Remote communication can distort the normal pace of our conversations. The delay between our messages can often postpone or hide emotional reactions to our comments.
If your team is partially remote it’s easy to forget that those who work away from the office don’t have the chance to pick up on conversations in the office. This means by the time they join the next team meeting things might have progressed more than they expected or even changed direction, leaving them feeling behind or even excluded from the team.
Improving Collaboration with Remote Teams
When you don’t have set work hours and your team is not in the same place, it can cause gaps in communication. And a team that doesn’t speak your language only complicates matters.
- Track hours worked & attendance
- Agree overlapping times for communicating in different time zones
- Be wary of chat and email overload
- Use tools for quick video and visual communication
- Effective collaboration on documents and spreadsheets
This is all well and good but if the one thing you are forgetting is it’s supposed to be a team. The key to team success is the human element of feeling part of a team. It has been proven having a best friend at work leads to better performance.
Start Evey Remote Meeting with an Ice-breaker
We start every virtual meeting with an ice breaker to encourage relationship building. Building these types of relationships in remote teams is more difficult so it’s important to spend time on informal communication.
Start every meeting with an icebreaker question, even if you’ve been working together for some time, slowly you’ll learn more about your team and what you have in common.
This will instantly lead to better collaboration between your team members creating a more productive dynamic leading to awesome results.
See Also: How to Take Care of Your Remote Workers
Top 4 Tips for Managing Remote Developers
VIRTUAL ESCAPE ROOMS FOR REMOTE TEAMBUILDING
HOW TO CREATE CONNECTION AND COMMUNITY IN REMOTE TEAMS
Guest post by:
Shane Drumm
https://shanedrumm.com
