Maximizing Your Team’s Efficiency: The Offline vs. Online Debate
If your team is starting a new project, do it offline;
If your team is working on an existing project, do it online.
At the beginning of remote work forced by Covid-19, companies see productivity increases, but that could be a false positive.
After a year or two following the endemic of Covid-19, Companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, started asking their employees to back to the office.
Reed Hasting, Netflix CEO thinks working remotely is ‘a pure negative’.
When it comes to choosing to work remotely VS in the office. I think it is vital in understanding the synchronization between employees, and their familiarity with the projects.
When we were forced to work from home, people know their work, progress, deliverables, knowledge level, and even communication style. Members are in sync on the project they are working on.
Working from home enables (or forces) people to cut off social chatting, and unnecessary interruptions that start with “Hey, do you have a minute?”. And let’s be frank, we haven’t gotten a chance and got used to cooking our own lunch or doing our laundry during the work day.
As we are returning to the new normal, new project started coming in, and with more new hires, people don’t have the same level of understanding towards the new project and new team members they are going to work with because they haven’t got the chance to talk about them frequently.
Human minds are fascinating, we don’t process information like computers, and a lot of our subconscious thoughts are without proper structure or logic. We pick up social cues even without proper learning in school, unlike math. Having interactions and talking (work-related or not) face-to-face will help to build better teams for a complex or larger-scale project that requires collaboration between multiple aspects.
Most companies settled with a hybrid approach eventually, because now that we are used to the luxury of wearing T-shirts during a work-from-home team meeting and taking minor breaks on phones without being judged.
Be flexible with your team and assess what situation requires which work mode. That will improve the team’s morale and mental health, yet not compromise productivity.
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I talk about startup, behavior, mindset & decision-making.
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