Home Office - Part I

The past weeks have been times of disruption for Europe and all the world. In an effort to slow down the spread of COVID19, governments all across the world have implemented rigorous measures curtailing public life, closing borders and in some cases even enforcing home isolation. While the future will show how effective these measures are, the most immediate consequence is that businesses and employees must now face the challenge - and recognize the chances - of temporary home office.

Switching all of a sudden from a traditional, potentially colocated office setting, to home-office is a challenge for everybody; the employer, the employee and the customer.

In this series I want to write about some of the aspects that need special care in this process.

Communication is key

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

- George Bernard Shaw

Whether it is about onboarding new teammates or tackling new projects
Communication is key in teamwork.

In traditional workplace settings well-organized meetings play an important role in keeping all the team on the same page and organize the efforts of every individual. Important ingredients for a successful meetings are preparation, participation and the protocol. And more often than not we do not exactly get all three parts perfectly right, even in a traditional workplace setting. Luckily, informal communication can sometimes make up for deficiencies - organizational and personal - that are existing in your formal communication processes. Exactly these informal, incidental “meetings” that happen so naturally in a traditional workplace setting, are normally not happening automagically in a virtual environment.

Virtual team projects exhibited notably more risk due to insufficient knowledge transfer. A plausible explanation is decreased implicit or informal knowledge transfer in virtual environments.

A study from 2010 indicates that knowledge transfer between virtual team members suffers greatly, mostly because less knowledge is shared implicitly compared to the co-located setting. With the context changing, you - as a team - need to find new methods, processes and supporting tools to share more information explicitly. When remote workers have a game plan for how to best get in touch with teammates for each situation, everyone can avoid wasted time, frustration, and missed connections.

Slack - Where work happens (or not?)

Groupware, like Slack and Mattermost can provide efficient means to help you to reduce communication issues. You can create team-internal channels, task-specific channels and even integrate a ton of third-party systems from your favorite issue tracking system to birthday reminders. However, overusing them - or specifically their instant messaging features - might open the doors for having a workday-long “Franken-meeting” essentially killing your productivity and shattering your attention to tiny pieces. Mitigating the communication overwhelm is quite simple: Give each tool or platform a specific purpose. Instead of leaving it up to each person’s preference, work with your team to set up some guidelines: for instance, designate Skype for live chatting on urgent topics and Slack for messages that aren’t pressing, with a designated channel for fun or informal conversations.

If I can’t see you, you can’t see me

One important aspect of communication in co-located teams is the fact that it is normally face-to-face. Setting aside the withered indoor plant that might happen to be between you and your teammate for a moment, you cam make eye-contact when talking to your colleagues.

By mimicking this face-to-face communication, you’re creating a professional atmosphere even if your employee is working on the couch. You can maintain eye contact and use body language just as you would in an in-person conversation, and it makes a world of difference. This way misunderstandings that can quite frequently occur when being deprived of visual cues can be reduced, which increases trust between team members and improve communication effectiveness greatly. If you are not convinced yet, consider that 82% of people admit to do multitasking on audio-only calls; something that is much harder to do in a video call.

Keeping the pace while switching from traditional to home office setting is not always easy. sIn the upcoming post in this series I will be writing about the challenge of designing a workplace into your home. In the meantime, I’d be happy to read your ideas about effective communication strategies in virtual teams.