Histories’ largest Work-From-Home Experiment allows many of us to embrace new ways of working. But switching from our fast-paced offices to kitchen tables brings challenges too. Collaborating digitally without losing the advantages of physical meetings, such as whiteboards, post-its, body language, social cues, and the so valuable small talk can be a difficulty.
My 3 hacks for fostering an efficient remote work culture in MS Teams.
Collect feedback
When you see people you can tell by their body language if they agree, disagree, are excited, or zoned out. You can’t do that over a video conference. Without social cues and body language, you miss a lot. One easy way to compensate for the social distance in remote meetings is to collect frequent feedback before, during and after a meeting by using live polls. My favorite MS Team extension is Polly. In seconds you can create a poll and gather valuable feedback without interrupting the meeting
Stay visual
Modern workplaces are full of visuals to foster creativity and clarify ideas. Sticky notes, whiteboards, and flip-charts became an integral part of our working culture to develop ideas in more detail. To collaborate visually in a remote setup Mural is a fantastic extension to MS Teams. It acts as a huge, zoomable wall on which users can use virtual sticky notes as well as add images, videos, arrows, and text. All of these elements can be dragged, dropped and clustered, just like they would on a real wall. It allows multiple users to collaborate simultaneously and it includes templates for many typical design thinking exercises.
Have fun
It seems counterintuitive to suggest that work should be fun, right? But having fun at work is good for business because happy and engaged people are the engine of healthy work culture and bottom line for success. Working remotely enables new opportunities for fun, my favorite MS Teams hack is Snap Cam, which allows you to upgrade your video stream with a nice background or a cute party hat, which upgrades every virtual birthday gathering or sets the stage for the weeks closing meeting.
