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Tips and tricks for working from home

With more people working from home than ever before, the need for seamless communication has never been greater. In regions such as the Middle East and Africa, that can be particularly challenging, especially if your team is spread across multiple countries with different levels of connectivity and internet access. But there are some simple steps you can take to make it much easier to encourage collaboration and teamwork. 

 Make your virtual meetings more efficient

We’ve all been on conference calls that have dragged on for too long, or not conveyed any information that couldn’t have been put in an email

It’s also important to be mindful of colleagues to make sure everyone’s voice can be heard, particularly in big video chats. Encourage meeting attendees to use the ‘raise your hand’ feature when someone has something to say and beware of overcrowded conference calls. Use digital versions of what you might use in a real meeting, like the Microsoft Whiteboard app – an infinite digital canvas where team members can jot down thoughts and share suggestions in real time 

 Recreate office chatter

Working from home can be lonely without the incidental moments of interaction with colleagues in the break room or over lunch. To encourage collaboration and camaraderie, it’s important to try and recreate those informal moments, and give employees space to breathe. For example, if you have back-to-back meetings in an office environment, the act of physically going from one meeting to the next gives you time to breathe. Back-to-back conference calls don’t offer the same break, so it’s important to build it in – schedule meetings to end five minutes before the hour to give yourself a break. The chat function in Teams can also be used as an unofficial digital watercooler, which goes some way to recreating the background chat of an office that’s not necessarily related to work.

Streamline your tools

For Safaricom, seamless remote working is vital. It has field staff around the country, but they sometimes had issues collaborating on documents – they would often have to wait until their colleagues were done with a file before being able to edit it, for example.

More than half of the company’s workforce is in its customer experience team, and new starters had to go through a lengthy process to gain access to individual servers and files required for their job. The presence of different teams with access to different tools had led to the accidental creation of “islands” of information within the business, with some people cut off from others. To resolve these issues, Safaricom decided to streamline their software. They turned to Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.

Using these tools enabled Safaricom team members to work on the same file concurrently, with safeguards and version control, so no work was inadvertently lost. OneDrive meant that new team members were instantly able to access all the relevant files they needed to do their job