7 tips for remote work without stress and more effect

How working asynchronously done right will make your day better!

Although it might make sense to apply your working practices at the office to online variants such as Microsoft Teams, it mostly is not the most effective way to be productive. Collaborating online asks a whole different skillset than it does at the office. As you probably have all kinds of habits and preferences in your office lives, you need to be careful not to drag these along into your online world.

What kind of disruptive activities are most persistent? Unscheduled meetings seem to be the most disruptive activity, followed by phone calls, emails, and searching for info. These things were frustrating at work, but with the easiness of online tools (“A video call is now just one click away”) it can make an even more negative impact on your productivity, as well as the productivity of your colleagues.

To deal with this, it could be a good idea to differentiate synchronous work (where things happen in real-time such as meetings) and asynchronous work (where you do not need to block each other’s time at the same moment such as email, chat, working in Planner, etc.).

Focusing on asynchronous work at home and only applying synchronous work when needed can have many advantages, such as being able to more clearly decide when your colleagues can interrupt you. This offers an opportunity to do work which takes more of your (creative) brain like writing a whitepaper, creating PowerPoint lay-out template, diving into an Excel file with complicated formulas, etc.

These 7 tips help you optimize your mix between synchronous and asynchronous work:

1. Set your status: make use of your calendar and the Teams user status to signal whether you are available for interruptions or not. For Teams you can go to your profile picture to set your availability.
2. Create teams and channels: only create new teams in Teams for different audiences and make use of channels, while making sure you do not create too many channels at the same time.
3. Use 1-on-1 chat: don’t say “hey Megan”, and wait for reply, but communicate what you want to achieve so that Megan can reply more effective to you.
4. Put updates on the right spot: don’t put into a Teams channel that you’re done with a task, if you manage it in Planner (as a Teams tab) as well. Also: use threads in Teams and use comments in Word.
5. Plan your meetings the right way: only plan meetings when there is a clear goal and a clear possibility to prepare and provide input. Meetings can also be planned from Teams and published to Teams channels.
6. Manage your settings: when communicating, make sure the right people have access to the right documents. Also, it would be great if people know how to comment in a unified way to your document.
7. Learn when it suits you: add WorkplaceBuddy and ask questions about the tips above or do the interview to receive learnings that match your specific needs!

It is easy to step into ad hoc communication, but ask yourself: is it really that urgent? While Teams offers chat and video calls, a flood of communication may distract colleagues. And if people feel they have the time to respond, the tendency is that the responses will be more thought through. So, try to communicate transparently and thoughtfully. Write down what needs to be done and make use of the technical possibilities, such as mentioning the right users.

Sure, real time communication is great for several topics, such as catch-ups, celebrations, urgent situations, and more sensitive matters. Also, regular weekly updates are great to do in a call, but again: keeping an agenda with goals in place helps bring to get the maximum out of each participants’ valuable time.

It is about finding the right mix between asynchronous and synchronous work that suits your and your colleagues’ needs. The provided tips can guide you to the right direction, but as you can see, remote work done right goes hand in hand with digital skills. WorkplaceBuddy is a Teams app with chatbot and learnings about working with Microsoft 365 in the best way for you. You can interrupt the service whenever you like and there is a big library with all kinds of learnings which you can dive into whenever you like!

We are looking forward hearing your opinion! Are you already trying to find a balance in working synchronously and asynchronously and how do you do that? What was your favorite tip or do you have an additional one?