How can you maintain strong relationships with your colleagues while working from home?
The Challenge
Reflect on your interactions with your colleagues over your past two days of working from home. Identify at least three actions you took to maintain your connections with your co-workers. If you are struggling to come up with three actions, identify two actions you could have taken that would help to maintain effective working relationships.
Why do this?
Effective communication requires clear messaging, active listening, and follow-up to ensure needed actions are taken. When working virtually, you will need to be more intentional in building and maintaining effective working relationships.
Emotionally intelligent people know that good communication is essential for strong working relationships. Casual conversations build connections between people. Emotionally intelligent people check in with their boss regularly and ask others if they can support their work in any way. They follow up on action items from meetings and seek clarification if they have questions. Emotionally intelligent people check in regularly with their coworkers to see how they are doing.
What’s next?
For the next week, practice being more intentional about connecting with your colleagues in these ways. Make being intentional about maintaining positive relationships with your co-workers a regular part of your daily routine. These connections are always important, but may take more effort when working virtually.
