Your Remote Relatability

Tomorrow we are sharing the building blocks of great remote relationships with over four hundred telecommuters and thought it might be helpful to share a few pointers with you.
Good working relationships don’t happen accidently. Whether you realize it or not there are ingredients to great relationships that are especially important when relating at a distance.
A challenge of distance includes working without face-to-face contact, resulting in lack of personal bonding. Trust is usually slow to develop without personal contact.
Here are some ideas for you to maximize your remote relatability:

• Be Intentional – when you are based in the same location you can build relationships informally by running into people in the hall and you can connect over coffee or lunch. When you are remote you must be deliberate about building relationships.
• Virtual Coffee – setup a call to have coffee with a colleague and make the agenda all about connecting. People remember how you make them feel. So spend time connecting, build a trusting relationship and your relatabiliy will increase significantly.
• Ask about communication preferences – do you know how your colleagues prefer to be contacted? Do they prefer e-mail, voice mail, text or an IM? Is weekly or monthly communication best?  Respect each person’s unique preferences by asking.
• Friday Chat – use IM as a tool to create connection in your team. Start a group IM and pose a trivia question or ask about everyone’s weekend plans. It enables group sharing and provides a sense of belonging. It doesn’t have to last long. After ten minutes you can wish everyone a good day and say good bye.

Build great remote relationships by being intentional and having virtual coffee or a Friday chat. Be intentional and ask about communication preferences. Be intentional and improve your remote relatability.