First-aid tips to working from home: keeping the team spirit alive [highly effective]
With COVID-19 spreading aggressively, many companies have been experiencing a shift in their workplace from the office to the home. The bustle of setting up new communication platforms and replanning projects can be daunting. However, it’s even more important you don’t forget about your team: a human team, with human needs.
Being the tight-knit digital agency that we are, we’ve got quite the experience with keeping our team members connected while they work in our two different locations — Enschede and Amsterdam — or, in this case, at home.
In short
- Get over your phone anxiety! Calling is more personal and more effective than messaging.
- You’re a team. Act as a team and help each other out.
- Encourage chats, jokes and coffee breaks
- Keep your office culture and team spirit alive (really, scroll down for this one. You’re missing out)
There’s nothing like finding out your manager gets his groove on to “Atemlos Durch die Nacht”.
1. Time to get over your phone anxiety!
There hasn’t been a better time than now to accept calling as the better way to communicate. In these times, it’s the virtual equivalent of walking over to your colleagues’ desks. Zooming (pun intended) throughout the day by means of quick video chats is not just a way to save time on work-related communication, it’s also a great way to hold on to that personal connection with your team. Sure, you could decide to message or send mails to each other every other 10 minutes, but that takes twice the time and half of the intimacy. Actively using Zoom, MS Teams or even Whereby comes with a bonus: a lot less time-consuming Slack-messages.
2. You’re in this together
Especially if your company is not used to working remotely, your managers, supervisors, and most likely your team members could feel like they are losing control of the workflow, and end up micro-managing everything.
First of all — accept that this way of working remotely takes some time getting used to. But let’s cut to the chase: you wouldn’t be (working in) the company you are today without your professional and reliable team members. There’s no doubt it is also in their best interest to keep up the motivation and do whatever they can for the company. Trust your colleagues to get their work done, and help them wherever you can.
Texting instead of a quick call takes twice the time and half the intimacy.
3. Keep the ‘water cooler effect’ alive
Something people often don’t realize until they start working from home is how effective the small breaks taken throughout the workday are at keeping up productivity and morale. A quick trip to the coffee machine turns into a 10-minute chat about an upcoming project or your dog’s visit to the vet. These little breaks are essential to keep motivated (and sane), but they don’t naturally happen when the team isn’t working in the same space.
That’s why it’s important to encourage this activity virtually. Establish some spaces where teammates can chat and joke around freely, no matter the time of day. This can be a dedicated Slack channel, a WhatsApp group, or keeping your video conferencing application open for those quick video drop-ins.
4. The time for office shenanigans is now
At Wirelab, we usually work from either our Mothership in Enschede or our Flagship in Amsterdam. In both those spaces, we arrange an abundance of fun in many ways. Now that we’re all working from our own little island, it is incredibly important to keep those shenanigans alive. You were a team that had fun “back in better times”, why not be a team that’s having fun now, too? Whenever we’re allowed back in our offices, we want the team spirit and personal connection to be as strong as ever. Here’s how we manage this:
Virtual Vrimibo’s
If Friday isn’t your favorite day of the week, we can’t be friends. Obviously, Fridays are a little different when working from home. At Wirelab, we usually host our weekly Fuel Fridays on — you guessed it — Friday’s. And we stubbornly decided to continue doing so. The recipe is fairly easy: put your work aside around 5 pm and enter a Zoom meeting with your colleagues. Grab yourself a drink you fancy and chat it up!
Share, share, share
Sharing is caring! Wanna bet your colleagues would love to see funny videos of your pet being over the moon you’re home all the time? Or how about that very special lunch recipe that you now finally have the tools to make every day? If you have the absolute best dance moves… Share it! Keep the morale alive and give your work friend a giggle or a growling tummy.
Work hard, play hard
Yes, work time is work time, but there’s time for play, too! How about joining each other in a collaborative home workout? Or arranging a Netflix party? At Wirelab, we love the Houseparty app, Sketchful.io and Wordfeud for a little fun and games after work hours and during those important breaks we talked about earlier.
Music
It’s a known fact that music connects. And — from experience — I can tell you that nothing connects more than being told: “you listen to that crap?!!”. Our team decided that a shared, collaborative Spotify playlist was highly needed. And guess what? It’s so much fun! There’s nothing like finding out your manager gets his groove on to “Atemlos Durch die Nacht”. Bonus tip: with JQBX.fm you can load your Spotify lists into a ‘room’ and have all your colleagues listen to the same song at the same time. Brace yourselves for some rough comments, though.
That’s it! That’s how we stay productive and don’t absolutely lose our minds at the same time. However, we’d love to hear your tips. We’re sure there are plenty more cool tricks to enhance the remote working environment we’re all in.
Drop your best-kept secret in the comments and let’s help each other out!
