The great work from home experiment has begun. This shift brings small and large frustrations: my friend spent an hour trying to log in to his company’s email server, parents now have a second job keeping their kids entertained, and relationships may be in danger as partners spend much more time together. As you might be experiencing right now, there are downsides to remote work.
But there’s a silver lining. There are some new skills we can learn from this forced remote work situation. Our limitations, like communicating virtually and feeling distant, might even push us to communicate better and come up with better quality creative ideas. Let’s explore how.
1. Get clearer with your communication: Others don’t know what you know
When working with others, we succumb to the curse of knowledge[1]. We assume that others know what we know. We think they’re aware of how hard we’re working, what roadblocks we’re facing, and what we need from them. The distance between us forces us to get better at explaining our situation; we can’t hope that people will “see” what’s going on without an explanation. Fortunately, this can force us to communicate more clearly.
The empathy toy is a team-building product that requires teammates to explain steps to a blindfolded team member. These sessions teach communication techniques in an uncommon environment: your team member can’t see what needs to be done. You need to guide their actions, or they’re left in the dark. A work from home situation seems completely different from this at first glance, as (most likely) your co-worker isn’t blindfolded. But there are some commonalities: coworkers and bosses can’t see what’s happening on your end of the screen, and vice versa. They don’t know if, for example, you’re struggling to keep concentrated in your flat, and you don’t know if they’re frustrated trying to maintain their normal pace of work from an old desktop — thus, more than ever, when working from home we need to communicate even more clearly to close this gap.
As working from home improves our communication, this in turn can also help your team’s coordination[2]. By sharing how your daily and weekly tasks relate to the team’s end goal, team members will see what you’re doing and why it’s important. This keeps the team focused on its objectives. If your team members agree with statements like these, you’re doing a good job with virtual coordination:
“I exchange useful information with my group members to solve the problem together.”
“I try to bring all our concerns out in the open so that the issues could be addressed in the best possible way.”
2. Lower the psychological distance between you and your team
Even though we need to be physically distant these days, we don’t need to feel isolated from our teams. Psychological distance happens when we feel far away from others, regardless of where we are in the world. To prevent your physical distance from turning into psychological distance, consider using these tips to improve trust, coordination, and cohesion on your virtual team.
Researchers analyzed over 7,700 teams to see whether having more trust helped them achieve their goals[3]. Trust had a positive relationship with team goal achievement, likely because it helps members stay focused on the collective. One way to increase team trust is to share personal experiences and show vulnerability; when we share something personal about ourselves, we open the lines of communication for others to reciprocate. These connections the researchers observed were strong, no matter if teams were virtual or working face to face.
However, virtual teams can avoid the dangers of low team trust with more documentation[4]. By keeping clear records of their meetings, chats, and workflows, teams can avoid miscommunications that can hurt their performance. This documentation is especially good for clarifying roles and responsibilities. Confusion around who should have done what can hurt team member relationships.
3. Brainstorm separately for more, better quality ideas
Staring at the same wall in your home might be killing your creativity — but you’d be surprised at how effective brainstorming separately can be. If you and your team need to generate creative ideas, virtual “brainwriting sessions” can lead to more and better ideas than brainstorming together out loud. Across over 1,100 teams, researchers found that small groups that wrote down their thoughts individually and anonymously before sharing them as a group ended up with better ideas[5]. Those ideas were rated by experts as more creative and higher quality than teams that simply followed the all-too-typical process of blurting solutions out loud to each other with one dedicated person writing them down. This means our standard brainstorming approach doesn’t make the best use of each team member’s unique perspective. If you’re working with a group of more than ten people, consider electronic brainstorming instead[6]. With this hybrid approach, team members submit their ideas over text and the whole group can discuss concepts as they appear on the screen.
