We’ve pulled together some of the best techniques we found that work to address this range of issues in work-from-home practices.
-
Foster a community feel by creating spaces for non-work-related engagement
We all know the realities of the working world and the amount of time spent gathered around the water cooler in most offices. Traditionally this is seen as time-wasting, but it is an integral part of the working world. It creates a human connection between employees and fosters community in the workplace. By creating platforms in the work-from-home setting to do this, we can make a similar feel to office spaces. For example, start a Teams Chat directly for employee engagement and lead the way by sharing personal information. What books have you been reading? What new film did you see over the weekend? How are your favourite sports team faring this season? These are all topics that create relatability and connection. By creating a space specifically for this information to be shared, we create shared experiences and happier workers.
-
Check-in on a personal level with your colleagues
When every interaction is work focussed, it creates a barrier between people who work together and makes real-life relationships purely transactional. Make sure you schedule a personal check-in with colleagues, not focussed around when they will have that report done or why they performed poorly in the last performance review. Check-in with your colleagues and create the space for sharing personal information. It goes both ways! It’s easy to let fall away, especially in busy periods, but don’t let that get the better of you, as this is when your team need a personal check-in most!
-
Create engaging activities
Work-from-home life can become mundane, leading to even the best of us losing interest in our work. By creating activities that break away from the boring same old information in PDFs and Excel documents, we can make genuine and thoughtful engagement with everyone in the team. The next time your team seem to be out of the loop with what’s going on, why not hold a team huddle and use Polls to test knowledge in a fun and interactive environment? Create MS Forms quizzes for the team and share high-scoring achievements. Run group sessions that bring people together to work on activities collaboratively and set the team off to work on activities as a group in the most creative way possible to create some new exciting resources for the team with PowerPoint.
-
Create opportunities for teamwork
Bringing together team members without the presence of management or team leaders to create autonomous work groups and allow connections that can be particularly useful in creating planned time and space for interaction and engagement. Team members are often concerned about saying the wrong thing when working with team leaders or management, which means people often won’t be themselves in these situations. People can connect in work-from-home by creating space outside of these everyday interactions. The real trick to creating opportunities for teamwork is identifying the scenarios that would benefit from team members working together or even procedures where a team approach wouldn’t harm fostering group working.
-
Establish a buddy system
When new employees join the team, joining a group of people who already know each other after years of working together can feel intimidating. This feeling is exacerbated by work-from-home when opportunities for personal connection make it harder to build relationships. By creating a buddy system and pairing up more experienced employees with new employees, we help develop meaningful relationships for new employees and allow our more experienced employees to practice and demonstrate their leadership skills.
-
There is no substitute for real-world interaction
Although we can do everything we can to create a sense of community and engaging workplaces, this is never a full-scale replacement. By creating successful work-from-home practices, we create more enjoyable real-world engagements where colleagues aren’t strangers to one another. So don’t use these methods as a substitute. Still organise those end-of-term parties, the last-minute Friday night drinks and those important birthday celebrations. Creating a sense of togetherness in celebrations brings people together more than anything else! And if your workplace has the capacity, try to get into the office when possible. Get into work and take that 10-minute coffee break to have some nonsensical chatter with your work best friend! You never know how much someone might need a friendly ear to listen.