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SPEAKER: Everyone has a different way of working.
And asking people what their preferred method
of communication is helpful when collaborating with them.
Welcome to the second episode of this Working from Home series
where we will explore a few different methods
of communication based on working styles.
To do this, let's meet Olina, Abi, and Cassidy.
Olina spends a lot of hours building tools.
Therefore, she prefers to have a longer focus
time on a single task and reduce switching
to different contexts.
Because it's very important to her
to work on one single task at a time,
she likes to check her emails in the morning
and then work through her longer blocks of work.
But on occasion with larger projects,
a whole week can sometimes go by until she gets a chance
to check her email.
This is why she communicates with her peers
to send her a message via chat for more time-sensitive things
and is also more active in her team's group chat.
This also helps her quickly troubleshoot questions
since she's a bit shy with video conferencing.
Abi, on the other side, switches to different tasks
in 30 or 60-minute increments since he practices time boxing,
which is allocating a specific amount of time
to work on a task.
And because he works very closely with his calendar,
he schedules when to check his email, which
is 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening.
He tends to scan his inbox for emergency messages
first by having the priority inbox feature enabled
in his Gmail, which helps personalize sorting of messages
from most to least important.
Abi also asks peers to have descriptive agendas in calendar
invites when they wish to meet.
And he uses commenting in Google Docs
to keep the conversation going asynchronously.
And when he's out in the field, he
uses his phone to answer chat messages and communicates
with his stakeholders that his calendar is up to date
in case they wish to book on a free timeslot to chat.
Then there is Cassidy, who is a subject matter
expert that supports many teams and customers.
She always keeps her email open in one window
to keep an eye on messages and asks
that any new requests or questions
be emailed to her so she can add it to her to do list.
She has created multiple email filters to help automatically
label topics she knows are important for her to monitor
and also manually labels emails as follow-up.
She also likes to scale information
from a one-to-many perspective.
And when she sees trends in questions,
she begins to document them into a frequently asked question doc
that she then uses to help point people in the right direction
and also save her time.
She also hosts office hours so that she
can support more than one person with similar questions
and asks that people join that time meeting if they would like
to chat more in depth when she identifies
it's a good item for that type of sync.
She also uses appointment slots to create public slots
for her customers to sign up if she sends them
a link without them viewing her entire calendar.
As you can see, everyone has a different process.
And to best support one's work, it's
important to learn and share about one's
preferred communication tools.
It's also equally important to turn off all communication
channels at the end of our workday
in order to unplug from it all.
If you're interested in learning more,
I have linked several resources in the description
of this video.
And community, if you found this episode helpful,
please click Like and subscribe for future episodes.
Cheers.
Stop, teleprompter, stop.
It keeps going.
How about this?
Does this look OK? (BRITISH ACCENT)
My preferred communication is chat.
This would be a great thumbnail, yes?
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