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How to Stay Connected to Your Colleagues While Working from Home

Written by: Victoria Strange
Published on: 26 Nov 2020

Staying connected article

With our second national lockdown nearing its end and the tier system once again being rolled out across the UK, many legal professionals are feeling increasingly distant from their colleagues. Our recent Working from Home Survey found that 22% of legal professionals think the biggest challenge of remote working is not seeing their colleagues every day. Additionally, 21% of our audience feel less productive when working from home and 36% of these blame their reduced output on infrequent opportunities to collaborate with colleagues. So, what steps can we take to ensure we’re staying connected to our colleagues and remaining productive whilst working remotely? TotallyLegal has come up with 4 tips to help legal professionals stay connected to their colleagues, create opportunities for collaboration and socialise virtually when working from home. 

Tip 1: Schedule regular team meetings 

Scheduling regular team meetings is such a simple way to keep connected to colleagues during the pandemic. Before lockdown it was easy to keep on track with what each member of the team was up to and get advice from colleagues, just through general chit chat at our desks or in the kitchen. However, now we’re working from home this is a lot more difficult, so holding regular team meetings is our virtual alternative. 

It’s difficult to strike the balance between too many meetings, which run the risk of appearing to be micromanaging, and too little communication which results in teams feeling disconnected. We advise having at least one team meeting per week to keep up meaningful communication with your team. However, many companies prefer to have more regular, perhaps shorter, check-ins through-out the week. Most of which will take the form of daily morning check-ins to see how everyone is and set out objectives for the day. Keep your meetings fairly informal and ask each team member to speak for at least a couple of minutes about what they’re working on that week in order to encourage those that may be slightly more shy to speak up on group calls to have their say.

Team meetings do not strictly need to be just running through your to do list. Why not start the week off with a general catch-up? This only needs to be 20 - 30 minutes but is a great way to replicate the initial Monday morning chit chat about the weekend. This will help colleagues feel connected to each other, without it necessarily being all about work.

Tip 2: Company updates 

Meetings and updates don’t have to be limited to the team level. Holding regular meetings on a larger scale is a great way to encourage interdepartmental collaboration and ensure you’re staying connected with the entire office. We suggest scheduling a company meeting on a monthly basis and encouraging members of across different teams to speak for a couple of minutes about how the team is getting on, any clients or projects they're working on and share particular success stories. This is a great way to encourage collaboration and keep everyone informed across different business units. 

Tip 3: Utilise different messaging channels 

Instant messaging tools such as Slack and Microsoft teams are a great way to keep connected to colleagues throughout the day. Instant messaging tools aren’t just for one-to-one communication but can be a great way to get the entire team communicating with each other on a regular basis. Most messaging channels allow you to create groups with different members which can be named according to their specific purpose. Create a group channel for general conversations with the team. We also advise creating groups for different topics such as news, social (discussing weekend plans and virtual social events), and knowledge (sharing industry insights, online courses and tips). By creating various groups you’re encouraging regular communication within the team, and more varied conversation - not just quick one-to-one messages when a colleague needs help. 

Tip 4: Recreate Social Events  

Working remotely does not strictly need to be all work and no play and we should not lose the social aspects of work just because we’re not in an office environment. However, socialising nowadays isn’t as easy as it once was and we’re finding ourselves having to be a lot more creative and think about how to have more fun at work. Try keeping the social traditions you had before lockdown. For example, if you finished 30 minutes earlier on a Friday afternoon to have end of the week drinks, block out this time on a Friday and jump onto Zoom with your favourite drink to recreate this. 

Virtual socials are all about trying and testing different things to find out what works for you and your team. For some teams, chatting over Zoom can seem awkward and forced, especially if there are some bigger personalities in your team that will dominate conversation. If this is the case then why not try something more structured such as a virtual cocktail making class, a bake-off, a team quiz or even a stand-up; summarising the week, talking about what you achieved, what you didn’t achieve, priorities for next week and finish off with weekend plans to keep it light-hearted. 

To encourage further collaboration within the team or even across different departments you could mix up your teams and rotate which team is in charge of leading the social each week. Encourage people to choose a theme, activity or session that interests them to mix up the socials and keep them fun and interesting.