The craze of WFH has mellowed down and everyone is now dealing with the problems that came with COVID-19. Revenues are getting affected and there are still mixed emotions and opinions about how to work during this time.
Arguably, communication is THE biggest challenge for companies transitioning to remote work. Providing a strong method for communication can yield a decisive long-term competitive advantage to your team, and resolve many other problems that come from working from home.
That brings us to the big question, how do you communicate efficiently when your teams are forced to collaborate virtually?
Leverage Technology
The answer is simple, we need to re-imagine how we collaborate and adopting technology to compensate for our short comings is going to be the front-runner here. Now is the time to integrate communication-based softwares to your stack. The top contenders are:
- Instant messaging
- Conferencing programs
- Task management tools
Bottom-up evolution
Don’t say no to new methods. Listen to the employees carefully to see how they would like to communicate. It would be crucial to not enforce a particular methodology on the whole team, but adopt a hybrid solution that evolves organically from within the organization. While instant messaging may be the preferred way for communication in the absence of a workplace, where you can merely roll your chair back to your colleague to talk briefly, a collaboration or project management tool may be the preferred method to track projects. In the presence of ever evolving API’s and support from new and proven tools, combining modular features to your collaboration stack has become extremely feasible in the post-COVID digital era.
Balance Work-Life
Another crucial factor impacting collaboration was found to be the blurring line between work and personal time. Just because everyone isn’t required to be in the office for the same hours doesn’t mean that the 9-5 is obsolete. HR teams have the responsibility to set expectations when it comes to working hours. They could be more flexible, or they could be the same as usual, depending on your particular needs, but the distinction is important. While employees can feel overly burdened if their work consistently creeps into their personal time, managers may feel their teams are under-productive if employees use work hours for personal duties. Thus, it is important to set expectations and bring whole teams to the same page on their preferences for how they would like to split their personal and work timings.
We hope you liked these pointers to look out for while dealing with collaboration issues in your team. Stay tuned to this page to read our upcoming articles about how to tackle above mentioned challenges in detail. If your company is facing challenges with collaboration and you’re looking for tailor-made ways to integrate new technologies and processes to boost collaboration, do let us know. Our experienced HR consultants can help you build cutting-edge data-driven solutions that can help you to not just boost your collaboration but also track metrics that can help you improve it perpetually.