So Long War Rooms! Six Ways to Engage Remote Proposal Teammates

Six Strategies to Engage, Collaborate, and Motivate Remote Proposal Teammates

1. Create clarity around tasks and responsibilities: Arguably one of the best (and potentially only?) benefit of having your entire proposal team in a war room is to keep tabs on them. Are they making progress on their assignments? Are they focused? Are they working on what they should be? Are we stepping on toes? Working remotely, it’s even more important to explicitly detail roles, responsibilities, and assignments for your team. A proposal management plan typically outlines the requirements of the proposal. In a virtual setting, take it a step further to clearly define roles using a responsibility matrix. Every team member should be 100% clear about their role on the project, their assignments, and their responsibility areas. Let’s face it – this should be true regardless, but even more important in a virtual setting.
2. Establish communication protocols and expectations: Between emails, chats, phone calls, and meetings, communicating in the digital age can sometimes seem overwhelming. Explicitly outlining when to use each form of communication is the difference between your team remaining informed and engaged, or important information falling through the cracks. Let’s start with meetings. Before scheduling yet another meeting with a subject line like “Quick Connect” or “Quick Update”, pause and think “Could this meeting be an email, chat, or a phone call?” Chances are, it could be. If you can have just one meeting each day, make it your Daily Stand-Up Meeting first thing in the morning. This is your opportunity to bring the team together, talk about progress from the previous day, identify goals and deadlines for the day, and discuss any potential roadblocks. Now let’s talk about email. Emails should be reserved for important updates that affect the entire team, and daily reporting. Just like starting the day with a Stand-Up Meeting, consider ending your day by sending a report to all participants with an overview of status, upcoming deadlines, and key information. Okay so if I’m only meeting with my team once a day and emailing them once a day, what do I do with the other “stuff” we need to discuss? Well, it’s likely just that – stuff. Questions for subject matter experts, clarification on requirements or assignments, feedback on content – this type of communication is best done via IM. With platforms like Microsoft Teams or Slack, all contributors can chat with one another in a group setting or 1:1, and refer back to the discussion later.
3. Build your knowledge backbone: Knowledge and content libraries are often overlooked, underfunded, and underutilized. Proposal professionals know they’re necessary, but are often moving from one deadline to the next without the luxury of time to pause and update content for future use. In both virtual and face-to-face settings, the more content you can have at the fingertips of your proposal managers, capture managers, and subject matter experts, the more efficient, effective, and streamlined proposal development will be. From your boilerplate text to updated resumes and projects, now is the time to invest in your knowledge library.
4. Use technology to your advantage: Remember when chalk boards were replaced with white boards and white boards replaced with smart boards? Well, there’s a new board that we all should have in our arsenal of collaboration tools: the online board. With tools like Microsoft Whiteboard and Mural, we are no longer bound to the confines of a conference room white board (or risk the possibility of your brainstorm being erased!). We now have white boards that we can access anywhere and at any time. Another key characteristic of war rooms are breakout sessions with key contributors, subject matter experts, and other stakeholders. Now, video conferencing platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom have breakout capabilities so you can remove yourself from the broader team to have 1:1 conversations or smaller strategy sessions.
5. Limit distractions and focus on deep work blocks: War rooms are synonymous with working hard (and working long hours). Those in the war room are expected to have their head down, making progress on their assignments and the overall deadline. On the flip side, in-person war rooms can also be incredibly distracting. One comment or question could lead to an hour-long discussion and disrupt the flow for all in the room. In a virtual setting, your team members have the ability to focus without distractions, in what we call deep work blocks. In between deep work blocks, it’s important to encourage your team to take regular breaks and step away from their computer. Bonus points! Try employing the Pomodoro method: as a group, agree to focusing for a one-hour deep work block with no distractions – no email, chat, phones. Then, come together for a 15 minute break to debrief, ask questions, post comments or ideas, or simply to talk about anything else other than your deadline!
6. Have fun! There are two types of proposal team experiences. There are those that are high stress, long hours, zero fun, and with little recognition or reward. Then there are those that are high stress and long hours, but that are fun, engaging, and rewarding. It goes without saying which type of experience you want to create for your team. As you’re scheduling out your proposal deadlines, consider also scheduling in moments for team building activities, virtual happy hours and coffee dates, or theme days – all where work talk is off limits. Bonus points! Reserve five minutes at the beginning of your daily stand-up meeting for One Good Thing – an around-the-horn rapid-fire opportunity for each team member to share one good thing happening in their personal life. Some days it might be as small as a fresh pot of coffee at home, others it could be as big as closing on a new house. We are more than our job, role, or career and the importance of providing a space for your team members to come together as people, not just coworkers, cannot be understated.

Bonus points! Reserve five minutes at the beginning of your daily stand-up meeting for One Good Thing – an around-the-horn rapid-fire opportunity for each team member to share one good thing happening in their personal life. Some days it might be as small as a fresh pot of coffee at home, others it could be as big as closing on a new house. We are more than our job, role, or career and the importance of providing a space for your team members to come together as people, not just coworkers, cannot be understated.

Of course, in-person war rooms will always have their place in the proposal world. Instead of being a requirement, though, let’s reserve in-person war rooms for those most critical of pursuits, and allow our proposal teammates space, flexibility, and balance we all so desperately crave.

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