Well-being is going to be a challenge for those not used to home working. I’ve been working from home for the past 4 years, and learnt a lot about what works for me. However, now whole teams and organisations are facing this overnight – how do you keep up morale?
I’ve gathered these tips from a Facebook group I’m part of for Charity Comms professionals where we’ve all brainstormed ideas. I’ve also gathered some useful tools for doing all this at the end.
Tips for keeping up staff morale whilst working remotely
- Planned coffee and lunchtime chat sessions on Zoom – being able to see everyone’s faces makes you feel less alone. Hold a virtual picnic, share recipes, pics of lunch, sneak peeks at colleague’s kitchens – makes up for a bit of the day to day chat.
- Create Team Spotify playlists with favourite tunes for working
- Have a daily breakfast chat over video conferencing
- The team watches a TED talk together, discuss it and check in with each other.
- Managers/owners – consider monetary morale boosters such as gift certificates, food delivery vouchers, free subscription to Headspace the mindfulness app
- ‘Coffee Morning’ once a week. All ‘Zoom’ at 10am on an agreed day and have tea and biscuits and general chat
- Take the dog for a walk and give a colleague a call at the same time.
- On Slack, create a virtual teabreak channel
- Virtual cuppa buddy system – everyone gets allocated someone to have a 10 min video chat each day, also
- Hire a local yoga/pilates teacher and set up virtual classes. You’d be supporting the self-employed who are going to struggle
- A fun icebreaker. Everyone had access to a document (such as Google Sheets) and wrote down a fun face about themselves and the others had to guess which fact belonged to which person
- Pets chat/photo thread
- A team book club, TV binge or movie night, where you can generate discussion and social contact on a topic
- Encourage staff to take time out away from the screen – read for 20 mins, do the washing up etc, anything that makes them do
- Share productivity and working from home tips
Useful video/collaboration tools
- WhatsApp groups (you can get up to 4 people on a video/voice chat)
- Zoom
- Microsoft Teams
- Google Hangouts
- Workplace for Facebook
- Slack