Home Working: 5 Tips to Strengthen Teamwork

The coronavirus crisis has made home working the ‘new normal’. However, working from home doesn’t mean the end of teamwork! Teamwork doesn’t require sharing an office. 93% of employees agree that they can still be a team player when working at home, as long as some ground rules are set.

 

To promote teamwork, we need to encourage communication between teams, whether in the office or at home.

 

Take advantage of team working tools.

Working from home has encouraged us to learn about many new tools, like Teams, Drive, Trello, Slack, Zooms, Hang out, etc. These tools are invaluable for remote working. They foster the exchange of information and promote both your open business model and the corporate culture.

 

Encourage knowledge management

Knowledge management is all about enhancing, preserving and distributing the know-how of your employees. How do you keep that going when working from home?

 

A great way to encourage this is to promote webinars. Webinars – like training courses run by the employees themselves – capitalises on employee expertise. It is an excellent way of fostering team spirit and cohesion, encouraging different departments to work together. You can also use it to recognise business experts and benefit from their expertise.

 

Promote mentorship

Thanks to collaborative tools and video conferencing software, you can still mentor from home. Mentoring is an opportunity for employees to better share their understanding and professional reality.

 

As an example, the lockdown hasn’t stopped companies from hiring. To onboard new recruits, mentorship is a great way to remotely welcome them. One popular method is to allocate several mentors; for example, one mentor to support a new employee within the company, and another to introduce her/him to the company culture.

 

Streamline the use of emails and meetings

That feeling of being drowned in emails is all too common. Working from home can increase that risk!

 

However, there are tools out there to help. For example, the Spark tool can automatically sort and classify emails for you, giving you only the emails you need. Equally, instant messaging systems like Teams help reduce emails, allowing the quick exchange of information between employees.

 

Meetings can also suffer the same sort of problem. 88% of employees find working from home more peaceful and productive; however, when you get overloaded with too many meeting invites, that benefit vanishes!

 

It is useful to consider how often meetings are set up, as well as the number of participants invited. 4 to 6 people is usually the ideal number for group work. This also depends on the type of project: 2 to 3 people can sometimes be more effective than a larger team. However, sometimes a project needs a collective vision; Teams and Slack are both examples of tools that excel in running larger meetings.

 

Find our “working well from home” range here.