image source: flickr

3 simple and effortless things to keep your team productive during WFH.

Context. The problem and the solution during remote working or WFH.

I never had an issue with delegation or assigning tasks with providing little context as I’m blessed with an awesome team.

But now things are different, by not giving enough context you are potentially wasting the valuable time of your team. This results in simple tasks taking more time to complete, and not meeting deadlines.

Tasks can be delegated or assigned but context must be given.

These are the 3 things you can do to increase productivity.

1. STOP sending forwarding emails with just an FYI and stop adding your team to chat groups with sending a personal message with some prior context
2. START inviting your team into meetings even when they have nothing to contribute, gives them context, more importantly, they can learn from the meetings.
3. START sharing your daily tasks and encourage your teams to read each other tasks, it’s even better if you can do a daily stand up over a call.

What will each of these do…

1. FYI emails can be very frustrating often there are 100’s of conversations in a single email thread, by not giving a proper context you are asking your team to read the whole thread, which in most of the cases is unnecessary.
2. A lot of junior members of the team learn by observing and seeing, you can even imagine how much they learn by attending a meeting that is just one level above. Inviting team to meetings even when there is nothing for them to contribute is a lot better than doing a different meeting to give context or delegate.
3. Start your day right, with not your team around you tend to miss some of the important tasks which are not priority but important for the team, having those daily stand ups over a call will set the right pace and makes your todo list more impactful, Also, its not like the team can walk up to your desk and ask questions anytime like a normal days, so these meetings gives them a chance to ask their questions not to the entire group, which encourages collaboration.

Hope this is helpful, originally posted as a small Linkedin Update.