Team goals

When you are working remotely, you are pretty much working at home on your own. However, you are going to be part of a team. Now this team, may well be that you are working on a project and there is lots of people involved in it, there is a manager overseeing it and there may be his manager on top of that or it may be just that you are part of a team in customer support or the sales team, something like that. Now, if you are working remotely, you do need to know what the team goals are, what are you trying to do?

Now, if you have have been with the company a long time, then this is relatively straightforward, you probably know already what is expected of you. But if you are new to the team or new to the company, you need to find out what actually the team is, who is involved in it, and who all the different people are. Working remotely is harder than in office. If you're in an office, you might well have a department, so there may be 10 people, a round desk, they are all in the same area of the office and this is the accounts team or this is the support team. So you get to know people a lot easier. Once we started doing a lot of remote working, we found that there are people who have not even maybe ever met some of the people on the team.

So if you are not sure who is in your team, then find out. Make a list of people. I am not very good at remembering people's names, so what I would do is list out people's names, who you are getting contact with, so you know who is there, you know who you can contact. If you do need to send an email to someone, great, that is one way of communicating. But sometimes it is quicker and easier, and also it makes you feel more included, easier to give them a quick ring. So you may be able to check when they are okay to talk. But rather than ask a question through an email, which is very impersonal and you sometimes don't always get the answer you are after, then maybe if there is a team member you have not actually got involved with or met before, then give him a quick phone call. It makes it a lot easier and you can communicate better. If you are working on a project, it is very important you know what the total project goal is because otherwise, you might find yourself working really, really hard, coming up with all the work that you think is required, but you have missed the point and then not actually what the overall goal of that project is.