Types of communication skills needed

When you are working at home, you are now going to have to deal with pretty much everything, whereas when you are in the office, there may well have been a computer department, an IT manager, or something like that to sort things out for you. So you are very quickly going to need to learn some skills. Now, you are always going to be able to get help from your company or from the IT service provider, or even just off the internet on what to do, but when we are working at home, there is a few sort of communication skills you are going to need. And the first one is basic communication. So you need to have a computer that is set up correctly with sound and also with a microphone or with a headset, something like that, maybe with a webcam. Because you are going to be involved in maybe Zoom meetings, so you do need to have a proper camera and sound set up. With Zoom or with all the others, you can go direct into their website and test it, so you just use the test feature and it will show you what you look like and also what is the sound and also the microphones, how it works. But just as important as looking at that, is look at the video quality. So if we had a camera on here, obviously they are going to see the background, so that is back into your home, so you can blur the background and things like that but we will cover those in separate videos.

Other sorts of communication skills you are going to need is the use of telephone. Again in the office, you might well just pick up the phone or put a headset on, but if you are working at home yourself, you need to set this up on your computer, maybe you are working with an internet-based telephone system, that way all of the calls can remain the same. We use this system, so I can work pretty much anywhere. I can be in my office, I can pick up a normal phone, I can put a headset on and communicate through the internet when I am working remotely, I can even take an office call directly from the mobile just by logging in through an app. This could be a system that you have, or if you have not got a system like this, maybe in the minute, just to start with, people are diverting calls to your mobile, which hopefully that works, but if it is your personal mobile, you are not really going to be giving that mobile phone out to people. So there are lots of other services available for internet-based telephone communications which you could use.

The other sorts of communication skills you are going to need are good literacy skills to be able to send good emails to people. So when you are sending emails out, just make sure you are sending it to the right person, you only copy people in who is relevant for that information, because you do not really want to be sharing information with others. And when you are communicating by email, just make sure that you spell things correctly and also that you are sending the email to the right person. It is quite easy sometimes to hit reply to all, but you only actually want to reply to one of those people, or you are sending an email out to totally the wrong person. So do spend a little bit of time making sure that everything is set up within your emails to make sure that when you are communicating on email, it all works well.

There are a lot of other systems you can communicate with, you can be using online chat, you could be using an internal system, message system, there is lots of these available, things like Slack. With that, you can send direct messages to anybody in your team, but also you can have group areas where everyone gets all the information. We find that works really well. So we have got a group chat where everybody can get that message, so you know when people are at their desk, when they are going on holiday, or we can broadcast information of new courses we are running, things like that. But also you can set up individual groups, we can have a customer support area, or you can send direct messages to people. So just because you're working at home, there is lots of ways that you can still communicate back with your office, but also with your clients and customers.

Another form of communication is things like just data transfer. So when you are handling data, you need to make sure that it is secure. Now if you are working at home, then obviously your computer, you need to make sure it is password protected, but you will probably find yourself using cloud-based systems, things like OneDrive or Dropbox. And when you are sharing data, just be aware of who's able to get access to that data, is it secure, make sure your line between you and the server provider is secure. Maybe use VPNs and we will look at VPNs in a separate video, but the idea is to try and any sort of data going to and from your computer needs to be secure so that no one can intercept that and take data.