A little interesting sharing from remote work WFH

It has been three weeks since I joined the new company. From interviewing to onboarding to onboarding to now, the training is all done online, except last week when I went to the company to get some office equipment to meet a colleague from the IT department who "stayed behind" in the office. I haven't even "physically" seen any team member of the Legal Team where I work. This is really a very novel experience. In fact, the old company where I worked at the beginning of the epidemic last year also let everyone work from home, but the work at that time was I mainly process files at home and upload them, so I don’t really have much online communication. My current job is contract negotiation, and all kinds of meetings are essential every day. In addition, as a newcomer, I still need to talk to me for a long time. The mentor did the online training, the feeling is really different, and there are some interesting things that I want to share.

The first is to use Teams for meetings and other online communication. Before joining the company, I did not use Teams at all. Although I used Skype to communicate with colleagues before, I also used Zoom a little during the epidemic, but I still feel that the user experience of Teams is better. Good. I remember that the first day of work was one-on-one meeting with various orientations from morning to night, and now I have been doing training with mentors every day, holding team and company meetings, and other communications that cannot be met by email or text chat. Completed through Teams meeting, the weekly schedule is full. When using Teams to meet, you can choose to open or not to open the camera. If you want to focus on the task, in fact, the pure voice communication is better, and the mentor can share it with me when doing training. The screen allows me to see his operations, and at the same time, I can take my own notes on the laptop, which feels even better than face-to-face training. If it is a multi-person online meeting and does not need to speak, you can choose mute to turn off your own microphone, and If I don't need special attention in this meeting, I can take the opportunity to leave the table to do something at hand or stretch. A particularly interesting finding is that most of the people who show their faces in this multi-person meeting are men, and women There are more people who only use voice to communicate, and everyone doesn’t pay much attention to appearance when working from home, so ladies don’t want to appear in the camera haha.

In addition to online meeting, the most important thing is to use email and Teams Chat for text communication. Fortunately, my last job gave me a lot of experience in using Outlook, so now I don't need to spend extra time to learn, but do the training I still learned some useful Outlook skills with the mentor, such as show as conversations, which can collect all the emails under a subject under one subject line instead of going back to find them one by one. Email is mainly used to transfer files or communicate with other departments. Then familiar colleagues and people outside the company communicate, and everyone in the team sends messages on Teams, and also establishes different chat groups according to different needs. In addition to the communication at work, the colleagues who are more close will also send messages. Chatting casually, or sending an emoji to greet each other when you are busy, can be considered a very warm move during the epidemic. What's especially fun is that I like to add a "~" after a sentence such as thanks or have a nice day. , One day when the mentor took me to do online training, I shared the screen to him and let him see my operation. When I responded to an email, I used "thanks~", and he asked me seriously about the "~" symbol. What is the meaning. I was completely stunned at the time, and then said that I thought it was a cute and friendly symbol to put at the end of the sentence, and quickly asked him if he thought it was inappropriate. He quickly said that he didn't think it was good, and Said he noticed that a lot of messages and emails I sent him had the "~" symbol, and he even went to Google to find out what this means... (According to the contacts in the past few weeks, I think my mentor is a student of North American culture. The bully guy also pays great attention to details, but he is really nice).

The current epidemic situation in Canada has been much better, and the vaccination rate is very high, so it should not take too long to fully reopen in the future (hope that the Delta variant will not have too serious impact). However, this work from home model is actually Many people like it. When I chatted with the manager yesterday, she also said that now she can't imagine going back to office work completely. WFH doesn't need to spend a lot of time on the road every day, and can use the fragmented time to do a lot of small things at home, At the same time, I can better focus on my work tasks without being disturbed. I can’t agree more. Although the company’s current plan is to reopen in September, it has already said that everyone will not be forced to go back, and each department’s The situation is different. I really appreciate the humanized management of the company. In the future, if we can keep a hybrid mode, go back to the office when needed and have enough time for everyone to work from home, in fact, the work efficiency will be higher, and the necessary requirements can be maintained. Communication between teams, employees can also have more time to take care of their families and personal life. It is no wonder that many employees in North America now regard WFH as a very important consideration in finding a job.