Remote Control — Remote Working. Last Monday I was drinking my morning…
By: Tom Kegode
Tags: Future Of Work, Remote Working, Culture, Workplace Culture, Remote Work

Communication

One of the things we miss the most when remote is face to face interaction. This can sometimes lead to us trying to do EVERYTHING via video call, its important to balance and mix a range of different types of communication to feel connected.

Phone Call — This has been around for some time and there is a reason for that. It’s an easy way to check in and have a quick catch up, it can be long it can be short, it can be work based it can be non work related. We have been picking up the phone for years….. then email came along and we started picking it up less. Let’s talk more

Video Call — Great for small team meetings and focussed 1:1 sessions but use with caution and less frequently for teamwide sessions;- it can get a bit messy with lots of attendees. Great tips for those new to video conferencing can be found Here.

“Get as few people on the call as possible,” says Bruce Daisley, author of The Joy of Work. “When you’ve got a collection of 50 postage-stamp-sized faces on the screen, it’s impossible to feel connected. And when you don’t know everyone in the meeting, you speak less frankly.”

Oh yeah … Please please please turn your camera on we’re in this together!

The Group Chat — The water cooler conversations and serendipitous catch ups are a lot harder to come by when working remote from your team. Think about repurposing your team chat to focus on the Human connections — Fun, Chat, Banter, Pet Pics, Best Dressed Desks, Evening Walks, Wellbeing tips, food tips….. You get the picture!

Use the technology to enhance our humanity and create those personal interactions.

Note: the above three communications channels can work in the same way in your personal and family interactions as well as work.

Collaboration

Collaboration Tool — This is where the magic happens, find the collaboration tool that works for you Slack, Google Docs, Microsoft Teams and use it to get the work done.

For my team and I Microsoft Teams has transformed our way of working and I’ll tell you why:

Say you are a carpenter, you go into your workshop, you get your tools, you pick up your project and you get to work, you put each tool back when you’re not using it but you can easily grab it when you need it for the next piece of work.

Microsoft Teams is Your Workshop.

My Day in Microsoft Teams

9:00 — I load up teams in the morning, I check my calendar that has synced from outlook. I join the team standup directly from the calendar It’s a video call, we agree a few key actions and add to the shared meeting notes which are saved to our team onenote

10:00 — I have a couple of quick questions for someone in the wider team so I open up a private chat through the chat function to clarify a few points, turns out it’s a bit more complex than I first thought, from within the chat we open a voice call…. sometimes its easier to talk things through

11:00 — One of the actions from this morning standup is to update a document that we are sharing with stakeholders I go into the files tab which opens powerpoint within teams, the little red square tells me one of the team is also updating it live and I can see the edits coming through. I make the changes. No need to save it autosaves to the cloud based sharepoint that backs up MS Teams.

12:00 — I go downstairs, have a bowl of Heinz Tomato soup with my partner and we talk about our days so far. The weather is looking ok for now so we take the dogs for a walk to get some fresh air.

13:00 — I head back up to the loft and notice a missed call on the teams app on my phone, there is a voicemail that has been converted to a sound file and saved within our private chat from a colleague who’s got an update on some news we have been waiting for i listen to this through my phone

14:00 — Leadership Meeting. We all video link in via teams and update actions that we agree to take.

15:00 — I’ve got a piece of writing to do so I set do not disturb on MS Teams open the word document and put some good vibey music on and start writing

16:00 — Time to check on emails, there’s a lot less because the use of teams has removed endless streams of transactional email. I wrap up for the day and head out with the dogs again (they are really enjoying this remote working stuff)

The native approach makes work a lot slicker and collaboration becomes more of a flow rather than transactional interactions.

Working Remote doesn’t mean you have to be disconnected.

It’s in your control.