. We chose to do an interactive presentation on the effects of negative press and how a company can reduce this risk.

Additionally, the Interns’ Project is an opportunity for all the interns across different departments to meet and work together. Recently, we finished working on the “InterNations Charitable Christmas”, for which we organized a cake sale to raise money for two charities. One of them was the Ronald McDonald Haus in Munich, which provides a temporary home for families with young children who are in and out of hospital for a variety of reasons.

Once we’d raised the money, we had the opportunity to visit the house and learn more about the work the volunteers carry out there. Their everyday tasks include, for instance, finding funding for food and other necessary products for the families who are temporarily living in the house, and providing moral support through tough times. This was an eye-opening and rewarding experience!

The interns after handing over their donations to the Ronald McDonald charity

Also, every month we hold the Interns’ Department Exchange, where interns from different teams explain what a day in their job is usually like. We also have the chance to learn about other departments by applying to the regular Department Exchange sessions, which are more flexible and spontaneous.

“I chose the Learning & Development Team for the Department Exchange. They gave me an in-depth explanation of a day in their job and more details about the development projects they are currently working on. It really helped me see our company from a different angle”, Natalia says. Amelia also took part: “As for me, I visited the Corporate Partnerships Department, which provided me with an insight of how InterNations builds and maintains relationships with our global and local advertising partners”.

Juggling these multiple responsibilities has allowed us to strengthen our teamwork and time-management abilities through distributing and organizing our various tasks within our tight-knit team.

The Best Things about Office Life

The company culture is among our favorite aspects of the internship, due to the importance placed upon having different cultures and nationalities within the company to make it more diverse and international. “As cliché as it sounds, my favorite part of the internship is the people I get to work with — everyone is warm and friendly, and there is a very supportive atmosphere,” Lewis thinks. Since he studies German, he personally “also likes the various opportunities to do translations for our German press releases”.

Overall, we all really value the way that Team Lead Caro pushes us to rapidly improve through clear and kind guidance. “The colleagues are also very friendly, and my supervisor guided me very well during the first few days, although her expectations were quite high!” explains Natalia. “This is a very nice internship because you’ll gain some actual experience, where your work makes a real impact on the world.”

Another highlight is definitely the team-bonding activities on offer. There are always opportunities to catch up with “teamies” in other departments who we don’t get the chance to work with directly. Some examples include the Christmas party, where we shared Secret Santa gifts, and the team breakfasts on Monday mornings, which we always attend for a relaxing start into the week. Within the Content & Communications Department, we organized a great outing to Air Hop, a local trampoline park, and we also had a huge Thanksgiving lunch, where everyone brought in their very delicious home-cooked dishes.

InterNations interns also rock at karaoke!

Life beyond the Office

With summer weekends spent in the Englischer Garten or relaxing in one of the many beer gardens, and with Oktoberfest in autumn and the many Christmas markets in winter, life in Munich has been full of various things to see and do. Outside the city, with the mountains being just a step away, we have also had the chance to spend our weekends hiring boats and swimming in the lakes, climbing, hiking, and walking in the mountains, and skiing in the winter months. Amelia thinks: “It is really amazing how quickly you can escape the city and visit such beautiful places!”

However, as much as we enjoy living and working in Munich, it is a very expensive city to live in! One thing that we can all agree we’d change about our internship are the living expenses.

Why We’d Recommend This Internship

On a whole, we would all recommend the internship, the high cost of living in Munich notwithstanding — you get to learn a lot of useful skills thanks to the wide variety of tasks you do throughout the placement. While some projects can eventually get repetitive towards the end, the opportunity to consistently practice and improve what you’ve learned is really valuable.

In any case, there’s always a new project to dive into just on the horizon. In short, Natalia believes that “the internship offers a complete hands-on experience in the world of public relations. This company is rather small — but not too small! — and a friendly place to start off as an intern!”

From warmer climes to a career in politics, the interns share their #lifegoals.

What the Future Holds for Us

While our immediate plans all include completing our final year at our respective universities, our future plans are much broader. With Lewis moving to Berlin to pursue an additional German-speaking internship, he states, “I definitely want to travel abroad more and could see myself doing another year or so in a German-speaking country, just for the challenge and to keep up my language skills.” Having adjusted to the cold and wet climate in both the UK and now Germany, Natalia thinks that although she may consider working in the UK for a few years after graduating, she will “then move to another country with warmer weather!”

After gaining her master’s degree, Siham would like to pursue a career in policy-making for an international development consultancy: “Although I want to work for the UK government, I’d love to have the opportunity to travel the world as much as I can.” Like the other interns, Amelia also has plans to discover new places, with the goal of travelling to South America and to New Zealand after university. “However, once I have completed one more year of travelling, I would like to follow a career in political affairs.”


Image credit: InterNations / iStockphoto / private

Filed Under: Behind the Scenes, InterNations Corporate Culture Tagged With: content and communications, guest author, interns, internships, public relations

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