Strengthening Work Relationships on Tevent

Building relationships based on trust and dependence, have been important for time immemorial — for any kind of activity in life, personal or professional or anything in between.

For professional relationships in particular, remotely engaging an audience has always been a challenge. The advent of remote working presents a similar and equally important challenge for cultivating work relationships. Video conferencing has therefore gained a lot more importance in the last few years.

While we adjust and try to change our behaviours to better suit the new environment, Tevent can help you address some of the technical challenges. 🧐

Start building team relationships right at hiring and onboarding with Tevent

First impressions matter. When looking to join a new professional environment, potential employees are already subconsciously scoping out if the employer is a fit for them. So it’s critical to help them get a feel for the relationships they’ll be able to build.

This experience then takes a more defined shape during the onboarding process. In fact, according to research by Brandon Hall Group, employee retention can be improved by 82%, and employee productivity by 70%, with the help of a great onboarding experience.

Gallup’s analytics also show the importance of an exceptional onboarding experience, with 70% of employees being 2.6 times more likely to be extremely satisfied with their workplace, and saying they have “the best possible job”.

While hiring and onboarding employees remotely is a new process for quite a few of us, there are equally new solutions being developed to address it. 🚀

Tevent’s on-the-go meetings are an easy way to have video conferences with potential new hires. You could also create a Space with Rooms inside to create a dedicated hiring experience for all potential hires.

For onboarding, recorded webinars with on-demand streaming on Tevent can help you pass on important information to new employees while giving them a branded, personalised experience. In case, onboarding also involves coaching, Tevent can help with that as well. We’ve covered it here.

Strengthen work relationships with strong communication on Tevent

Once onboarded and getting into the thick of things, we’re only as strong as our communication. It’s a key differentiator in almost any high-performing professional environment — Michelin star kitchens, the infrastructure behind the infamous Japanese Bullet Trains, and now, equally, in companies with remote workers around the world. According to this report by McKinsey, “improved communication and collaboration through social technologies could raise the productivity of interaction workers by 20 to 25 percent.”

As Pumble’s extensive article on workplace communication shows, effective workplace communication based on which facilitate the flow of information up and down the hierarchical ladder, while also gathering feedback at every point, is critical to the success of a company.

"Email alone is insufficient. Remote workers benefit from having a “richer” technology, such as video conferencing, that gives participants many of the visual cues that they would have if they were face-to-face." — HBR

As we mentioned earlier, with Tevent, you can create a personal Space for your company or team, with Rooms and Tables for different occasions. You can also host company or team events within this Space. At any time, you can record a call and have it available instantly at the Table it was recorded in.

We at Tevent have our own Space for the entire company, with Rooms for each team. Within each Room is a different Table to hold calls for various intra- and inter-team meetings, one-to-one chats, and any other possible combination. Holding regular calls in consistent channels has, for example, reduced our confusion about which link to join a meeting on. 😄

Having said all this, keep it fluid — communication is supposed to aid, not tire. It’s important to strike a balance between having strong communication processes for efficiency, and productivity, and rigid ones that throttle outcomes.

Team building is about having fun on Tevent

Well, the heading says it all, doesn’t it? We’ve been accustomed to work socials, happy hours, in-person off-sites, etc. for quite a while now — and they are, of course, as important now as they ever were.

Remote working, with all its benefits, does miss out on the ease of hanging out in the same place on a whim. Until we figure teleportation out (psst, we’ve figured it out on Tevent —  not bragging, just saying), we’ll have to make do with remote socials. ☕

Having said that, why can’t virtual gatherings be fun? There’s plenty to do online, and some of these are particularly difficult to do in person (imagine carrying your gaming consoles around to your workplace).

On Tevent, you can host personal or group chats whenever you’d like to have impromptu chats outsides the confines of an Event or a Space. If you’re intent on having a larger group meet regularly, you could always schedule a recurring event, complete with an agenda, if that floats your boat. 🔁

Spaces with a dedicated Room for an informal meeting are also a great place to do this. As a company with fully remote employees, we particularly enjoy the Thursday Pub session we meet up in, in the company Space. Skribbl is a favourite. We’ve also played Among Us, Werewolf, Hangman, and countless other games.

Myriad articles, like this one, will tell you all about the various things you can do at your weekly or monthly team gatherings. We’ve also compiled one ourselves. 🎉

Work relationships are about attitude and the little things

If we’re being blatantly honest, processes and tech stats can help a lot with improving communication and thus, relationships, be it for in-person or remote teams — but communication at its core, on a personal level, is a soft skill. It’s all about building trust with small habitual, incremental improvements that we can all make to improve our communication abilities.

Even at this level, virtual environments do offer their challenges. Think about making a purchase online or a long-distance partnership with someone you don’t really know much about. Think about the big changes in the past couple of years — physical distance is just one of them. Informal conversations, meetings, and interactions are all important, and remote environments have a lot to do to catch up on that front.

Video calling is great, you can definitely make at least some of the body language out in such scenarios, but there are so many screens to cause distractions. Sometimes, videos aren’t even turned on in meetings. All these elements matter.

And these are not just intra-company but inter-company as well. HBR has a great article on building strong business relationships, one quote stood out to us, “Virtual meetings are transactional, but deciding to trust new business partners requires deeper relationship building.”

Figure out what works for you in this new and evolving environment. Only you can determine what’s best for you, your team, and your company.

Takeaways for strengthening work relationships

So, to conclude, strong work relationships can build trust, improve productivity, create better employee comradery, and be the difference between your company, and your competitor.

To cultivate better work relationships, nip the challenges in the bud. Start right from onboarding, and even better, start from hiring itself. Build strong communication values and processes that unite your teams. But also ensure that you have fun, mingle and create deeper formal relationships in informal environments.

Lastly, pay attention to the finer details, and the values you build and expect from each other. Customise your approach to suit your needs (like we’ve customised our pricing model for you 😎). And to end with a shameless plug, Tevent can help with almost all these levels, why not give it a try?

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