Podcast 28: How to effectively collaborate when working from home

In these recent difficult times, employees across the world have suddenly been required to work from home, many for the first time. As a result, they’ve had to adapt to collaborating remotely with their teams and colleagues. So today, we’re joined by Kosta Mavroulakis, Founder and CEO of Empact Ventures. Kosta is here to talk to us about how we can all improve our collaboration skills when working from home.

1. It would be great if you could introduce yourself to our listeners.

So, I’m the founder and CEO of Empact Ventures. Essentially, we co-design different startup and technology initiatives around the UK and Europe. We also scout innovation for top corporates and investors and we act as a super connector for high-growth SMEs and startups.

We’ve been doing this now for about four years and I’ve been doing it for about twelve years. We’ve got a great relationship with Hays and we run staff initiatives across the UK through the super connect series of events in twelve cities. So, I’m used to traveling and working remotely with many different organisations of different sizes and I hope I can help some of the listeners today.

2. For many, the world of work as we know, has changed dramatically as a result of COVID-19. For instance, some of our listeners may be dealing with responsibilities from other departments which are outside of their normal remit. So, that means that day-to-day priorities are constantly changing and there could be a demand for more collaboration with wider teams. What unique challenges does this situation bring when trying to collaborate remotely?

 I think it brings a number of challenges whether you’re dealing with and working with different team members but also working with different partners and clients.

• More responsibilities such as childcare and pets

So, you’re not just sitting in an office working nine to five, you now have other responsibilities around you like childcare and pets. The importance of communicating that to those that you’re working with is essential, so that they know what environment you’re in as you’re not sitting right next to them.

• Juggling multiple jobs as a result of colleagues being furloughed and reduced hours

There’s also the matter of juggling multiple jobs because there might be some staff that have been furloughed or some staff that are on reduced hours and all of a sudden, your boss comes to you and asks you to take on more work. So, you end up doing two or three people’s jobs at the same time as doing your own, because times are tough for all manner of businesses, whether it’s small or large.

And in that scenario, it’s important to be honest with those that you’re working with internally and externally about what you think you can and can’t do. And also, externally with customers or partners, that you’ve only just come into this and maybe you’ve only been told in the last few days, and so you’re finding your bearings. So, you’ll do your absolute best to help and support them but if you don’t know the answer, you’ll be honest about that and be transparent that you will find the answer and get back to them. So, those are two of the challenges that you face from a team perspective and externally.

• Getting used to the new environment you are working in

Also, there’s things like frustration and stress that can build up because you’re not used to the situation that you’re in or you’re not used to the environment. You might be sharing a flat or a house with multiple people, whether it’s family or other housemates, and that can build up frustration because you’re used to quietness in an office, but a flatmate might love listening to their music or playing their drums.

• Continuing to work on projects with less support

Then also frustration within the teams that you’re working with, because certain colleagues that you’ve worked with for a while have now been furloughed or they’ve lost their jobs, et cetera. And so that project that you’ve spent so many weeks or months or even years on, suddenly a key part of that and that knowledge is lost or is not there. That can build up and obviously managing multiple job roles and people, it can mean that stress gets built up because, you want to ensure that you’re working hard and giving your all to the company that may or may not be facing some difficulties themselves.

But at the same time, you’re trying to juggle your current work environment, your home responsibilities and the people that maybe report to you or you reporting to other people. So, all of that coupled together can create some stress and frustration and that can be a challenge.

• The ability to learn on the job

And finally, learning on the job. If you’ve been given something that you’re not used to, or you’ve never done before, you’ve got that challenge of having to not go through an extensive training course but learn from others, ask questions, observe other team members from afar. Maybe look back on the collaboration system or the project management system if you’ve got one in place, to see how certain challenges were dealt with so that you can learn by doing.

• You mentioned perhaps having to manage childcare or living with pets. What advice would you give to someone that’s perhaps juggling work with those challenges and how can they manage these distractions?

Well, yes, that’s a very good point. You see, when you’re working in an office, you don’t have to think about that. I mean you might have to think about family commitments and you get an emergency text come through, et cetera. But now you’re working from home and like I said, you might have a wife and two children or a husband and two children and you might have those children not being able to go out and do the things that they used to; see their friends, et cetera. And that might build up some frustration in them that they want to go out. So, it’s really important that you manage this in a sensible way.

• Optimise your home working environment

So, the way that I deal with things, also other people in my team or partners and clients that I’ve been working with is firstly to optimise your home working environment. Try to set up a separate room in your house, if you can have that, or in your flat that it’s kind of like your mini office. So, currently I’m working with three screens, I’m working with an iMac, a laptop that I’d usually take out with me, plugged into a monitor. So, because I’m doing multiple jobs and working with multiple people, multiple projects, I’ve got this separate room.

• Ensure you are moving around throughout the day

I’ve also tried to optimise myself as well, so I actually have a stand that my iMac is on. So, I’m able to stand while I’m working since I can’t go out for long periods of time because of recent COVID-19 restrictions. I can go out for one form of exercise, but during the day it’s not like I can walk to the train station and get on a train and then walk to work and so on. So, I’m standing for at least half the day.

• Make use of the technology you have available

Try to set up all the right technology that you’ve got available to you. So like I said, I’ve got these three monitors. I’ve also got two separate computers. So, if for example, I was going on a call and my wife next door was also on a call because she’s doing some business as well remotely, then I would take my laptop and go straight into the living room or another part of the house, so I can quickly attach and detach.

• Minimise distractions where possible

Also, what’s important. I like to play music and I’ve got some noise canceling headphones, so I put these on to drown out any distractions and I set up my playlists accordingly. Sometimes, I need motivation music and other times I need music that has no words and it’s just sounds and it’s calming, particularly in the most stressful times or different peak periods of the day when everybody’s firing emails at you at nine in the morning or maybe three, four in the afternoon when everybody’s trying to get off.  So, it’s important to have the technology. It’s important to have things that keep you calm, keep you focused.

• Communicate with those that you live with

It’s important to communicate with those that you live with. So, whether that’s your wife or partner, husband, housemates, parents, whatever situation you’re in, communicate to them that you’re normally in an office, working nine to five and now you’re in this situation by no fault of your own and you really need focus within a nine to five period or whatever your working hours. Ask them if they can take some responsibility to look after the children or look after your pets, take the dog out for a walk and also try to adapt your work routine as well.

So, you might not be able to work nine to five all the way through without distraction because you have these responsibilities. See if you can actually break your day down and communicate with the other people that you’re living with. And then when I come back, I’ll go back into it for another four hours. So, use that communication and establish that productive work routine with these breaks that supports yourself, but also supports those you’re living with whilst also communicating to your team members, this changing environment and when you are working and not working and so on.

Thanks, great advice. I have to agree with the noise cancelling headphones. I realised early on in my lock down that they were a godsend along with many playlists that are already created as well, so, I’m completely on board with that.

3. A big part of working remotely, is communication and keeping that up and many say it’s important to over communicate when working remotely. Would you say that’s true?

Yes, I would say that’s true. I mean, because it’s not like we’re sitting in an office now and we can turn around to our colleague and say, “Oh, what do you think about this? I’ve done this proposal, but I’m not quite sure.” In order to speak to a colleague, you now have to either send them an instant message or send them an email or schedule a call, et cetera.

What that can create, particularly when you’re taking on other responsibilities, is it can create many more calls. So, Zoom calls, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Hangouts, phone calls. These are all the different types of platforms that are being used now to have all these calls. And, you could find yourself in so many internal calls for something that when you’re in the office, you could actually deal with, within a few minutes, or within a quick 15 minute catch-up.

I think it’s important to get balance of what you should be communicating when and on what platform, how, and to get that balance so that it doesn’t take you away from the work responsibilities that you have. It supports you, but it gets that balance and in an effective way.

4. Something that I’ve been doing is starting the day with a team meeting. I’m finding it incredibly useful just to set out what we’re going to do for the day. Would you say that’s a good idea, that’s something good that teams can be doing?

Yes, absolutely. I mean I think it all depends on the person and the team and also the company that you’re working within because some companies will have a very intense start to the day. Maybe they operate from very early hours of the morning and some will operate in the opposite way.

So, I think it’s important that there’s communication, first internally and maybe also externally as well about what actually works for the business, what works for you as an individual and what works for the team. For example, for myself, I actually don’t do well with calls from let’s say halfway in the morning through to about two o’clock, that’s kind of the busiest period. It’s when I’m getting hit with emails left, right and centre for organising all these technology events around the country. And so I actually choose to not have calls first thing in the morning but actually wait till the afternoon, but make sure everybody is briefed in the morning from the previous day, and make sure that when I do have calls, that I choose appropriately according to the priority levels that they are, and how long they should last and I’ve communicated that.

So, I try to organise calls both with team members but also partners that I’m collaborating with on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So, that way there’s a start to the week of what we’re expecting. And then in the middle it’s kind of a progress of where we’re up to and what we need to do before the end of the week. And then Friday is, this is where we’ve got to and this is what we need to remember when we start the week again.

5. And given the current situation, is there a preference for video calls or have you tried encouraging members of your team to speak on video?

• Use voice recordings to cut out small talk

Yes, absolutely. You can use email, phone, video, but also voice recordings can also be good. So, for example, within my team we always say that if we can’t get that availability internally, maybe because we’re working to a deadline and we’re working on different projects or certain people in particular, if you’re working with freelancers that work certain days or certain times. What we tend to do is to actually do a voice recording and then upload it to our collaboration system or send it on email or on a WhatsApp group or a collaboration system.

And what that enables you to do is, cut out the small talk, though there is a place for it. You get straight to the point, you can make that recording as short or long as you need to make it to say all your points and to say what input you need, and then you can send it at your convenience and then wait for them to respond at their convenience.

• Use video when you need to share your screen and collaborate

So, we manage between (voice) recordings where we don’t need an immediate response from that person, and then we use video calls when we’re working on a project, particularly if we need to screen share. Because I can’t turn around to my colleagues in the office and look at their screen or they can’t look at mine. Using something like Google Hangouts or Zoom means that you can share the screen very easily.

• Use email for low to medium priority tasks

Email we use mainly for low to medium priority tasks, but we also use a collaboration system that we can all see. We can see what tasks, we need to do, what the priority level is, what day they need to be done on, who’s doing them and then we can write messages within this collaboration system, so that we actually reduce emails because you can just over communicate with too many different forms and again, I think it’s important to get that balance right.

6. You mentioned a collaboration tool there, which is great for collaborating within your teams. As we all know, many of our listeners are adapting from working in a traditional office environment to now working individually from home, and there’s obviously going to be some disconnect between teams when collaborating on projects. Do you have any tips to ensure that everyone is clear on the goal of the project and stopping any disconnect or misunderstandings that might happen due to this?

The collaboration system we use is monday.com. It’s a U.S. platform, but a lot of U.K. startups and companies use it. But there’s also things like SharePoint, Slack and all of that.

• Make sure that everyone is clearly briefed

And so, it’s really important you make sure that everybody’s briefed. So, with these collaboration systems, we always keep it short. We always say the goal of the project is this in one sentence, the objectives are this in bullet points, this is the expectation of what we need as a deliverable from whoever the task is assigned to. And then we leave it open for people to clarify or please reply on the system and I will answer all your questions. So, it’s really important to set a very clear brief.

• Attach documents to give some more context or background and offer support

Attach documents if you need to attach documents that maybe give some context or some background to that. Make it clear that you’re here to help them and support them as well, and when and how they can contact you, or who they can ask within the team to help them within that. And make sure that you schedule some check in points, whether that’s them responding on email by a certain date of where they’ve got to. So, at least if you’re the manager, you can check in with them and you can identify if you need to jump in or you need to support them, or as a colleague as well.

• Set out and clearly communicate expectations

I think it’s important that you set out the expectations, communicate that clearly, transparently attach things where you need to attach and make yourself available as well. And make it clear when there’s an external deadline, maybe it was for a client, and when the internal deadline is that is the final checkoff point before you’re happy for it to go off, particularly if you’re ahead of schedule.

7. People spend a lot of time building a culture within our teams. If we’re not working all in the same office together, I imagine there’s a risk of perhaps losing some of that. Is there anything our listeners can do to ensure that that team culture remains intact whilst working remotely?

• Be mindful of the language you are using when communicating

Absolutely. You know, with email and instant messenger, et cetera, there’s a very big risk that the tone can be lost, particularly when people are working in different environments. They’ve got different stresses, whether they’ve got perhaps children responsibilities and all of that is overlapping into their work environment. It’s very important to be appreciative and explain to those that you’re working with, that in fact, this is the situation and when you do communicate like this, please don’t take anything personally or please don’t read anything into it.

It’s just important to be clear and think about the wording you’re using because people are in their separate environments with different stresses and pressures and that might boil over a bit into them working or typing. And it’s important that a supportive, collaborative, friendly environment is kept there.

• Show appreciation to your colleagues

Particularly if you find yourself in a situation that, maybe your colleague has been furloughed or they’ve lost their job, or you’re doing multiple responsibilities. It’s important to show how appreciative you are to others, that they’re helping you, or you’re in the situation together.

It’s important to explain to them that these are tough times, but we’ll come through it together and keep that willingness to fight, and to keep persevering in the situation that you’re in because it won’t last forever. We don’t know how long it’s going to last, but we’re in this situation working together in all these different remote places.

• Maintain activities that build team culture

Any culture that you’ve built up in person, try to make sure that you translate some of those things into the remote way of working, so that you can keep that going. And that might be anything from a loyalty scheme or it might be every Friday you get together, and you report your wins for the week, what you learned, what you think you can do better.

And if that’s what you do when you have a weekly stand-up or a daily stand-up, try to do that again. Try to do a short, quick agenda. Maybe it’s at the end of the day, this is what we achieved, et cetera, to translate that culture so that you don’t lose anything, because there’s a risk of things like isolation appearing and loneliness, particularly people that bounce off other people and need that in person collaboration.

8. One of the first things I did during lockdown was set up a WhatsApp group with the colleagues I usually have lunch and morning coffee with, because I imagine small talk is still important amongst colleagues as you touched upon there. And there is a risk of losing out on that when working from home.

Absolutely. You know, we’re all in this situation together. We’re learning, we know as much as each other about what the situation is. We’re hearing government briefings and news and so on all the time.

• Ask your colleagues about their home environment and experiences

Every call that I pick up, I’m always asking about their home environment, how they’re finding it, what they’re learning in this situation, et cetera. So, that you build-up that empathy and show people that you can within your team. And it helps from the beginning, so that small talk in there is required. Particularly, if you’re only talking to that colleague or that person within your team for the first time and it’s been a week or two weeks, maybe they’re a freelancer and they’ve come in, they’re jumping in and out.

• Remember the conversations you are having

Try to remember some of the small talk as well so that when you next have one of those new conversations, let’s say in a week’s time, if they told you for example, that the children are struggling to adapt to being in the house all the time and they told you that a week ago, ask them how that’s going now and what you’ve been doing or maybe share some insights of what you’ve been doing as well, because it creates that empathy that you want to help.

• There is a time and place for small talk

But, I think there’s also a time and a place for the small talk. So, if you’re always talking to that one colleague all the time, et cetera, you don’t need small talk every single time that you schedule a Zoom call, or a Microsoft Teams call, et cetera.

In those scenarios, just set short agendas and go straight into it. And then once that’s done, if you find that you’ve got some minutes available at the end, then yes, bring in the small talk parts of it. There is a risk that we could miss out on it, but it’s important that we take responsibility to introduce it where it needs to be introduced and take it out where it doesn’t need to.

I think that was fantastic advice, what you said about, having some empathy and just remembering the small details, picking up on those points and keeping the conversation going.

9. Going back to tools and technologies, you’ve already named some collaboration tools that you’ve used. I just wanted to check if there were any others that you would recommend and if you had any tips about using them well?

 So, for different email systems. I would say, some people are using Microsoft Office and are using things that are client side, on their desktop, et cetera. Other people are using Google apps or Gmail.

• Organise your email inbox

In some cases, if you haven’t customised it for you, I think it’s very important with email that you make sure, particularly if you’re working from home and probably spend more time behind an email account than you did when you were in an office. It’s important first when you sit down to make sure you’re organised, you don’t have one inbox with every single email that comes in, but you have multiple folders with all the certain projects or different departments. So, I’ll have admin and operations and then I’ll have a separate one for client projects and a separate one for internal projects, whether they’re R&D (Research and Development) things that we’re working on, or external projects that we’re working with colleagues in other companies and other partners that we work with. So, email’s very important.

• Use app extensions

It’s really important to see what hacks you can do and by that, I mean extensions of those things. So, for example, if you’re using Google apps or Gmail and you go into the settings, there’s an advanced function that has certain little things that you might need, like you can enable it so that you can put the chat on the right-hand side. You can also disable the chat altogether.

So, for example, as soon as we went remote, we always used to use Hangouts and instant messenger and actually we overused it too much. So actually, I disabled it.

• Use collaboration systems

We introduced this collaboration system Monday.com only about seven weeks ago. And it has really revolutionised us because what it does is instead of having one long instant messenger system with all these chats going back and forth, or you might be using Slack with different channels, it organises it because you can actually set different boards and tasks and groups and categorise them and assign them to people. And I think these types of systems, a SharePoint, a Monday, a Trello, are systems that are required. So yes, see what your email can do in terms of different functionalities.

• Use social media extensions to build your personal brand

Look through the Google Chrome extension store because there’s certain things that you can add to that will help you. So, if you’re somebody that uses social media for example, and maybe you use a scheduling tool to schedule our posts, maybe use Buffer or TweetDeck, then see if they’ve got a Chrome extension. So for example, I use a buffer quite a lot. I know the founder well, so when I find different things on the internet that I want to tweet, I actually go to the extension and use that to put things into my schedule. And it just helps to speed up a bit of time.

• Share your screen to continue presentations

And then as I said before, communication wise, because we use the Google Suite, we use Hangouts quite a lot and we’ll share a screen. And so, when we share a screen or share what we’re seeing and what we’re working on, certain documents or if we’re doing internal team meetings and we’re in different locations, we’ll show them presentations that we’ve prepared for clients or prepared externally for the events that we’re presenting at. So, they can see through them.

10. If you had to pick three important rules that teams should follow when trying to effectively collaborate remotely, what would they be?

• Choose a suitable collaboration system

I would choose a collaboration system that works for everybody in the organisation and it’s set up with the right information, with the right documents, with the right work flows, projects, clients and so on. I think that’s essential because you’re no longer in an office together. And you no longer can just walk to the other side of the room or go into a filing cabinet and pull something out.

So, it’s important to have that, particularly if you’re using an online drive management system. Like if you’re using Google Drive and that system can link to there and you can pull documents out that are already in there and put them in an organised way.

• Explain what your set up is at home to your colleagues and clients

Secondly, I would say to them, to explain what your setup is at home and the environment that you’re in and your work routine as well so that they know when the best time is to catch you for a call.

Maybe when the kids are getting up, it’s not a great time because you’re likely to have background noise happening. Equally, it’s important to help them understand when you work best in this current new situation that you’re in. So, like I said, I work best between the hours of like 9am and 2pm and then I take all my calls between 2pm and 6pm, for example. And that communication is so important, that transparency, that truth is really important.

• Translate your workplace culture online

And finally, I would say try to translate the culture that you’ve created and certain things and whether that’s stand-up meetings at the start of the day or the end of the day or speaking every day et cetera. Try to translate that as much as you can into the online world and try to ensure that there’s that consistency and explanation of what you’re going to be doing in adapting that culture to this new online culture that you’re now in.

11. There’s been lots of talk that previous world changing events brought about big changes to the world of work. And there’s a thought that much the same, with this world changing event, it could bring around equally big changes to the world of work going forward. So, in your mind, remote working and as a result remote collaboration, would you say it’s the future of work?

 I don’t think it will be a complete replacement of offices and people coworking et cetera. But I do think it will play a bigger role for the majority than the minority. So, usually remote working is currently used by startups who maybe can’t afford an office for three or four team members because it can pile up. It’s freelancers or contractors that don’t have consistent work or maybe they’re on different client sites all the time. And also parents that need that flexibility to work from home as well. So, this is where it traditionally gets used.

• Organisations assessing how well their employees work from home

I think you’ll come to a point where companies large and small, whether in the private or public sector or third sector will evaluate very strongly how the situation that we’re in now, this one month, two months, three months or longer, how everybody did and who worked well in that and therefore could work from home. Maybe they want to work from home. Asking people whether they want to work from home over longer continuous periods and who was having cabin fever, isolation, maybe mental health issues et cetera, and needs to be around people. So, I think there’s going to be at least a bigger discussion on the whole matter and how it can play a bigger role in society.

• Companies evaluating the cost of office space

Maybe some of the bigger companies start to evaluate, do they need all these costs relating to big fancy offices, et cetera, or can they be flexible? Can they give more flexibility to it because you’re going to find, like right now some people are gonna really enjoy it. That they don’t need to do that commute to work and the costs that go with it, et cetera.

• Home working to no longer be viewed as a perk

Other people are not going to like it that they’ve got this isolation. It might disrupt some of their home lives because working remotely creates all sorts of challenges of knowing when to draw the line particularly if you’re a very focused person and can’t really draw a line between when is the home life and when is the work life. And so I think it’s going to have a massive role to play in the future. It will have its place. And like I said I don’t think it will just get used by the minority. I think it could get to the point where around maybe not 50/50, but maybe 30/70, 40/60, it gets used and it no longer gets thought of as a perk but as a norm, as an expectation when you move jobs or start jobs, et cetera.

Thanks, Kosta. I think it will be really interesting to see what changes do occur in the world of work as a result of this and what learns we can take away from it , f there are improvements that can be made to tell people and organisations.

12. I just have one question left and it’s a question that we ask all of our guests. If you had one piece of career advice for our listeners, what would that be?

• Open yourself up to new opportunities

So, for me, there’s one quote that stays with me. It defines everything I do. And those that I support as a super connector and my team as super connectors. And I’m sure everybody’s heard of the saying, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” But, it’s not just that, it’s not what you know and it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you and how visible you are. Because the more visible you are, the more opportunities come your way.

So, what that means really is if you are looking for your next career path or your next job, go to networking events, communicate to people that you’re looking or you’re quietly looking, et cetera. Open yourself to new opportunities, advise startups if you can, or nonprofits. You might actually find that you really like it or they really like having somebody like you and that might create an opportunity.

Try to get out there as much as possible, particularly in this time that we’re where we’re at, trying to do lots of webinars. And I think, Jon, you were saying to me before we started that you’re doing some webinars and it’s a good chance to learn new things and so on. And I definitely think that’s great advice and I always take the philosophy of why not, why can’t you just do it? Why, can’t you give yourself a shot in this new path or this new opportunity that comes your way as a result of being visible and being out there. So yes, I hope that helps everybody in some way. It’s helped me.

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