BRIEF Remote Workforce Communications Course – How to tele-communicate efficiently

The big connectivity shift

With continued uncertainty around COVID-19, companies are embracing travel bans and unprecedented work-from-home policies. IT teams are scrambling. But with cameras on every device and cloud access to most platforms, it’s not the technology or connectivity that worries me. It’s the communication and connections.

The hidden risks of working remotely

Occasionally working from home is great – free from drive-bys and ad-hoc meetings. But doing it for weeks or months poses significant communications challenges. At The BRIEF Lab, we’ve conducted virtual training with thousands of dispersed workers (we also work remotely ourselves). We constantly hear about the frustrations of communicating in this environment:

• Continuity: Managers lose track of progress moving from in-person to remote arrangements
• Visibility: Teams lose sight of the most important priority and become invisible to each other
• Productivity: The same technology that enables remote working becomes the source of distractions that undermine progress
• Consistency: Interactions become impersonal, transactional and easily misinterpreted
• Teamwork: Teams that were once positive and connected, become distant and trust erodes
• Isolation: It’s easy to feel disconnected, forgotten and undervalued

There are ways to communicate more intentionally to avoid these issues and keep dispersed teams on track. But they don’t happen by accident.

A more intentional tele-communicating approach

To respond to these challenges, The BRIEF Lab has launched BRIEF Remote Workforce Communications Course – How to tele-communicate from home. The goal is to equip teams with the discipline to be more purposeful and make every interaction count. Each lesson is a blend of dynamic, live instruction (virtual, of course) and individual, self-paced assignments based on the BRIEF methodology:

1. The Hidden Challenges of Working Remotely – Avoiding the most common mistakes
2. Staying Visible – Establishing a new cadence and discipline for updates and interaction with your manager and co-workers
3. E-mail Updates – Getting much more value from the most used communication channel
4. High-Quality Conversations and Present Listening – Creating the time for deep conversations and relationship maintenance
5. Running Virtual Meetings/Conference Calls – Simple techniques to design effective agendas and run better meetings and calls that take less time
6. Playing to win above distractions – A daily method to manage focus amidst the noise

Working from home offers workers a fantastic opportunity to be more balanced, purposeful and productive. Perhaps one benefit of the current uncertainty is that it will force teams to discover that with the right communication discipline and standards, they can truly work and stay connected with each other from anywhere.