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There are plenty of rules, stated and not, that you should follow when communicating with your employees during work hours. This advice doesn’t change when you connect online just because people work in different parts of the country and/or the world or because pandemic safety requires that everyone work from home.

With that said, let’s quickly review the basics of communicating with people online:

 Use face-to-face communication whenever possible, and that means to get together with an online chat app such as Zoom. That’s no substitute for meeting with people in person, but it still helps fulfill the human need to see the other person you’re talking with.

 Listen and pay attention to what people are saying.

 Make eye contact as much as possible to show you’re engaged.

 Pay attention to nonverbal messages. Online, you can’t see all those messages someone else’s body is telling you, but you can still learn a lot by their facial movements and even body movements, like someone moving around in their chair when they’re uncomfortable.

 Participate in the conversation. Everyone in the meeting needs to contribute if it has a chance of being effective.

 Speak calmly and openly — you know, like a professional.

 Acknowledge people’s time and thank them for talking with you.

So what, you ask? That’s basic stuff. But working online has also required a greater understanding about boundaries during work hours. After all, when someone works from home, their entire workday isn’t taken up by work. They have to manage their family (called the real job by some), go to appointments, and try to juggle the bowling ball, chainsaw, and dinner plates as best they can.

Working remotely also makes it easier for people to violate someone else’s boundaries, no matter what role they have. We talk about how to call out boundary violations later in this chapter.

Every employee and every manager is different, so you will experience policies created from your company’s unique priorities, expectations, and boundaries. Those include how you will communicate with one another, such as using Zoom for online meetings and using an app like Slack for project communication.

If you’re a manager who will be developing your online communication policies, you need to resolve several issues:

 What the at-home job duties and responsibilities are

 How you want to create work-from-home schedules

 When and how you can contact people after work hours

 Whether you want to give people the option of working on weekends and holidays

 How often the communication policy needs to be changed and who’s responsible for reviews and changes

You may have guessed (correctly) that you need to bring your ideas to your managers and to your employees in order to craft an overall policy. That's best done in a meeting setting — maybe even more than one meeting — where you can finalize that policy. Be sure to come prepared to every meeting and communicate to your team that you expect them to do the same.

If you want to find a remote job or you’re a manager who wants to hire remotely, one good resource is We Work Remotely (https://weworkremotely.com), shown in Figure 2-9. The site has not only remote job listings but also a guide to hiring remotely that you can apply to any industry. And you can post remote jobs on the site for $299.

FIGURE 2-9: The We Work Remotely website lists current remote jobs on the home page.