5 Employee Communication Secrets to Effectively Connect with Your Remote Team
Currently, we have more employees working from home than ever before. Whether you’re a company, a leader with years of team management experience, or entirely new to the work from home world, every day brings a whirlwind of new challenges.
How do you know if your team is actually working?
When is it appropriate to check-in?
Should you hold your team accountable in the same way you did in the office?
How do you connect and engage with employees, so they don’t lose track of the big picture?
Communication. Communication. Communication!
The secret to any successful relationship is great communication. If your communication strategy is lacking, these five trade secrets will help you connect with your remote team better than ever before:
Communicate Frequently
Frequent communication trumps even the most thoughtful, high-quality periodic communication. Employees don’t like to be left in the dark; they want to be kept in the loop! Especially when working from home. After all, it’s not like they can walk by a team member’s desk for a quick hello anymore. For this reason, we all need to think about how to replicate the same impromptu communications in a work-from-home setting. Here are some ideas:
Send a text or chat message in the morning to start the day on the right foot.
Provide updates on projects and initiatives as you receive them.
Outline how to communicate for certain tasks. For example, email communication for updates on projects to the team, chat communication for questions and phone calls for questions that tend to bounce around. Set the communication preferences with your team and ensure all understand.
Organize daily check-ins with two questions: How do you feel about your workload? And How can I help you?
Show Your Face
How often do messages get misconstrued through email, text, and chat? Far too often! Even with all the emojis, sometimes, you just need to hear a person’s voice. Take phone calls a step further with face-to-face video. Video chatting helps keep you connected with your team and allows you to validate that your employees are not “working” from the grocery store or during a Netflix binge. Encouraging face-to-face web meetings also supports engagement and accountability on both sides of the table.
Bring the Office to the Home
Some employees enjoy working from home, absent of side conversations, pleasantries, and what some may call “pointless meetings”. They work very well alone and can be just as productive as they were in the office (if not more). Others, however, need more touch-points.
Check-in with your employees and ask them what they prefer. Do they prefer to be left alone to get the job done? Or, do they prefer a quick virtual snack meetup or a weekly virtual lunch meeting?
If the latter is true:
Organize a lunch meeting for the team and have lunch delivered to their home.
Send your team their favorite coffee drink on a Friday morning for a sweet and much-needed surprise.
Once a week, send a post-it note to your team via USPS mail. Yes, the real mail! For each post-it, write, “You _____!” You fill in the blank. “You rock!” “You are kicking butt!” “You made my week!” “You are killing it, working from home with the kids!”
Share Knowledge
One of the hardest parts for companies right now is having a remote team that has never worked remotely before. We were not prepared to just switch into full work from home mode by the snap of a finger. There is so much technology involved, and you’re not alone if you think it requires a full training week just to get up and running. The key right now is to be patient with your team and set aside “training time” to go over processes such as how to:
Get on the VPN
Connect to a printer
Use Zoom
Don’t have the time? Strongly consider hiring a consultant for a few hours a week to do this for you. Your team can only be successful if they are provided with the tools they need to get the job done. Having the proper knowledge will allow your employees to feel confident and secure that they can, in fact, be productive from home.
Practice Empathy & Vulnerability
There are a lot of articles out there saying you need to trust your team, or your team needs to trust you. Sure, that’s all great, but how do you build trust? You build trust by being empathetic to whatever is going on with your employees. You build trust by being vulnerable and honest with your team. Understand that your employees, like you, probably have a lot going on right now with children and family living and working under one roof. Times are stressful. If you are a leader feeling these same feelings, show empathy and understanding. This will allow you to get on a deeper level with your team. It’ll also show them that you are doing the best you can, too. We’re all in this together, after all.
Hand-in-hand with empathy is vulnerability, especially when it comes to delivering bad news. It’s no secret that companies are watching their bottom-line and are having to make tough decisions right now. When delivering bad news, be sure it comes from you first, talk in detail about why the decision was made, and then allow a time for anonymous questions to be asked. Answer these questions during a live web meeting. At the end of the day, your employees will remember how they felt and how they were treated during this pandemic. If you treat your employees with respect and empathy, and show vulnerability, you will find yourself creating a community of family rather than just a team of individuals.
BONUS! Hold Employees Accountable
We’re not going to lie; accountability is one of the hardest things to tackle with a remote team. Accountability should not fall on the wayside given the uncertain times we are in. We all still have a job to do.
Set the expectation up front and define clear deliverables. Explain what will happen if deliverables are not met. What’s the policy? How long in advance do employees need to give notice if they’ll miss a deadline? Clearly define:
The objective
The deliverable
Important milestone dates
Measure of success
How employees can ask for help
What happens when the employee is not successful
Do not harp on how your team will get it done. Instead, focus on the outcome. This will allow your employees to feel more empowered and less micro-managed.