It’s been several weeks now since most of us began our pandemic-driven, work-from-home mandate – how are all your remote teams doing?

A major workplace shift like the one we’re all living in now cannot occur without causing major disruption to teams. Give yourselves the grace to make mistakes, and do the best you can under the circumstances. Here’s a good first start. Have a conversation as a team and check in with each member. At your next team meeting, ask the following questions and discuss (link to infographic):

• Do you feel connected to your team? To your leader?
• Do you have what you need to do your job?
• Are our established communication agreements working, or do we need to revisit them?
• Are we using technology effectively? Where can we improve?
• How have we managed our disagreements? Did it work well?
• Are we spending enough time connecting on non-work topics? Have we been effectively checking in on a personal level with each other?
• Are we respecting each other’s boundaries?
• Have we stuck to our agreed-upon response times? Do they need to be adjusted?
• How are our team meetings going? Does everyone participate?
• Are we supporting each other? Being flexible and open to new solutions? Keeping our sense of humor?

We hope your new remote workforce is going smoothly and we applaud the responsible actions you’ve taken to reduce the spread of COVID-19. And we understand that in many cases, the decision to work from home was made for you under less-than-ideal circumstances.

At PRC we are huge supporters of the virtual workforce – we based our research on it and our CEO Tara Powers, is the author of Virtual Teams for Dummies – so we know it can work. But because we work with clients every day on virtual team effectiveness, we understand the things that need to be in place to make them successful – the infrastructure, the technology support, leadership buy-in and, team charters and communication agreements. We are here for you and your teams if you need additional support and resources. Please reach out to us directly.