Working from Home – Communicating with your manager and team

With the COVID situation, you may by now have a well-developed routine of working at home, and all may appear to be quite efficient – but have you thought about whether the way you are currently communicating with everyone is the most effective for them, and for the team as a whole?

Working from home is extremely different to being in the office and you may find that some of your team members have different needs at home, for example, they may have young children or other family members with them so may prefer that you call during certain times of day.

Below are a few suggestions of things you could consider and discuss with your manager and your team members to see if you could improve upon how and when you communicate with them all.

If you don’t already do so, would it be beneficial to have a phone call, or a Zoom/Team or  work “chat” system meeting at the start or end of each day?

• Does your manager prefer you to call or email when you need to discuss things during the day? Or only call when it’s something urgent? Or just email?
• If you are calling your manager, do they have a preferred time? And are there any times/days that you should not call?
• What about emails? How often does your manager and also your team like you to email with updates or questions? Do they like you to email for each separate thing? Or do they prefer you to save things up and send a more lengthy email with a number of items? For example, at the end of each morning/afternoon or day?
• For emails, is there are preferred way to set them out? For example, the contents of the heading field; should items be numbered; should matter numbers be included etc.
• When you’ve completed all your tasks for the day, should you contact your manager, and how? Or should you send an email to your team to see if anyone needs help with anything? Or should you call someone else?

There may also be a number of other ways of improving communication that you could discuss with your manager and your team that you can think of. Why not suggest them to your manager and your team today! All the best!