Anyone who has worked remotely would agree with me that there is no "start of" nor "end of" the working day. One feels more compelled to be glued to the computer because it is there, in your living room, or in your home office. Your remote co-workers would want to communicate with you at all times (or at odd times) depending on how they are organizing their days. If there is no guidance about communication etiquette people will use email, chats, IMs and whatever they think of to communicate with each other. That it why it is important to have a shared understanding within your teams about how, what type and when to communicate when teams are moving to working remotely for the first time.
Here you will find some suggestions related to communicating while working in virtual teams:
1. E-mail: When working remotely email will become more important than ever. I suggest to prioritize, at the beginning of your working day, which messages to answer first. Identify those messages that are important and that needed long responses. Send a brief reply telling the recipient when you will answer (put an entry on your calendar to answer this LONG message. Or simply use the “task” feature on the email message with a specific time to reply). Do reply by the time you committed since this is one way to create trust in virtual environments. This approach is also called “decreasing transactional distance” (you can look up this term on the web for more info).
2. Choose the right tool for the right message: Instant Messaging(IM) for quick messages that require quick answers; email for longer ones. Be mindful that each culture-organization prefers specific IMs such as whatsapp, wechat or slack, etc. But be clear with your team on how you will use each means of communications. If you decide to use IM, I suggest to label each chat according to the topic it covers. This will be very important since instant messaging can get out of control if conversations are not labeled (you will think about this when you are using “slack” ).
3. People will now email you at any time of the day-night. Set expectations with your team about when a reply is expected. I suggest to keep your same schedule as you had before going remote.
4. Virtual teams go through different stages (but that is the topic of another long post-video). So be mindful of this.
5. Trust is created in many ways in virtual teams. One way to create trust at a distance is based on you being responsive to requests as well as delivering upon commitments (there are cultural variations for developing trust in virtual teams, for example the ability to get along in some cultures is more important before starting to work on specific goals, but that is the topic of another long post-video).
6. If you are working with clients and are moving many of your operations virtually define a "communications plan" for your customers/clients including what has changed now for them, what impact working remotely will have for your clients, how your team will communicate with clients, what is changing now, expectations, and any change that you believe is impacted by the way you are now operating (e.g. expected times, how problems will be funneled, changes in delivery times, etc.).
7. Have weekly virtual check ins (or bi-weekly, etc.). This will keep virtual teams focused while they are used to work remotely.
8. And one last word for now. Do not, by any means, send an email or message when you are mad, upset, annoyed, infuriated. You don’t want to regret what your fingers can type in those situations. Remember that your adrenaline will enable you to do something but it is important that you engage your frontal lobe (critical thinking and planning) not your amygdala (anger, fear, etc.) when you are responding virtually.
I know there are more best practices but for now I need to dedicate my next 4 hours to develop my next 1-hour virtual class. Please feel free to add to this post your best practices working remotely.
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