As we come to the end of our second, and almost enter our third month, of social distancing because of the Corona virus, what are you doing to keep in touch with your team?
Staying in touch with colleagues is important and should not feel like a chore. In fact, “staying connected while working from home should come naturally”
Working from home is not uncommon in today’s corporate world, but it is enforced now due to corona. Either way, whether you are working from home as usual or due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be daunting to do so. Especially if you are used to working at the office.
The Difference between the Office and your Home
While at the office, it is easy to walk into someone else’s office to ask a question, or have a chat at the coffee machine. This is, of course, not so easy to do when at home. What can you do to stay in touch and keep connecting anyway? Luckily, we have quite a lot of means available to us to have meetings online, for example Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or WebEx.
Each of these communication tools are useful for meetings but certainly also for keeping in touch with your team. After all, they allow you to have all your team meetings and client meetings through online communication.
Stay in Touch
Use the tools you have to organize things. While your meetings will be able to continue though online rather than in a meeting room, will your socializing as well? The downside to working from home and not seeing your colleagues as much, is that it can create distance. Leaving you feeling disconnected.
Perhaps you can help each other out. Start organizing things! One great way to stay in touch with your colleagues is to organize a virtual coffee room session. While you cannot chat in the coffee room or have lunch together, organizing half an hour with a few colleagues just to chat is a great way to stay connected. What do you normally talk about during your breaks? Perhaps you can now share things by sending a photo of something funny your pet did. It is different, but all of these things can help you stay connected to your team.
What would you organize to stay in touch with your team? Think about it, discuss it with colleagues, and organize it!
Communicate well
As you will notice, or have already noticed, it is easy to run into miscommunication while you are all working from your own homes. It is therefore very important to keep communicating as much as possible about projects or the status of client relations throughout the weeks. Make sure to ask questions, or provide concise and clear feedback whenever anything might be unclear. In this remote setting, it is better to over-communicate than wait for the inevitable miscommunication.
In addition to trying to prevent miscommunication, share your successes! Keep your team updated on your progress, keep your calendar up-to-date so your colleagues and manager can see what you are doing.
Working from Home at FourVision
We, at FourVision, make sure to keep in touch with one another by using a few minutes during meetings to simply chat with each other. This is important to feel connected as in ordinary situations, we would be chatting in the office by walking to one another, or sharing our lunch hour. Besides that, we over-communicate rather than under and make sure to keep each other updated.
About us
FourVision is Microsoft’s global leading Dynamics 365 Human Resources implementation partner. We have successfully implemented HR platforms in a variety of industries across multiple Microsoft environments for over a decade. FourVision also delivers an impressive suite of Web Apps that extend Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources.
