Peter Sorgenfrei shares five practices for remote teams: put information on shared platforms, write down how your team prefers to communicate and when, protect quiet hours across time zones, and build empathy so distributed workers feel they belong.
Increasingly, a lot of us are working remotely. Here are a couple ideas to how you can do that more effectively. One, make sure that all information is accessible for everyone at all times. Make sure that you share information on some of these platforms so that you asynchronously can catch up and see what's going on in your business. Have a how-to-work document. So one of the things I experienced in the past is if I write down some of the ideas about how we work more effectively together, and certainly how I work— so I'm better in the morning than late in the afternoon, I'm probably better on text than I am speaking on the phone— that way people know what to expect when they engage with you, and that might be helpful. You should enable quiet time. So encourage your colleagues around the world to certainly have work hours. So when can you expect them to be online and respond, but also during the day to have quiet time so that they can have a moment to relax and reflect throughout the day, even though it might be in the middle of the workday somewhere else in the world. And then the last thing is sort of being more empathetic. It's hard to work remotely. It's difficult to have that sense of belonging and feeling the culture when you're somewhat isolated somewhere else in some other time zone. So knowing this and taking that into account when dealing with your team can be helpful.
