3 Tips for Productive Teams Working from Home
Collaboration accelerators for teams and organizations working from home for extended periods of time
While WFH became a standard on an individual level, it may be a trouble for the whole teams and organizations to run in this regime for extended periods of time without a negative impact on their performance.
If you apply the tips and policies below, you will set a basic framework to reach a more efficient flow of work without unnecessary non-productive time generated by sluggish communication.
Tips for setting the basic WFH framework
#1 Make Daily Sync TWICE a day ✅ ✅
Most of the teams already have a Daily Sync in place in the form of Daily Scrum, Stand-up Meeting, or similar. Its purpose is to organize around the team’s goals, identify blockers and possible risks, and craft a plan for the next 24 hours, usually within a fifteen minutes time-box.
When the whole team works from home for a long period of time, consider introducing a second Daily Sync.
This measure speeds-up the work as the tasks get inspected not once, but twice a day: blockers are addressed sooner, problems are tackled collectively.
Daily Sync no.1 @ 9:00 am — 9:15 am
Daily Sync no.2 @ 3:00 pm — 3:15 pm
If a person gets stuck, he or she is driven by this fierce inner motivation to solve the problem themselves. To crack it, to puzzle out the riddle…Even if asking their buddy behind them could help to resolve it much faster.
When stuck, people have natural tendencies to work on a problem solution themselves alone for an unnecessarily long time. And this pattern doubles if working from home.
By establishing the second Daily Sync, you aerate the process and give people an extra opportunity to inspect the ongoing work, leave their shell, and share their struggles with the team. As other team members are invited to the problem, finding a solution is genuinely faster.
#2 Agree on the communication tools & streams 📢
Two team members use Slack, the other three exchange information over Skype, and the rest of the company uses Microsoft Teams — there is quite a high chance that some information will get lost or not reach its target audience. And to find the info retrospectively is almost impossible.
It is in the best interest of every member to get the answers to the questions as soon as possible.
For the sake of the success of the team, one communication tool should be agreed to be used by everyone, even if it brings temporary discomfort to some team members.
Once tools are set, align over the communication streams. A good practice is to have a global stream for general communication and multiple specialized streams, still visible to all, but dedicated to certain areas.
*Note: For some organizations, it makes sense to have two tools — one for internal communication and another one to communicate with clients.
#3 Agree on time frames with limited availability ☕️
Identify the parts of the day when team members may not be fully available.
Coffee break @ 10 am — 10:15 am
Lunch break @ 11 am — 1 pm
Snack time @ 3:30 am — 3:45 pm
By agreeing on the limited availability time frames, people can better plan their daily activities. The work is planned effectively around these time frames. It is clear when people can expect answers to their questions.
Combined with the regular slots for Daily Sync meetings, the team creates its specific rhythm, and members get used to the team dynamics.
Collaboration accelerators: Keep people productive, motivated & engaged
In the first part, we have been through the three basic tips how to set a foundation for productive and effective collaboration across your team or organization if you have to work remotely for an extended period of time.
In this second part of the article, we focus on the additional optimizers, which accelerate the collaboration and keep people engaged, motivated, and having fun.
General hygiene — update the board
Agree on a policy to have all tasks and their status up-to-date at the beginning and end of the day.
Nevermind which project tracking system you use, the work, and actual progress should always be available for everyone to prevent frustration from misalignment.
General hygiene — tag people in the chat
If you need help, do not hesitate for too long and ask your teammates.
If you write a message and address it to someone specific, tag the person. In most tools, it is usually done by using the “@” sign.
The tagged person gets notified, and the chances are that you will receive answers quicker.
Remote calls — etiquette
When on a call with more people, it can often be a bit chaotic. Especially if we would like to keep the call within its time-box.
To make the communication slick even with many people on the line, it is an excellent practice to employ the military radio etiquette and use the procedure words.
Not only it makes the communication super effective, but also super fun!
Few points from the etiquette:
- Try not to interrupt others as it creates chaos and unclear situation (some communication tools have a possibility to “raise hand” to signal you would like to say something)
- When you speak, always tell your name
- Keep your message simple enough for intended listeners to understand
- If you have more points to cover, speak one point at a time and then say “break”… wait a couple of seconds… speak the next point… When you pause a couple of seconds after every point by saying “break”, this allows the other party to speak if they must.
- When you finish, say “over” as a signal to others they can take the word
Remote calls — turn on your webcam
Agree on a policy that everyone will share their video if possible at the moment.
It’s more personal. It helps us not to forget that we work and communicate with real people, our colleagues, our friends.
It humanizes our communication and makes it fun as well.
Individual routine — make it a serious workday
Working from home, especially if it is for a longer time, may sometimes result in a decrease in productivity of an individual = of the whole team. 📉
With the comfy couch and wearing pajamas all day, it’s quite a challenge, right?
- Take a shower in the morning. Do your usual hygiene and rituals, just like if you would go to the company’s office.
- Dress up. Put on clothes like if you would go to the office. It will make you feel more empowered, determined, and will help you to focus on the work.
- Rearrange your place. Have a comfortable but professional workplace with a dedicated desk and chair — as far as possible from your bedroom (but the basement is not a good option though).
Check some of the Feng Shui tips on how to organize your home office.
Keep the spirit high — share home office experience
Not to let your team spirit fade away, encourage people to interact not only over work-related stuff.
For example, you may ask to post pictures of everyone’s home office space to the dedicated communication stream. If there are pets around, the better!
You may ask people to keep posting the weirdest home office adventures (WFH WTF), what lunch they are had, etc.
Don’t be afraid to gamify these activities and have the best contribution be entitled to a prize every other week. 🏆
Keep in mind that everything should be discussed and agreed on with the teams themselves. If any of the tips or policies will be enforced top-down by management, they will not work nor be obeyed.
Inspect the policies and ways of working frequently and continuously adapt the system based on received feedback.
We are ACTUM Digital and this piece was written by Martin Dušek, Director of Apollo Division. Feel free to get in touch.
