Another work day dawns and our work location for the majority of us is our kitchen table, bedroom or if you are fortunate, a quiet room away from the children. Many of us miss face to face contact with our colleagues, the office water cooler chats, unplanned brainstorming and ‘in the moment’ huddles.

The good news is that most of us have adapted reasonably well to our new virtual ways of working but the question remains: what can we do to communicate and collaborate even better in our new virtual reality?

Some organisations, such as Dropbox, have recognised the changed reality of work and are adopting new ways of working with collaboration and communications at the heart of their operation. Dropbox has developed its excellent Virtual First Toolkit including:

• How to manage your time
• How to stay well
• How to support your team
• How to communicate effectively

 Dropbox plans to adapt and evolve Vitual First over time and to build in operational learnings.

 “ We’re going Virtual First, which means remote work will be the primary experience for all employees, with in-person gatherings for team collaboration (once it’s safe to do so). We wrote some principles based on our experiences so far and and included resources about adapting to Virtual First work.”*

Collaboration and Communications Competency

Other organisations include collaboration and communications as part of their competency framework for managers and their employees. The focus here is to positively affect the opinions, behaviours and actions of colleagues and to encourage cooperation and teamwork. These competencies become the reference point for helping you recruit, develop, engage and retain talent. For example, managers acting as coaches can then use these behaviours to help develop their team members knowledge and skills and also become part of the annual performance management goal setting and review.

Listen for Ideas

We spoke before in ‘how to manage and motivate remotely’ about the power of Huddles to help generate new ideas and clarify communications. Regular staff check-ins around people’s wellbeing in meetings and 1:1’s have also become important during the pandemic. This wellbeing focus and need for ongoing collaboration and communications was a common theme across many of the winning organisations in the 2021 CIPD HR Awards.

One practice used effectively in the past by CEOs like Jack Welsh, GE and Steve Jobs, Apple is to use  team meetings to pose the all important question: what can we do differently?  Depending on the answers to this question, probe further: And what else can we do? (AWE).

To collaborate and communicate well, let go of the idea that you need to come up with all the answers. Instead, listen to new ideas from those closest to the challenge and embrace new ways of doing things.

Our collective experience over the past year has highlighted that anything is possible. Who would have ever imagined that lockdowns would lead to corporations moving to remote work overnight. Collaboration and communication are important ways for managers to foster teamwork, wellbeing and to get better results in a virtual environment.