HOW TO BE VISIBLE WHILE REMOTE WORKING
How to be visible while remote working
How many times have you heard that 93% of communication is non-verbal? Of that, 55% is via body language, and 38% is through tone of voice.
Only a paltry 7% is the words we say. Let that sink in; the words we use have the smallest value in terms of communication.
Add to that all the visual clues littering the office which show our presence and productivity, post-it notes on the wall, coats on the back of chairs, the noise level of the room.
Pretty much everything we know about our teammates' wellbeing and the status of the work we're doing is understood through non-verbal communication.
Now, imagine a management guru comes to your office and says that to 30x to 40x your productivity, you should work in a box, and you collaborate with your team via a keyboard and a synthetic computer voice.
Sounds crazy, except that's what happens when you start working remotely. Firstly, you lose 55% of the communication which you share via body language as your team physically cannot see you.
Then, if you communicate mainly via text, you lose the remaining 38% as plain text messages don't convey tone.
Now imagine your boss asks you to create a report for them. You get your head down and start researching and writing.
Two days pass, you're kicking it out of the park and feeling very pleased with yourself. On the third day, you notice that your boss has sent you a couple of emails to see what you're up to; creating that report you think and crack on. On the fourth day, your boss calls to ask for a status update; they seem pretty irritated that they've not heard from you for days. Have you been working at all?
This type of thing rarely happens in an office, as it's easy to see what someone is doing and how well things are going.
When remote working, you have to create the digital practices and rituals that amplify those missing social cues, progress indicators, so that you can easily 'see' the wellbeing of the team.
Remember, what's important is that the work is getting done.
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As a sign of good remote working practice, we focus on progress indicators, and not evidence that someone is chained to their desk from 9.00 am to 5.30 pm.
In an office, people can be present without being productive. Remote work makes it so much easier for us to focus on impact and output.
Consider the following:
1. Create a team-status channel so that people can post a message letting their teammates know they're not going to be available.
2. Create a team-checkout or reporting channel with an automated message at 4.00pm asking people 'What did you work on today? Please take a minute to reply to this thread.'. Set the expectation with your teammates that they should answer as thoroughly as possible at the **end of their working day**. Encourage people to add context with a voice or video message, where they can show and tell what they've done. The checkout enables a person to show progress and ask for help while respecting their teammates' time, who can then reply at a time convenient to them.
3. Create automated hooks which will display a message to a channel when something useful happens. For example, when a designer publishes their designs to a shared folder post a message to the project channel. Hooks shows progress as a by-product of doing the work, without requiring any additional work.
4. Not all messages need a written reply, use emojis and reactions to respond to messages. For example, if a designer needs feedback on some design options, they should post the image to the project channel and use reactions (1,2,3,4) to vote on the most preferred options. These add context, allow for quick responses and can be completed when people have a spare couple of mins rather than occupying the whole team in a design review meeting.
As you can see, there are a myriad of different ways for people to show progress indicators when working remotely.
We draw the line at installing app usage tracking technology which undermines trust, and instead, we look for ways to amplify progress indicators as a by-product of doing work. It's more natural and can usually be automated.
Coming next we'll discuss what you should do if despite your best efforts a teammate is not as visible as you'd like.
If you'd like help, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch at Ready for Remote
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Regarding point 2, a team-checkout, I wanted to share that a friend of mine has a practice that I thought was really meaningful. They had their team write down 3-5 things that they want to do everyday -ish that makes their heart sing (can be simple like a glass of bourbon at the end of the day, or something more complex like talking sales strategy) and then they check in regularly on how they did on those things. I thought it was a great way to focus on what makes people happy in their job and we incorporated it into our end of day journal.