Social Connectivity in the Days of Remote Working

Many of us are facing challenges as we adjust to a fully home-based workforce. At Brightwave, we quickly realised that we needed to facilitate the transition of our sociable, friendly and supportive company culture into the virtual space. 

With the help of our incredible Social Committee, Office Manager and other colleagues, we’ve looked at how our own internal Tessello can be best used to keep our people informed and in high spirits.

We want to share our internal community engagement ideas with you, in the hope that you’ll find some inspiration for your own remote workforce.

Build an engagement boosting plan

We have put together an engagement boosting plan. It’s all about staying connected, team spirit, social learning – and having fun! Many of these are based around the Tessello Communities area, but you can apply them to any platforms or channels. 

Our ideas include:

  • Post: share a photo of your at-home work station.
  • Post: what are your best tips for working at home? (Curate the best shared responses, create a new resource collecting everyone’s answers).
  • Request recommendations for films, books and TV shows. Start a book or film club
  • Request music recommendations. We can coordinate a ‘concentration/working’ playlist from the suggestions.
  • Run virtual competitions or games (like the International Women’s Day mini project). For International Women’s Day, our female colleagues shared a little or unknown fact about themselves – a company-wide version is already underway. We’re also re-establishing ‘Brightwave Babes’, a guess-who competition with baby photos!
  • Start hashtags. I can see #fruitmondays and #stinkycheesewednesdays working well (we have fresh fruit each Monday, and a monthly cheese delivery that is very popular!) One of our Learning Designers shared some great new projects in the world of immersive learning and suggested a new project called ‘Wednesday Wows.’ This is an example of organic sharing that can be transferred to Tessello.
  • Ask for photos of pets! Perhaps with a hashtag like #isolationbuddies
  • Encourage the sharing of memes/light-hearted stories/funny videos – we need to replicate that kitchen chat time. We may need to create separate channels for more ‘fun’ stuff.
  • Can we ask people to produce short videos (just on their phones) on various topics? One a week, for example, shared in the Communities then stored in a dedicated tile – ‘Snippets from Brightwavers’.
  • Create a calendar of Tessello activities to keep organised, and have ideas at the ready if organic engagement drops.
  • Weekly all-company virtual meeting in which we call out achievements and make announcements. Last week we had a section where people gave shout-outs to anyone who had made their week a little bit easier, no matter how small (or non-work related).
  • Arrange regular smaller team meetings that are just a space to catch up and check in on each other.

Create a Covid-19 Resource Tile

We’ve created a Covid-19 Resource Tile to house formal guidance materials and helpful advice, such as a ‘Working from Home’ programme. 

We are ensuring that we:

  • Update/remove outdated content as soon as possible. This is particularly relevant in this instance as news and comms come in rapidly – we need to make sure Brightwavers are confident that Tessello is a reliable source.
  • Make use of the New Content area on the homepage to highlight the most important new resources. This not only signposts learners to featured resources, but it’s also one of the easiest ways to keep the homepage looking fresh and indicate that the site is regularly updated.
  • Create new Programmes (subcategories) under the Covid-19 tile when necessary – they may become overcrowded so we’ll need to break them up, or add new ones as the topic grows.
  • Upload our Managing Director’s weekly videos here.
  • Open this up to what people want or need – we have already had our Product Owner, Alex, starting up a wellbeing area.

We encourage you to really think about what your people are missing right now – is it guidance, knowledge, community, simply something to keep them occupied and feeling valued? Look towards the expertise, talent and strengths you have within your people, and utilise it; you’ll likely see that there is lots of activity going on already, so tap into it. 

Ways to get in touch

Talk to Dan

Dan Jones is Tessello’s Head of Product and he can help review your usage of Tessello to make sure you have all the bandwidth you need, especially if you foresee an increase in users over the coming weeks.

Talk to Zoë

Zoë Hedinger is Tessello’s Head of Customer Success. She is here to make sure you have what you need to make a success of your platform. You can also take a look at the Help Centre where you can find guidance on how to use Tessello. Our team can help you make sure your Tessello users are engaged and supported.