Remote work is now a popular way of conducting business, collaborating with co-workers, and interacting with different stakeholders. This arrangement works for many organizations as long as they can ensure seamless communication and coordination among the employees and other stakeholders. To do that, organizations need to set up remote work processes that take into account cultural, linguistic, and regional differences. Additionally, a few strategies can help improve online collaboration in a remote work environment.
1. Consider regional differences
In a remote work setup, all team members may not necessarily reside in the same city, state, or country. Some of them may belong to a different time zone, which can make it challenging for the organization to maintain real-time collaboration among members. To address this issue, managers must opt for measures like holding only the most essential meetings online and scheduling them strictly during everyone’s work hours. Managers must also ensure that each meeting sticks to its agenda so that the session doesn’t last longer than it should.
Additionally, the management must account for local employment laws and norms when following a remote work arrangement to plan for disruptions in routine work. For instance, the annual mandatory/public holidays can differ from state to state and country to country. So, top-level management must look up region-specific laws to ensure legal compliance and allow remote workers paid time off on these days.
2. Choose a centralized communication channel
One of the go-to strategies for promoting effective online collaboration is choosing communication channels that work best for employees. For instance, chat tools that streamline text-based communication allow team members to respond promptly. The popular remote team collaboration tools are Slack and Microsoft Teams, which allow users to interact beyond traditional emails. With the help of these instant messengers, users can share documents, set reminders, and schedule and conduct calls to collaborate.
3. Set clear expectations
To manage remote teams successfully, organizations must set clear expectations that help employees know what they need to do and be accountable for their work. For instance, outlining team and individual goals, project/task deadlines, and responsibilities ensures each member is in sync while working remotely. If these expectations change with time, managers need to check in with team members to ensure they are comfortable with these changes and can keep up with the new requirements.
4. Prioritize team-building efforts
Team-building experiences can help boost team morale and strengthen professional relationships. They encourage team members to engage in informal communication from time to time and build a strong and comfortable working equation with each other. This is especially crucial in a remote work environment, which offers limited opportunities for interaction. Team leaders could occasionally organize virtual team-building activities, such as quizzes and memory games. Along with improving collaboration, such activities could also help boost team productivity.
5. Maintain maximum transparency
One of the best practices for ensuring successful virtual team communication is maintaining transparency. When remote employees are looped into small and big organizational developments, they feel involved and less detached. So, to be transparent with the employees, managers could personally share regular updates with them over mail or brief video calls. Engaging one-on-one with each employee is important here.
6. Offer adequate support
When working remotely, team members may experience issues or have concerns that can go unnoticed by the management. This is because these details are not easy to spot in group calls, where not every member participates in the same way. Some of the common problems remote workers face could be personal issues that interfere with work, lack of recognition at work, and ambiguity in responsibilities. New employees particularly require constant support till they get used to the work. To recognize and address such issues in time, managers must schedule brief weekly or fortnightly one-on-one virtual meetings to consistently keep up with each team member and prompt them to share their concerns, if any. In these calls, managers must provide solutions that make it easier for team members to do their jobs and offer them feedback if required. This will eventually help improve the productivity of remote team members.
7. Give remote workers some flexibility
All organizations must set core work hours to allow teams to collaborate in real time. However, organizations can also leave some room for asynchronous work, which allows employees to set their schedules while ensuring they meet expectations. To ensure a balance between real-time collaboration and asynchronous work, organizations could use multiple communication channels, some of which strictly relay urgent tasks and others for assigning work that can wait. This will prevent information overload. Managers should also document decisions and processes so that the employees can refer to any details they missed while they weren’t online.
8. Review all processes regularly
In any work environment, as harmonious as it may seem, there is always room for improvement, especially for improving team collaboration. So, organizations should regularly seek employee feedback to determine how adequately or poorly each remote work process works. This will help organizations identify problematic remote work software tools and processes and, as a result, improve organizational efficiency. Organizations should also ensure managers offer continuous feedback to their team members about their performance to help them improve.
