This is a special 5-part series designed to help individuals who have been forced to transition from on-site work to working from home. During this series I will share my best practices of being effective while working from a home office. I have worked from a home office for over 30 years. There are essential habits you need to develop in the areas of office setup, discipline, time management, organization, and communication. During this difficult time, I want to help you master this part of your work life and aid in coping with this specific challenge brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
There may be some elements about working from home that you like. You have more control over your daily routine. You make more decisions about how you want to work, your working environment, and other parts of your workday. But to be sure, working from home isn’t necessarily easier than it was at your office or shop. In fact, more of your effectiveness and productivity now depend on your behaviors.
In the first four articles of my Working from Home guide, we’ve focused on establishing positive physical and mechanical elements to support your energy and productivity. Now it is time to focus on what is perhaps the most critical success factor of working remotely. Your communication skills.
Master these 3 specific communication behaviors to make sure you and your colleagues don’t miss a beat just because you aren’t physically together.
Change your In-Meeting Communication Practices
First things first. If your staff meetings, team huddles, or informal group brainstorming sessions are now taking place on a conference call or web app, get real with your colleagues about the new challenges you face. Talk about it.
When you are face to face with others, there are inherent benefits that are no longer present when you shift to meeting remotely. Body language is probably the most important. Physical presence and eye contact enable smoother communication between two or more people. You know when one person is ready to speak and when they are done speaking by observing them. You can read faces to understand if the statement you just delivered landed or recognize that you need to say more to communicate your point. There is another benefit to simple human contact. An emotional benefit. You look forward to seeing your colleagues and feel valued by sensing that others are paying attention to you and value your contribution. They feel that way about you too.
In remote meetings, these physical benefits are absent. You can’t tell if all eyes, or in this case ears, are on you when you speak. You can’t judge others’ reactions to words that are spoken, either by you or another person, to inform your own judgment about a topic, suggestion, or decision. You can’t stick your finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing so you can avoid going out on a limb you don’t want to stand on.
You aren’t the only one feeling this way now. Everyone has the same physical communication deficit as you. You may be used to calling in to meetings that take place in a conference room somewhere, when you must muscle your way into the in-room discussion. But this is different. Now nobody is in that conference room. Everyone has to elbow for airtime.
Agree on new protocols for your remote meetings. Push the group to make sure everyone is heard. Have a roster of attendees printed at your desk. Make the effort to make sure everyone is participating. You may have to assign roles in your meeting that you didn’t have before. Start a chat so that people who don’t get to speak much can submit suggestions or ask questions. You might need to shorten your agenda, so you are covering fewer topics, but are doing it more thoroughly.
Whether you are the leader or a participant, you must change your tactics to make your meetings work now. You cannot let anyone lose focus or interest because they are not being heard or respected in your remote meetings. Don’t leave that up to chance. Take control.
Improve your Preparation and Follow Up
There is no question that you’ll have to adjust your communication during remote meetings. But what about before and after the meeting?
Maybe you’re already good at this. You consistently provide a strong agenda, informed by collaborative input, and distribute it well enough in advance to allow participants ample time for preparation. After the meeting, you’ve got great notes on discussion points, decisions, and next steps. You polish them up and distribute them to your team so everyone can take the appropriate actions. If you already do this, great. Skip to the next section.
Actually, wait just a minute.
The truth is, we can probably all use a little, or a lot of improvement in these areas. Again, the change factor here is the formal and informal personal interaction that is now absent. No occasion to drop by someone’s desk to get their input on the agenda. No chance to poke your head into a production meeting to see if they are working on the next actions you assigned to them. No more management by walking around. Now everything must be premeditated. Deliberate.
Use this as an opportunity to refine your preparation and follow up skills. Use your empathy as your key enabler here. When you distribute a coherent agenda in a timely manner and you provide meeting notes and clear assignments after a meeting, you are demonstrating that you understand the value of your colleagues’ time. You are showing that they are important personally and in the function they perform for your organization. You are modeling the kind of respectful behaviors you want to see across your organization.
Be thorough and timely in how you prepare and how you execute, both in form and intention. Be sensitive to your colleagues and help them understand what they are accountable for under these new communication dynamics.
Keep your Soft Communication Alive
This might be the toughest part of communication to overcome in our current reality. The informal conversations. They play a significant role in how work gets done well, and may be the most difficult to measure.
Conversations at the coffee station. Quick lunches with key people. That walk or run you take with co-workers at lunch time. Your carpool, weekly happy hour, or sideline chatter at the kids soccer game. All these little interactions that influence thinking. Shift strategy. Solve problems. Maybe they just make you feel good or valued or happy.
Guess what? Those aren’t happening anymore. And that is a huge deal.
You need these interactions to get things done. Sure, you can replace them with phone calls, texts, e-mails, web meetings. But there is no substitute for the solutions that fall out of these accidental or habitual interactions. There just isn’t.
As a first step, take 30 minutes and rewind the tapes from your last few “normal” weeks of work. Catalogue all of those informal interactions. Who were you with? What did you talk about? Did you help someone solve something, or did you walk away with a new idea for a problem you were struggling to solve? Did a new opportunity arise that you wouldn’t have otherwise identified? Or, did you simply feel better about something as a result of talking to that person who infused you with increased energy to bring back to your work?
Once you have a full page of those interactions, commit to finding new ways to recreate the interactions in our new reality. Schedule a catch-up call with that person. Have a virtual coffee break or happy hour with your buddy group. Set up an open phone line or web meeting where people can connect in to talk about anything, work related or not, to regain that human connection. The gap in person to person interaction is going to be hard on you. These are the moments of our work that tend to keep us going when energy is sagging. Maybe your connection with others is more than half of the reason you choose to do the work you do. It is the same for all of us. We are all going through the same emotional turbulence. Be aware of this. Support your colleagues who probably feel like you do about the changes happening to all of us.
A final word on soft communication. Don’t simply replace these personal interactions with more texts or e-mails. We all know that texts, for example, tend to be impersonal. It is very difficult to read motivation on a text. We instantly try to derive where the other person is coming from based on the 8-word message. Don’t make the mistake of overloading your work relationships with more data. Most of us are already at our data digestion saturation point anyway. Force yourself to replace your high value face to face interactions with equal parts non-digital communication.
Working from Home – A Final Word
If you’ve been with me for all 5 parts of the Working from Home series, congratulations. You learned solid basic tactics about setting up your home office. You committed to apply discipline to your daily work routine. You are more prepared to manage your commitments and deliverables assertively. Your workspace is well organized and maintained for peak performance. And now, you have a few more communication tactics to help you and your colleagues thrive in your new circumstances.
These aren’t all the working from home tips you need. But they should be a good start. They are the basic tactics I’ve used in many years of working remotely. If you use them, you will certainly be more effective than if you do not.
I have shared these tips because I care about you. The COVID-19 pandemic is traumatic. If you have been touched by this illness yourself or through your family or friends, I feel for you. So far my family and I have been lucky. We have made changes in our lives and are trying to do our part, as you are. But my heart aches for those who have suffered. I know that all of our lives from this point forward will be different. Changed.
These basic techniques I have shared will not solve anybody’s big problems. They are the little things I know that work when working remotely. I hope they can remove a little bit of stress for you as you try to keep your work life intact. It is my greater hope that you and your loved ones stay healthy and emerge from this crisis stronger than ever.
Thank you for reading.
Previous: Working from Home – A COVID-19 Guide – Part 4 – Organization
Be smart. Be safe. Be healthy. Be kind.
Lead well.
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