Manners are hugely important when working with anyone, but they’re extra important when working with remote staff. When working with a remote team, particularly if you’re not having regular face to face meetings, your day to day correspondence is the only way you build rapport. So whether you’re communicating with your Virtual Assistant, accountant, website or graphic designers or any other team member it’s worth keeping in mind that good manners foster good working relationships.
So with the aim of developing and maintaining good relationships, it’s worth taking a few extra minutes to make sure your communications are both polite and clear. In order to be polite, there’s no need for excessive formality or wordiness. Just treat the communication as you would if you were talking to a person in the same room.
Address the person you’re corresponding with
It may seem like a waste of time, but otherwise you’re just barking orders. If you wouldn’t bark orders at people without acknowledging them, don’t do it via email, text or chat.
Sign off your emails
There’s no reason you can’t have a signature set up, and if you regularly forget to use it, then set it to be automatic. If you don’t know how to set up a signature on your email or your phone, then find out and spend those few minutes setting it up once so it’ll be there for ever.
Tone is difficult to convey in email or text correspondence
So it’s worth taking a little extra time to choose your words carefully. There’s no way to know how people have taken your message so there’s a very good chance you could offend someone without ever knowing it.
Never fire off a response
If you receive a message that offends you, or you’re just in a bad mood – wait at least a couple of hours before you respond angrily. It doesn’t achieve anything and can ruin an otherwise good working relationship. Alternatively, the person who offended you may be oblivious to your anger and frustrate you further. There’s nothing worse that wasting a good snark on someone who doesn’t get it.
Avoid passive aggressive behaviour
For the same reasons as above, it never achieves something good and usually results in bad feelings. If something is a serious problem you need to have a discussion about it. If it’s just something that annoys you a bit, you’re better off taking it as a chance for personal growth and get over it.
Uppercase is shouting
It only takes milliseconds to turn the Caps Lock on or off. Consider it time well spent. Unless you’re trying to shout, then it’s OK.
Time is money
Even though someone may be working from home, their time is still valuable. If you’ve got a conference call scheduled or you’ve promised to have some information for them by a certain time and you can’t make it – a quick text, email or call to let them know shows respect and professionalism.
So those are my main tips for maintaining good communications with a remote team. Basically, it’s just common sense and remembering that even though you might not have a person in front of you, you are actually having a conversation with somebody. Do you have a pet peeve when it comes to communications? Share it in the comments…
If you’d like some more ideas, check out my previous Working With A Virtual Assistant posts
Click here to book a complimentary 30 minute catch up to discuss how I could help you.
