Teamwork At Home

I transitioned to work from home back in August of this year, so COVID-19 really hasn’t changed my life much, other than the changes to going out. So I’m keeping regular business hours and finding that it’s interesting to be doing business now with many people that are working from home themselves.

I’ve read that at some companies they make everyone connect to meetings from their desk, even if they are in the same office, so that everyone gets to be equals. This makes some sense. I mean, we’ve all been on a call where we’re the group of people and we have the phone on mute for us to discuss things– or maybe we haven’t muted, but there’s no way the person on the line can hear the discussion. I work with a team of developers from India, and I often hear discussion or someone telling the one speaker what the latest status is.

That has all gone away. What has replaced it is having everyone on a call, where we can hear all the voices and actually have a discussion and everyone hears the discussion. This is actually a very positive thing, because when you’re doing creative work you should hear the differing opinions– sometimes without filters.

This also puts remote employees on equal footing as their in-office counterparts. They aren’t left out of conversations because of geography.

So take advantage of this time to get to know the people on your team in a different way than you’re used to!