Love it or hate it, working from home has now become a normal part of life for so many of us across the world.
Remote working can have a huge impact on the strength and bonds of workforces, but there are a number of things you can do to limit the effects of home working and keep your team strong and connected.
In today’s blog, we’re going to take you through some of the ways you can keep your employees feeling – and acting – like part of a strong team.
Make yourself available (and encourage your team to be available, too)
Without a doubt, the most important thing that you and your employees can do to create and/or maintain a strong connection is communicate. Communication shouldn’t be a once in a blue moon activity, it should be something that you implement and really stick at.
It’s always better to over communicate than to under communicate. An excellent way to make sure your team is communicating properly is to hold weekly team meetings, whether that’s over Skype, Microsoft Teams or something else. These meetings could be company wide or by department and it can really help to see everyone’s faces, so encourage people to turn their cameras on!
If you’re an employer or a manager, one of the best things you can be at the moment is available. Try to be as accessible as possible during working hours. Keep your phone on throughout the working day and take calls from your workforce or department as often as you can. If you can’t take a call for whatever reason, always call back when you’re able to.
In the same vein, encourage your employees to follow suit. If they can be available to talk as much as possible throughout the working day, it’s easier for everyone to communicate.
Don’t make collaborating a chore
Encouraging people to collaborate isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but can be especially challenging when working from home. Making the most of the tools out there that can help will make it a much easier task.
Project management systems such as Basecamp and Trello are great for aiding collaboration, but there are plenty of other ones out there and what you choose will depend on what best suits your needs.
Curate water cooler conversation
Non-work-related, social conversations (a.k.a. water cooler conversations) help employees bond and really add to the overall enjoyment of a workplace. However, it can be incredibly difficult to engage in water cooler conversation remotely.
There are a few ways around this, though. When you have meetings, try allocating the first or final ten minutes for social chit chat. It keeps things under control time wise, but still allows for some fun conversations and team bonding.
Also, you can give your team access to instant messaging specifically for non-work-related conversations. That could be through a specific Slack channel or a tool like Google Hangouts.
Don’t forget growth
A big part of many people’s working lives is career progression – it’s easy to put that on the back burner when working from home.
Lots of people will be feeling that their career goals are on hold since they’ve had to work from home, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
If you do annual or quarterly appraisals, make sure you still do them when working remotely. Similarly, offering your team training and opportunities to learn can really help them to feel valued.
See Events specialises in keeping workforces connected and bonded with team building activities. We’re offering virtual team building activities at the moment – click here to find out more.
