You can also record and revisit sessions whenever you want, which is an excellent feature for teams in different time zones where not everyone is always present. Zoom’s cloud storage hosts it for you so you don’t have to take up computer space. Team collaboration done right is a powerful force to align a group of individuals to accomplish a common goal in the most effective way possible. But even the best collaborations, filled with smart, capable, and experienced team members, can be a struggle. Done wrong, collaborative projects can feel like a waste of time where individuals spend more time talking about doing things than actually getting things done. It can be a big challenge just to have everyone online for meetings at the same time, let alone team bonding events like online lunch (which, for some, might be a very early breakfast or a late dinner).
It helps employees share their information with the team and lowers the potential for important details to get lost in the shuffle of daily work. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach. Zoom is a video conferencing platform that skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic. Its intuitive meeting rooms include features like chats, screen sharing, and breakout sessions, making it a robust, highly-functional meeting tool. It’s also a common concern of remote employees that the lines between home life and work life can become blurred. This is why it’s so important to reinforce an asynchronous culture, and encourage employees to turn off notifications during their rest hours.
Pros of Remote Collaboration
Strong team collaboration promotes open communication, clear plans, and more streamlined work. Avoid information silos and lost messages with tools that help far-flung colleagues form real connections. Constantly monitoring your employees — especially with invasive software — is the easiest way to show you don’t trust them, and it will result in your best people looking elsewhere. People are productive at different times so, as long as the results are good, let them work whenever they feel most productive. In many offices, where employees are given clock-in sheets and cards, employees are judged on their input rather than their output.
- As important as working together and collaborating are, equally important is finding your own focus time—and ensuring your team does as well.
- Anything from an instant messaging service like Slack to a calendar app like Google Calendar falls into this category.
- You need to embrace new approaches to communication and documentation, and find new ways to build effective teams.
- To compound matters, some team members might be hesitant to say anything, under fear they’ll be accused of a lack of commitment.
- Adopting too many tools too quickly can only make things more confusing — and costly.
The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed. Additionally, a shift to remote work allows companies to find talent in locations they couldn’t previously access. This can ease relationships and, somewhat paradoxically, improve communication because work is less bound by space and time.
Managing remote teams: best practices and expert insights
Whether you are hosting meetings virtually or in-person, these six communication strategies will help you keep meetings helpful and productive. Learn the processes you need to find, recruit, and onboard remote employees (and stay compliant while you’re at it). In a remote workplace, the majority of conversations revolve around work only, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Designate how your team uses various communication methods to help prevent information from getting lost. Start by deciding what information should be communicated synchronously versus asynchronously. Collect and organize important high-level information that employees need when they join the company. That could include org charts, a team directory, your company mission and goals, content calendars, product roadmaps, or other information everyone should know. Centralized information improves efficiency because the information your team accesses on a day-to-day basis becomes self-serve. The more your team knows where to quickly find the information they need, the better.
Maintain a strong company culture
With a little forethought and good frameworks for how to work, it’ll be easier for you and your team to find focus time. Although digital communication is almost like second nature, losing body language or other aspects of in-person communication can create tricky situations at work. Even small non-verbal cues can have a positive impact or lower morale depending on how they’re interpreted. Remote collaboration is the ability to work as a team from anywhere around the world.
For instance, when communicating digitally, don’t assume that others understand your cues and shorthand. Consider creating team acronyms for digital communications like “Four Hour Response (4HR)” and “No Need to Respond (NNTR)” that bring predictability and certainty to virtual conversations. And remember to create space for celebrations and socializing with remote teams, which can strengthen relationships and lay the foundation for future collaboration. From real-time communication to file sharing, team meetings, and face-to-face video calls, time spent on “work about work” can disrupt productivity. Work about work is any task that isn’t skilled or strategic work—things like searching for documents or scheduling meetings.
And most file-sharing tools have custom organization and access options so data stays secure. Employees who are office-based get a lot of time to talk about non-work-related topics during lunch or coffee breaks, which helps people build stronger relationships. A video is still a valid piece of documentation, with everyone able to watch it at their own schedule or return to it, if needed. It also reinforces to employees that not every topic requires remote team collaboration real-time communication. Of course, you should be realistic; nobody is going to be an expert in three weeks. But it’s a good idea to create 30, 60, and 90-day plans where you establish milestones (formal or informal) for your people.
