Top 10 tips for effective communication with home workers
For home workers, it can be easy to feel isolated and disconnected from their colleagues. Maintaining effective communication between office staff and home workers is important and it doesn’t take much effort to achieve.
Here’s our top ten tips:
1. Grow Personal Connections with Fun
Re-create the water cooler chat with a channel in your communications software (i.e. MS Teams) dedicated to informal conversation. Think about hosting team building events online, such as a ‘pub’ quiz.
2. Trust Your Staff
One of the benefits of home working is not having your boss lurking behind you, checking you’re doing everything to their liking. However, if you thought that was bad, being micromanaged by email can be even worse. Not only does micromanagement not work, a 2020 study has shown that workplace productivity and focus improves when staff are trusted to do their jobs.
3. Check-In Regularly with Staff
There’s no escaping the truth: remote working can be lonely. Ensure staff are not feeling isolated by scheduling regular catch-ups throughout the week. These don’t need to be work related either; find out what your staff like to do in their free time or whether they have any hobbies you didn’t know about.
4. Practice Empathy
For many, working at home is a new experience and finding the right balance between work time and personal time can be difficult. The distractions of home are different to the office and many feel obligated to stay sat in front of their screen for hours on end in case they are called, as they don’t want anyone to think they’re slacking. It’s important to be empathetic to people’s needs and encourage them to take regular screen breaks, just as you would in the office.
5. Use the Right Tools
Remote work communication is more effective if you use the right tools for the job. Everybody gets enough emails throughout their working day without the inbox getting clogged further by group chats - these should be confined to messaging channels. Consider using only email or video calls for work-related communications.
6. Be Present
Be proactive during online meetings and eliminate distractions. Engaging with colleagues on video calls is a great way to improve communication between yourself and people you may not interact with regularly. Put your smartphone aside, lean into conversation and make the other people on the call feel like your priority.
7. Convert In-Person Meetings to Online
When working from home it’s easy to start to isolate yourself - not only physically, but also mentally and emotionally. This poses a risk to both your mental health and job satisfaction. By converting what would have been in-person meetings to video meetings, colleagues can still get the face-to-face connection that a phone call can’t provide.
8. Be Clear, Consistent and Concise
Now matter how you’re communicating, you won’t go far wrong by remembering the Three Cs: clear, consistent and concise. Clear communications are simple and stick to the facts. Consistency means people know how and when you’re going to communicate and concise communications are brief and get to the point. Avoid monologues, long explanations and technical jargon - these are surefire ways to lose people’s attention.
9. Communication Preferences
Maybe your boss prefers to communicate using the occasional video call or one of your colleagues prefers instant messaging, and another likes to email. Whatever people’s preferred forms of communication are, try to learn them and then communicate in the way that meets their needs. Of course, not all forms of communication will serve the same need (see Use the Right Tools), so try and find the right balance between what’s preferred and what’s practical.
10. Encourage Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge sharing among employees is beneficial for both company success and employee development. For remote teams or employees, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing is critical as they may have less opportunity for in-person knowledge sharing or social learning.
More reading…
