Building relationships can be harder when you telecommute, and there are always little incidents here and there that remind me of techniques that telecommuters should be more conscious of to make their working relationships more successful.

My boss is relatively new to our team, and a lot of people don’t know him very well yet. Especially those who work in other parts of the country or world, who don’t get to talk to him face-to-face. Some people aren’t comfortable with him, don’t feel like they know his personality, and haven’t seen the personal, human side to him yet.

I noticed that when we have a team meeting, once my boss dials in he immediately stops any chit-chat and gets right down to business. I imagine part of this is because he is busy and he knows the team is busy too and doesn’t want to take up any more time than necessary. But those first couple minutes of chit-chat are a valuable way for people to get to know you, know what you’re like, and to build a connection with you. Even if it’s simple talk about the weather or tossing around a few jokes.

Today my boss reviewed the results of our company’s annual employee satisfaction survey. He struggled getting people to give their thoughts or comments on the statistical results. He urged people to feel comfortable being honest with him and that he wants to hear what people think and they shouldn’t be afraid of speaking up. He even said he welcomed any personal constructive criticism. Good for him.

So after the meeting I politely gave him the feedback about having a few minutes of casual conversation at the beginning of team meetings. He appreciated it and said he’d give it a try. Hmm - it will be interesting to see if he was just being polite (and that giving my ‘constructive criticism’ was actually a career-limiting move) or if he actually gives it a shot. And of course, it will be even more interesting to see if it helps. Keep reading - I’ll keep you posted in future blogs on how it goes!

Anyway, this same lesson can be applied to telecommuters - to help maintain your relationships with those people you don’t see very often.

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, telecommuting advice, distributed teams, work from home, work at home

So why do people want to work from home? The infamous answer is that you get to work in your pajamas. But really, what’s so great about that? Why do we take such delicious pleasure in working in our nightclothes? Perhaps it makes us feel like we’re not really working (how can it really be working if I’m wearing my bunny slippers)? Or like we’re somehow getting away with something irreverant or inappropriate from a professional, corporate perspective?

In my personal case it’s typically because I have early morning meetings (often 7am) because I work with such a distributed team - I’m in California and my coworkers are spread throughout the US as well as in Europe and other parts of the world. And even if I don’t have a meeting, there’s often some urgent email or other that’s been sitting in my inbox for a while, where I want to get an answer back quickly (especially if it’s for my European coworkers). If I can get online and get some emails out as soon as I’ve rolled out of bed, that helps my team. And of course, then I’m sucked in and end up in my pj’s until 2 or 3pm before I finally hit the shower! Well the good news is if you do that every day, at least you’re still getting a shower roughly once every 24 hours!

There’s many other reasons for telecommuting that have nothing to do with attire -which I’ll explore more as time goes by. Stay tuned for my next posting where I’ll include a picture showing the main reason I telecommute!

Technorati Tags: telecommute, work from home, distributed teams, corporate, professional