The art of remote communication
Working from home has become a normal part of our lives. There are many people who are seeking only remote jobs and they never think about going back to the office.
Despite the fact that working from distance has become a strong normality in our daily life, there are still many who are struggling in it.
To some of us this change — remote working — was more painful, because we had to learn a new way of working and communicating, and more importantly we had to change our habits. We need to be more careful and sensitive, we also need to use new techniques that we don’t use when we are at the office.
Working remotely could sometimes get more stressful than working in the office.
It happened to all of us that we misunderstood a colleague’s text message and we got mad or sad about it. A plain text message has no feeling and body language in it.
Considering all these challenges we can say communication from distance over our computers and phone has become an art: The Art of remote communication
There are many techniques that we should know or learn to be able to work or communicate better.
Let’s mention some of them here:
Focus on positive intent and forget the negative:
When you receive an unpleasant message from your coworkers, please “PAUSE” before answering and jumping to the conclusion with a negative assumption. Ask yourself some questions:
- What are their statuses?
- Are they not concentrating because of a heavy meeting day?
- Are they stressed because of a due date or heavy workload?
Try to answer these questions first, try to find the problem from their perspective. Try to Assume positive intent and forget the negative.
When you do that you give time to yourself to find a productive answer that could help you and your team to move forward and communicate better. This approach will also lead to a better and happier virtual work environment.
Clear the uncertainty
When you work from home, It’s really easy to not understand completely what is happening in a feature development or to have doubts about ongoing projects. Well that’s also something that happened to all of us. When this happens it’s important to remember only one thing: Asking questions.
You can ask as many questions as you have about the topic, make sure that you take enough time to write down all your doubts and ask your colleagues about them in time. This will lead to better and more efficient communication.
You can ask your questions in a different way, like:
- Just to make sure that I got it correctly, we need to …. am I right?
- Could you please repeat what you mean by …. ?
- So we have decided to … did I miss anything?
If you are the leader of a team, before leaving the meeting make sure that everybody understood what just you guys decided: Always ask:
- Is that clear to all?
- Is there any doubt or question?
- Who could help me with this part of the project?
Recap your meetings
One great way to NOT forget is the recap emails. Whenever you hold a decision-making meeting, please make sure that someone in the meeting sends a recap of the final decisions within an email, to all of the participants, so no one forgets what happened. Everybody could use that email as a reference and add to it in the follow up meetings.
Be creative, chatty and expressive:
It happened to all of us that we misunderstood a colleague’s text message and we got mad or upset about it. There is no feeling, body language and no facial expressions in our plain texts. That’s why we should note the following issues:
- The power of emojis 💪
Emojis could give feeling and personality to your messages. Be creative with them. You have more than 3000 emojis at your service, be generous and use them a lot. 🫡
- Informal writing helps
Leave the formal writing for your emails or when you talk to the C level of your company. Instead use informal, friendly (_ and nerdy 🤓) writing during the working hours with your teammates.
- Use Star Wars references
Always use fun, creative dialogues or gifs of the movies to virtually bond with your colleagues. Remember, don’t over use them but May the force be with you.
Conclusion
I know it’s really hard to come to the conclusion when you really know that there are plenty of techniques that we didn’t cover at all. We didn’t even dive deep into the techniques we covered so why come to the conclusion so fast?
Be the artist of that art.
Well as we mentioned at the beginning, remote communication has become an art and art is part of a huge culture, The culture of remote working. It’s never enough to talk about it but for now this article is good in order to just start practicing and to point out some effective ways to help us to be an artist of remote communication. Use the basic tips mentioned above and stay tuned for more advanced ones in the future.
