tetronik News

 by Kerstin Marx-Kiesinge | tetronik marketing | 

To ensure that goals and results do not diverge, teams in the home office must coordinate on a regular basis. Corresponding tools are widely being discussed and recommended on the Internet. However, the following important aspects are often given to little consideration:

1. How can we coordinate when the quality of the Internet fluctuates heavily?

Internet quality currently fluctuates massively due to the above-average number of hits, e.g. by home office workers and home schooling students. This results in frequent interruptions and quality issues during online meetings, which in turn makes it difficult and lengthy to synchronize team members. Both team productivity and work results suffer as a consequence.

Many of my contacts with whom I have been talking in recent weeks find their online meetings tiring and lengthy. And this is not due to poor meeting discipline. Rather, due to the constant interruptions and technical failures, a lot of time is lost through repetitions, technical explanations and waiting times. One of our team colleagues lives in an urban area, where every morning the Internet connection breaks down completely. Video or online conferences in general are not feasible for us during this time.

The solution: Use conference calls more often to coordinate your team

Conference calls are much more stable in quality, require fewer resources and can, according to experience, be arranged more effectively in terms of time. Whenever an image is not absolutely necessary for synchronization (e.g. when you need to demonstrate a product sample live) and whenever interruptions are highly disruptive – e.g. when important decisions have to be made – you should fall back on a fail-safe communication in the form of telephone conferences.

The telephone conference functions of tetronik's DAKS alarm server, which is successfully deployed across the globe, are ideally suited for trouble-free and effective team coordination. This is best achieved with the help of these tried and tested '10 tips for more effective telephone conferences'

Source: Boyko.Pictures via stock.adobe.com

2. How can I help my co-workers to structure themselves?

In the home office, it is impossible to avoid mixing private and business topics here and there, especially during the current contact ban, as children often have to be looked after at home. Regular conferences, which take place at the same time every day, help to find the necessary structure for work and to get into a good working rhythm. Try the widely used 'Morning Call', for example. But even after lunch, it can be a good time to get back together and focus on the goals of the day.

In preparing for home office work, it was particularly important to me that we as a team manage to maintain a common working structure despite the very different situations at home. We decided to have a daily 'After Lunch Call'. Because right after lunch was the ideal point of overlap in our individual daily rhythms, which are characterized, among other things, by toddler care, home schooling or the preference to work late in the evening.

The solution: Automate conferences as far as possible

All necessary participants should be called automatically at the mutually agreed time. For if this is not the case, experience shows that annoying and unproductive time delays occur because individual participants miss the appointed time or are delayed for other reasons. This can severely disrupt processes.

There is also the danger that after the first few days the discipline to make the daily synchronization call diminishes. If, for example, you are just in the flow, it naturally seems attractive to postpone the conference or even cancel it altogether. However, others in your team may have collected questions that they urgently need answered in order to be able to continue with their work.

That's why we have set up DAKS so that we are automatically called together in a telephone conference at the same time every day. It is precisely for the fact that, despite this routine, we are still sometimes "surprised" by this conference call, that we know how important this automation really is. But once set up, the synchronization works perfectly!

DAKS telephone conferences not only dial the previously defined participants automatically, but even take into account different telephone numbers under which a participant can be reached. This prevents conference calls to team members with different workstations (e.g. an indoor and an outdoor workstation) from possibly missing the mark. For people who are located in areas with strong network fluctuations, DAKS automatically re-establishes radio connections that may have been interrupted. This also saves a lot of time and nerves!