Remote Work: How to Keep Your Teams Connected and Productive

With the sudden move to remote work in response to COVID-19, some businesses were caught by surprise. How can you transition your team to at-home work and still stay connected and productive? Erin, Syte’s founder and CEO, takes a moment to answer those questions . . .

Remote Work Mindset

As everyone—you and your people—adjust to this new reality, it’s helpful to keep communication and relationship-building front-of-mind:

• It’s okay to maintain high expectations when you transition to remote work, but that needs to be paired with high support from leaders and managers.
• Expect the transition to be messy. You might have an office in your home with a door that locks. Don’t expect that to be true for everyone who works with you. If you’re on a video call with someone, have extra patience for barking dogs and kids walking into the room. Extend some grace and humor, and assume your people are doing their best.
• Business leaders are go-getters. When things go sideways (as they are now with the coronavirus) they tend to double-down on alignment and execution. Business leaders are already good at maintaining a course and increasing the speed!
• But, when your people are unsure about the future and are anxious about how to do their jobs remotely, it’s important to emphasize and model good communication and relationship building. How?

Best Practices

• Share information. Anxiety loves a vacuum, and in the absence of information, people start spinning their own narratives about how things are going—and, usually, in a negative way. Sharing information and being transparent lowers anxiety in uncertain times.
• Check in. It’s not enough to be available. You need to be proactive in communicating. Make the time to touch base with your direct reports using a tool like Zoom or Skype several times a week.
• Ask questions and listen to the answers. Be curious about how people are doing. Work/life balance has never been more important and has never been harder to achieve when more and more people are working from home. Ask how it’s going and ask how you might make things easier.

Remote Working Tools

At Syte, our team has always worked remotely. Here are the tools we use maintain our focus on communication and relationship building:

• Video Conferencing: Whenever possible, we’ll fire up video call in order to see the person we’re communicating with. They say that communication is 90-93% non-verbal. There’s no substitute for seeing someone’s face when you’re talking to them, and that’s what people tend to miss most when they no longer work in the same building.
• Contextual Communication: Tools like Slack or Teams straddle the gap between email and texting. It’s an easy way to communicate short messages and share resources without cluttering our already-cluttered email inboxes.
• Networked resources: For us, this happens in the cloud. For you it might be a shared network and VPN. Regardless, ensuring that your people have access to the documents and data they need makes their jobs easier and increases collaboration.

What mindset have you had to adopt as your people make the shift to remote work? What best practices and tools have you implemented? Reach out to let us know what you’re doing!

Could you use some help enabling and empowering your people to stay connected and productive while working remotely? At Syte, this is how we work and we’d love to help support you and your team. Click here to schedule a 30 minute call with me to discuss how.