Q. The biggest challenges when working remotely with others are ...
Remote and hybrid working can be fantastic, but it comes with its own set of challenges and hurdles that need to be designed around. What are yours?
Every week, we suggest a new question you can include in your Manual of Me.
Keeping your Manual of Me regularly updated helps you continue to explore and communicate how you work well with others.
And remember, you don’t need to share your Manual of Me to benefit - even just taking time to discover these insights about your way of working, helps you become more aware of your needs, preferences and motivations at work, so you’re able to build stronger working relationships with others.
Manual of Me Plus Edition members can add this as custom question, and Manual of Me Teams Edition allows team leaders to add this question too. If you don’t already have a Manual of Me - sign up for free.
Q. The biggest challenges when working remotely with others are ...
Remote and hybrid teams have exploded in recent years, not least prompted by necessity during COVID, but also to support those who have different needs, and open up more accessible working practises.
However, it’s not perfect, and it takes some additional effort to design distributed and hybrid teams, and taking time to consider, reflect and share the challenges as a team allows us to face the hurdles head-on, and explore what we can do to improve things, or simply be more mindful of each others frustrations.
Use this entry in your Manual of Me to reflect on the challenges you’ve experienced, the frustrations you face, but also the benefits and opportunities which remote and hybrid provides.
How to find your answer:
Think back over the past five years - how work worked before COVID, how things changed when we went remote, and how things are now, with a mix of people on-site and distributed. What are the benefits, what are the challenges, what are the areas for improvement?
Think about your frustrations - what gets in the way of you doing a good job, when you’re working remotely, or perhaps when you’re working with others who are working remotely? Try and think about the challenges others might be facing too - or the reasons behind why they might need to work in the location they are.
Think about the opportunities - For each of the frustrations, explore potential improvements or changes you or your team could make. Think about what might make things better, what you could do personally, and what you could collectively do as a team.
What would your answer be?
Leave a comment, so others can see how others might approach this question.
For team leaders
Including this question in your team Manual of Me encourages individuals to reflect and share challenges and frustrations - which can be hard to hear as a team leader, but when done well, you can turn it into an opportunity for improvement.
Consider supporting your team to think about the challenges, and then create a positive session to flip those challenges, and explore solutions.
This question can surface lots of uncomfortable comments, so it’s possible you might not want to ask individuals to share out loud - but leave comments, answers and challenges on post-it notes or anonymously - so you can tackle them in a group.
Further discussion questions might include:
How have things changed over the last five years?
How are things likely to continue to change?
What are the benefits of fully-remote, hybrid and fully-onsite teams?
What are some of the reasons some people might need to be remote?
What opportunities are we missing to work better together in this way?
Manual of Me is a living document - introducing new questions regularly helps your team embed the framework in your ways of working, and creates an opportunity to spend time as a team discussing how to work together effectively, and builds stronger internal relationships.
Share this question with your team, and encourage them to share their answers in the comments, or in your next upcoming team session.
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