When you working from home, your team only talks to you over Slack or Zoom. There’s no physical interaction. So we need to sharpen our remote communication skills. There’s no doubt!
Here are 5 tips to improve your communication while working from home.
1. Create in-depth onboarding videos and resources
Are you a manager? It’s challenging to train new employees while working from home. And new employees also have a lot of questions and confusion regarding the onboarding process and training.
You can get irritated by taking calls every time new hires have questions. So how can you save time and make your process easier?
Create onboarding and training videos that show how to use your company’s culture and standard programs. And share these videos with new employees. They can re-watch these videos when they have any doubts.
2. Avoid boring text documents by using visuals
While regular work can become very monotonous, you can do something about it with imagery. Often long documents become unreadable and impact the productivity of employees as well as their motivation. This is because it looks like a lot of work, and the human brain finds it hard to keep its attention sustained for an extended period.
In such situations, it is also possible that employees neglect essential details about the work, thus impacting the overall project. Make sure you add pictures and visuals to ease the task.
3. Prioritize video calls
Video calls aren’t meant for spying on you. Most employees keep their videos shut during a meeting as they don’t feel very comfortable. However, while connection issues are genuine, you must connect with your team via video calls once in a while.
When you can see people around you, it feels more like a physical workspace and enables you to communicate ideas more clearly.
For employees, this can be an excellent opportunity to understand the concepts being conveyed better. After all, it is always better to look at the speaker than starting at dark screens.
4. Improve your writing skills
Writing skills are an essential aspect of communication, no matter what. In an organization, you might not always be able to call people and explain the situation.
Most of the formal work has to be sent via emails and other forms of written communication. Even if you are creating a document for a job assigned to you, writing skills become fundamental to complete it.
5. Respect coworkers’ working hours
Always respect your colleagues’ working hours. Your colleagues might have different work hours. They will wish to wrap up the work within the time and spend time with their families doing something they like.
While you should have the same approach in a work environment for a healthy work-life balance, you must respect your team members. This means scheduling meetings, asking for any feedback or report, all within their work hours.
Article was originally published at Springworks Blog