6 practices to ensure your remote employees don't feel so remote
David Cheatham ● Enterprise Transformation
Change Practitioner ★ Educator ★ Executive Coach ► Scroll to see Recommendations
For today's work-from-anywhere world, here are 6 practices to ensure your employees don't feel so remote.
#1: Value Individuals Over Infrastructure
Demonstrating empathy for your colleagues is the glue that holds a remote enterprise together. Whether it’s their life circumstance, their work experience, or their feelings of inclusion in the company, it starts with listening to remote staff and being empathetic to their situation.
If you work out of the office, try working from home a few days to understand where your remote colleagues are coming from and learn more about what their typical day looks like. It’s easier to understand their circumstances and communication pain points if you try it yourself.
There’s another bonus to demonstrating empathy at work: The ability to be empathetic carries over into the development of your product. If you cannot understand and cater to the circumstances of your colleagues, how can you understand your users’ pain-points? Listening to users’ feedback is paramount to building an effective product, and empathy is the cornerstone of that process.
#2: Avoid Impromptu Meetings At Someone’s Desk
This advice reaches beyond the realm of remote companies. Walking up to someone’s desk with the intention of hashing out important decisions is a problematic communication tactic. Once discussed, all of the thoughts evaporate into thin air. The decisions and reasons behind those decisions are not documented anywhere for anyone to see and potentially could be forgotten later.
Let’s say there are three people on a team, and one of them is remote. If two out of three people are constantly making decisions themselves and filling the remote team member in, not only does the remote employee not get a chance to give input before a consensus is drawn, but they are also constantly plagued with the feeling of being left out. And, real talk: it’s because they are being left out.
The key here is accessibility. If you need to do a quick sync, have it over video call or in a public chat room where everyone can see the context.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Being able to walk up to someone’s desk to ask a question is how we’ve always done it,” then you’re not committing to remote work. You’ll probably find that your in-office colleagues appreciate the lack of interruptions, too.
#3: If One Person Is On A Video Call, Everyone Is On A Video Call
If your solution to #2 is, “No problem. We’ll just have a meeting in a conference room and pipe in the remote workers on a big screen,” you’re also going to run into some problems.
When a group of people is sitting around a table in the same room they can provide each other with facial cues as to how they’re feeling, and easily see when someone else is about to speak. These sort of micro-interactions are crucial to smooth communication during a meeting. The folks who are piped in as giant chat heads on a big screen cannot easily distinguish a group of people sitting in a room.
If everyone sits at their desk on an individual video call screen, the playing field is equal. Everyone’s faces are easily distinguishable, it’s easy to know whose turn it is to talk, and it simply puts everyone’s input on equal footing.
#4: Communication Is Asynchronous. Deal With It.
With a distributed team comes distributed time-zones.
One rule to live by on a remote team is that no decisions are made last-minute. If you have an item that requires some input and decision making, then you are sourcing feedback well before the second you need to ship it. You can’t expect immediate answers because your co-workers inevitably don’t work the same hours as you.
While this may seem like extra work, asynchronous communication actually ends up being more efficient. This is because meetings are pre-planned, often weekly standing times when everything is discussed as a team. It also eliminates those pesky “stop and chat” impromptu meetings that not only leave remote employees out, but they also interrupt flow of concentration.
#5: Socializing Is Not Around A Watercooler
Because communication is more intentional at remote companies, it can be helpful to set up some pre-planned time for socializing. Allotting specific times in the week for folks to get on a video call and not talk about work can help supplant the “watercooler” conversations that happen in real life.
Developing a personal relationship with your remote colleagues can also make it easier to approach them when you need to actually interface with them for work-related projects.
Another aspect of socialization occurs in chat apps like Slack and HipChat. Employers should welcome employees establishing social channels where they can share pictures of their kids, vacations, or pets. There can also be channels dedicated to hobbies, interesting trends in the world, etc. All of these experiences help the team feel more connected, no matter where they’re located.
#6: The Tools You’re Using Matter. A Lot.
Remote work would not be possible without solid internet connections, better video call platforms, and generally more robust software. So, it’s important to leverage the right technology to make the process smoother.
The best way to do this is to listen to employees about which tools make it easier for them to communicate, see progress, and ultimately get more done. The best tools are the ones that remove roadblocks.
Here are tools that work well for my clients:
Zoom:
Confluence:
Trello:
Slack:
You should select the video conferencing software with the least friction, and the chat software that feels the most like a virtual office. After all, video and chat are where a majority of the communication is happening.
For more tools, check out this infographic on when to use what tools for remote work.