Tips for Staying Connected with Your Colleagues as You Work from Home
How our team in Australia created a more diverse, inclusive, and interesting dynamic amid remote working.
There are several things our team in Australia greatly miss since we have moved to a remote working format:
-
Catching up with each other while waiting for our tea to brew
-
The arrival of online shopping orders at the office and the stories surrounding them
-
Friday evening drinks and Monopoly Deal
Staying connected with colleagues during COVID-19 has been difficult. What used to be a continuous stream of 5-minute interactions throughout the day has turned into planned blocks of “social time”, and a whole lot of deductive reasoning.
Our offices in Australia and New Zealand already had several people working from home on a permanent basis, and for them, it was business as usual (with maybe some extra neediness from those of us who are new to this environment). However, our largest regional office in Sydney, where I work, is used to seeing most of our team in person every day. Not seeing each other is new for us and we all had to find new ways of interacting and collaborating.
But somehow our connections have become more diverse, inclusive, and interesting.
Friday drinks do not just include the Sydney office anymore – instead, we have opened our socializing to the wider organization.
For example, whenever my colleagues and I called SHL’s internal IT help desk — the people on the other end of the phone were living in the UK and working Australia hours! We all recognize each other by name and voice, but introducing a social hour meant that we could interact via video chat as a team for the first time. It has been great to have this opportunity to connect with my colleagues across the world in a different way.
Friday drinks do not just include the Sydney office anymore – instead, we have opened our socializing to the wider organization.
We have also been able to break up the day and prioritize time with our colleagues daily to talk about everything except work – social time is no longer isolated to Friday afternoons. So, this means that our team socializing has grown to include children, partners, and pets. We feel it is an honor that we are “invited” into each other’s homes, even if it is through video chat!
A useful activity has been to share recipes, books, podcasts, and tv recommendations. This allows social interaction that is not limited to specific timing and people can drop in and out with thoughts and comments as they think of it through the day rather than waiting for a specific social interaction.
Our regular social events mean there is always something to look forward to, whether it’s a 15-minute call, a quiz, an apartment tour (six people in the Sydney office have moved house in the last two months), or even a game of Scribl.
As we approach week eight of remote working, will we ever find out where Tom’s home office ladder leads? Who will grow the most impressive beard before we are all able to return to the office? Will Tim finish his box jump box?
One thing we all know for sure – our office and the wider SHL team has been supportive and available to each other as we have adjusted to this new world. We have done this for each other, and so we can continue to be aligned to provide our customers with the best service and solutions possible.
If you are interested in learning more about how SHL can assist your team as they adjust to remote working, then connect with us or check out the new RemoteWorkQ.
