While many companies, faced with keeping their employees safe with coronavirus, have made the transition to working from home with a tremendous amount of grace, there is one thing that many people are missing during this time: interaction with colleagues.
As members of a remote team are tasked with doing the same job under different conditions than their in-office counterparts, it is important that you hire the right people for your remote work teams. The best remote workers are self-starters who require minimal supervision. They must certainly be problem solvers–since they can’t ask questions any time they want, you want to make sure that they are the kind of people who are willing to research answers or create novel solutions when nobody is around to help them.
If your team has transitioned to remote work from an office environment and you did not have the opportunity to be deliberate in your choices regarding which employees would work from home, lay out clear expectations for your team. What habits do you expect them to utilize in their new role? What norms do you want to be clear for them as they embrace these new challenges? Set your standards and don’t be afraid to engage in regular check-ins until you are confident that they are being met.
When working remotely, you lose the ability you once had to pop into the office next door and ask your colleagues questions. This means that teams have to be particularly intentional about how they approach collaborating with one another. This can be especially critical when it comes to working with clients that various team members might assist.
Create strong and efficient systems for your team to engage in and then sit back and allow them to show you their strengths. If something is not going as well as you would hope, avoid the temptation to micromanage. Hold a quick meeting with that employee to let them know your expectations, allow them to ask any questions that they may need, and then give them the room to prove themselves. In most cases, they are likely to meet, and even exceed, your expectations.
Because remote teams do not work together in-person, people often experience a temptation to cut the fun. With virtual productivity apps checking our keystrokes and clicks, many of us feel an urge to get as much done as we can in as little time as possible. While we certainly aren’t telling anyone to lower the bar for their own productivity, we are telling you that it is okay to let your hair down a little bit. Take a couple of minutes to check in with your team members at the beginning of a meeting; as you build relationships with your team and develop faster working habits as a result, these check-ins will pay dividends.
At LightHouse Graphics, we engage in a couple of small, but meaningful rituals that helps us to stay connected. First, we go out of our way to remember birthdays, and, where possible, celebrate them over video chat. Second, we carve time in meetings for icebreakers and other activities to better understand each other. These small, but deliberate choices, help us to feel a part of a broader team, which allows us to work with each other in a more relaxed, streamlined capacity.
