Maintaining engagement with your team and your organisation

MVP

I think one of our greatest challenges while working from home is keeping engaged with your team and your organisation. It's easy to get so focused on a piece of work that hours go by and you haven't checked in with your team. We underestimate the value of the conversation around us, or being able to turn to the side and bounce an idea off a team member. 

What do you do to keep in touch with team members, outside of stand-up calls and scheduled meetings? 

When working remotely, you need to make more of an effort to engage team members and your organisation. It becomes a habit you need to develop, to post what you're working on, to ask a question or two in a Team or on Yammer. Share a short news post in your team sites and tell a story with pictures, video and a few references. 

Schedule blocks of focus time, just like you do in your office. (you do that right?)

Get on a 'meet now' call occasionally. If you're team uses Teams, consider creating a channel for check-ins and impromptu calls for engagement. When a team member wants to check in or have some 'human real-time contact', they can start or join one of these calls in the channel. 

 

Got any other ideas? Reply to this thread or start a new conversation in this 'Enabling Remote Work' community. I'm certain I'm going to learn something new that will help me an my org work more effectivly from home. 

 

2 Replies
Thank you for sharing Darrel! Great advises! I would also encourage OOF activities remotely. I happens to work at a company with an online gaming culture, where we also work odd hours. Schedule some time to, in our case, play together, or to do other things. Have "catch up" meetings where everyone take the meeting on their phone and take a walk meanwhile.

Also, ensure to encourage (but not force) as many as possible to at least listen in, even if they dont feel comfortable in talking.

We just started the 'Meet Now' lunches @Darrell Webster and they're super fun. Really helpful if you just need to vent or have some human interaction. Could not agree more!