Teamwork. It’s the subject of many inspirational posters, plaques and journal articles. Some may argue that it was a much easier task to understand how well a team worked together when they were all working in the same office or working the same hours. However, working from home has challenged the traditional ways managers are measuring team productivity, effectiveness, and other traditionally held beliefs about how teams interact and thrive.
What’s the one thing managers shouldn’t be doing right now to foster teamwork and communication among team members? Nothing. A recent study by VitalSmarts found, “Leaders who have ignored the potential impacts of WFH have put their organizations at substantial risk. On the other hand, commitment, engagement, and teamwork are stronger than ever in organizations where leaders are proactively engaging employees in spite of WFH.”
So what can you do to improve communication, teamwork and engagement in your team and across your organization?
Work from Same Platform/ Digital tools
It might not seem like a huge problem if some of your team is working in Google Sheets while others are working in Microsoft Excel. However, while there is a lot of crossover between platforms, there are areas/ functions that are completely incompatible. If you know your team is struggling to share files, open files or simply get work done, this article from ntaskmanager.com might have a solution to your incompatible software/ platform problem.
Who does what? (Accountability and Ownership)
It might seem like if your team is communicating less, they’re having fewer issues. That might not necessarily be true. A 2-year study by Stanford found that when call center employees worked from home, there was a 13% increase in performance. This means, the challenge isn’t so much understanding if your remote employees are actually working – it’s to get your employees to communicate with their managers about what they’re working on so that leadership can see the big picture and strategize how best to focus their efforts to drive performance and impact. If you don’t know what your team is working on or how they’re getting work done, it’s time to set up a system to measure accountability, ownership and expectations.
Here are a few tips for setting clear expectations from crowdspring.com:
- Assign tasks in writing. This forces you to be clear about what you want before assigning the work. And, it provides a resource to which both you and your employees can refer back.
- Share team goals. This allows everyone to see how their individual actions contribute to the overall team effort.
- Hold weekly 1-on-1’s. Set up a recurring weekly meeting with each team member to set expectations, discuss progress, provide training, and address any other individual issues.
Create Teamwork Opportunities
In an office environment, group meetings offered natural opportunities for employees to offer to help one another and support each other if they were stuck on a project, or could use some collaboration to get out of a rut. Remote work doesn’t offer the same kind of feeling when your team is trying to be collaborative. Meaning, as a leader, you’ll have to go out of your way to find ways to encourage your team to work together. Here are ten ideas you can use to get your team to ditch their days of solo work from lumapps.com .
Get the communication back on track
If you’re worried that your remote team isn’t engaged and collaborating as they should be, try using questions to open up a conversation like:
- “Looking back on the day/week, can you find any part of it that could have gone better?”
- “What do you need help with, today, this week, or this month?”
- “Is there anyone that you want to get to know better on the team? How about setting up a time to chat with them virtually?”
- “Is there anything in your work that’s affecting or frustrating you?”
- “Are you clear on what you should be working on right now? If not, what do you want to discuss, so it’s crystal clear?”
All these ideas/ concepts can be applied beyond an individual team, and can make an impact when utilized across an entire organization. Understanding that swapping a conference room for a conference call does not mean that meaningful work is getting done, and changing your tactics on how to approach the work your team does, and how they get it done could be key to fostering team work and ultimately delivering working from home success. You don’t need to overthink how to encourage teamwork, but you do need to do something. As the VitalSmarts study said, “Leaders who are implementing simple culture interventions are avoiding the hidden costs of WFH and even seeing a culture and commitment boost from WFH.” Meaning, something is better than nothing.