With the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, most workplaces have asked their employees to work from home. Many people are happily welcoming the idea and are using it as an opportunity to strike a balance between their personal and professional life.
But for many, working from home without any interaction with their coworkers has led to various challenges.
Instead of being more productive, some employees are becoming more stressed, many are overworking, and some are even feeling disconnected. This is mainly because of the lack of communication with coworkers.
Since people aren’t meeting their teammates regularly, the scope of group discussion and collaboration has also decreased a lot.
This results in confusion, problems in decision-making, missed deadlines, even conflict amongst team members.
To avoid such negative effects from showing up, it’s important to improve communication among the team members even when they aren’t meeting in person.
If you’re not sure how to stay connected with your remote working team, the following points can help you stay in touch to improve productivity and stay motivated while working remotely.
1. Encourage Group Chats
Just because you’re working from home doesn’t mean that casual conversations are no longer important.
Little chats with the teammates about a weekend plan, or a viral YouTube video may not bring you business but that’s how people build relationships in the workplace and stay connected.
Most of us are used to small in-person chats with our colleagues during lunch breaks at work. But now with remote working being the new norm, you need to learn how to stay connected with your teammates even without meeting them in person.
A good way of doing that is to encourage your employees to engage in group chats. You can use business communication platforms like Slack to keep things smooth.
It’s easy to create different channels in Slack where your team members can interact with each other, talk about their family, share a joke, or say anything to keep in touch with one another.
This will keep things interesting and your employees will always have a sense of belonging too.
2. Hold Video Conferences Once a Week
Another brilliant way of staying connected with your remote team is to hold video conferences at least once a week.
Sometimes it’s difficult to convey your message accurately through chats or emails. Video conferences are a perfect means of communication that lets you talk to your employees face-to-face.
It’s a great way of making an important announcement, discussing ideas, clearing doubts, and strategizing a new course of action while keeping everyone in the loop.
Doing this also improves the decision-making capabilities of your employees.
3. Make Team Work More Effective
The key to building a successful business is to promote effective collaboration among your employees. It can boost work efficiency in the organization and boost productivity too.
Although it’s difficult to collaborate on projects with your remote working team, you have to find ways to promote an efficient teamwork environment in your company for better results.
A good way to do that is to use project management tools like Asana. By using these tools you can help your employees streamline their to-do lists and assign subtasks to each other without any confusion.
It also lets your employees add comments and suggestions for the assignee to avoid doubts, assign a due date for completing the task, etc. to ensure that everyone stays informed about the progress of the work.
4. Ask a Question of the Week
Another great way of staying connected with your remote team is to ask a question of the week. You can do this in whichever chat application you use. You don’t necessarily have to ask something related to work.
It can be anything silly like “Would you rather have a unicorn or a dinosaur as a pet?” or something more interesting like “What’s the most adventurous thing you did as a kid?”
Questions like this will encourage your employees to participate in the discussion and interact with each other through threads of chat.
You might also find a lot of interesting answers and get to know your teammates better even when you’re working from home.
Staying connected with your remote working team is important. Although it’s difficult to keep in touch with everyone without meeting in person, the above points can help you be in touch with your employees even without direct one-on-one, in-person engagement.