Welcome to 2020, the year we will all remember for being thrust without warning or preparation into a distributed working model.

Surprise!

Your company and your team needs to make, right now, a functional distributed culture — even if your culture in the office was … lacking.

This means you need to have agreements about how and when you will communicate.

While you should be creating an actual communications plan, you at least need an agreement on what will or will not upset the people you are working with.

Here are some things you will experience and a little advice on dealing with them.

1. Late for a Phone Call — Even though every meeting in history starts a little late, we seem to be unforgiving when we are staring at a phone waiting for it to ring. Three minutes late feels like forever. So, two things about that. If you are the one waiting … remember that all meetings start late, it’s just how life works. If you are the one calling … remember that someone is on the other end of the phone, likely doing nothing but staring at the phone, and that it’s your job to start the call.

2. “It’s Just a call, I can reschedule” — For the time being, anything scheduled is sacred. People are dealing with massive uncertainty. Every rescheduled phone call just adds to that uncertainty. For the moment, never reschedule. You can go back to being a jerk when the Covid thing passes.

3. Technology Issues Happen Once — Get everyone together and have your first video call with no agenda other than to help people set their equipment up. If someone has repeated tech issues, then make sure they get one-on-one support to make them go away. Do not turn this into a 2 to 4 week continuous “why isn’t my microphone working?”

4. Technology Is Everywhere — If you are on a call and your gear isn’t working, switch to the phone. Don’t sit there for the whole call looking angrily into your camera and unable to speak.

5. Text Chat is a Lifeline — For the next few weeks, text chat will literally carry your team and your company. If you don’t have it, your communications will be weak. If you do have it and you personally opt out of it because you “don’t want to be interrupted” then you are not helping your team weather this storm. It will be awkward at first and it will feel like a nuisance, but it is the best way to communicate. If you don’t believe me, imagine each of those “bings” you are annoyed about were your phone ringing.

6. Everyone is Home — Some of us have dedicated work spaces at home, most of us do not. Most of us also don’t have long standing agreements with small children who are now home from school and bored off their butts on how to stay quiet or respect our space. So … you will meet people’s kids over the next month or so and sometimes those kids will be kids. Deal with it. If those are your kids, … sorry. But it’s a thing now. You deal with it the best you can, but know there are hundreds of thousands of other parents worldwide who are dealing with the same thing.

7. Wear Pants — This isn’t some year without pants experiment, this is real life. I can speak from painful experience that the one day you don’t wear pants, you will forget and stand up in front of the camera to get something. There’s no delete key for that.

8. When on Con Calls — Pay attention. Do not look at your computer. If the call is on the computer, maximize the call so it takes the entire screen. People can see you not paying attention and it is a frustrating thing to see in the camera when you are talking.

9. Work Together — Find reasons to pair with someone else and actively work on Zoom or Google Docs or whatever on something together. At least once a day. Keep the team like a team.

That’s it. Stay safe.