5 Practices to Improve Remote Team Collaboration

Whether your team communicates largely asynchronously via email or synchronously via video conferencing, remote team collaboration is already the norm for many businesses.

In fact, what began as a necessity has evolved into an expectation. Even the most experienced leaders, however, find it challenging to handle remote work.

While the world recovers from the COVID-19 epidemic, Currently, 58% of the US workforce work remotely. This shift has brought about a number of changes and benefits, but also challenges, for both employees and employers. The benefit is that there is a 62% productivity increase in remote workers, while the challenge is that 60% of remote workers feel less connected to their coworkers, which can be found in this source.

Additionally, while collaboration and remote teams are difficult for in-person teams, with physical distance, it is even more difficult for remote teams to stay on the same page.

Here we look at the 5 best practices to improve remote team collaboration at your workplace.

1) Give Your Team the Right Tools

Your team will be unable to collaborate without the necessary tools. Therefore outline your tech stack for remote work. And this should include:

Also, you must not only offer staff the appropriate tools, but you must also educate your team on how to use these tools.

Additionally, when a major oil and energy firm failed to attract and retain younger workers, it experienced this directly. However, with the right tools, training, and education, the company was able to change its culture—and hence employee retention.

In this regard, you can use WorkHub, which is essentially built for helping hybrid and remote teams work better, and that too at a cost that is extremely low in comparison to other similar tools. So, it is a great option for a hybrid and remote work environment.

It combines internal and external communications to provide a one-stop solution for all your remote and hybrid working needs.Internal team members communicate utilizing the ‘team wall,’ which includes a single-click call capability as well as chats.External communications are also connected with WorkHub’s platform, allowing any external client to communicate with members of the internal team.

Moreover, it also allows its users to sync with calendars, which makes booking individual or group appointments much easier.

Last but not least, WorkHub also recognizes that if there is no celebration of victories, team collaboration, whether remote or not, is not possible. So, it includes a platform for employee awards and recognition to boost staff motivation, satisfaction, and engagement.

Read More: Practices That Make Remote Collaboration Efficient

2) Set individual and group objectives

The time employees spend in front of a screen has little to do with remote team engagement. So, to foster remote team collaboration and individual success, set both individual and team goals.

It’s also a good idea to set short-term and long-term goals for your team so that everyone knows what they’re working on.

Essentially, your staff will always know what you anticipate of them this way. You may even utilize project management software to build task dependencies based on these goals so that everyone on the team understands what they need to accomplish and when they need to do it.

3) Make Social Connections a Priority

Work cannot be solely about work. The glue that holds your team together is social interaction.

Managers must create social interactions purposefully because remote teams cannot socialize in the company break room or eat lunch together.

Plan opportunities for your remote staff to connect with one another, such as:

• 15-minute coffee talks in the morning
• Escape rooms on the internet
• IQ contests

Also, this may appear to be an afterthought, yet the social connection is essential for effective distant collaboration.

In fact, a pharmaceutical company discovered that when employees connected socially with one another, team performance improved dramatically.

Also, a large US bank noticed that call centre employees who talked with one another during their breaks were more productive.

4) Set Expectations Ahead of Time

Every remote team will have its own method of attaining its objectives.

Common expressions: Each squad has its own lingo. Create a list of shared acronyms to help you communicate more efficiently. Make a point of defining and documenting the acronyms.

Communication: How will your team communicate? On which channels? Clarifying which communication channels remote teams will use and when each channel should be used will be crucial. They may also need to establish norms for each channel, such as responding promptly, muting oneself if you aren’t speaking on a video call, employing cameras as a standard, and avoiding BCC on emails.

Standard working hours: It is not always practical for a remote workforce to be online from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, especially if you are an international company. You should also collaborate with your remote staff to determine when they will be online and available for meetings on a daily basis.

Communication, nevertheless, is the most important factor in remote team collaboration. One European bank, for example, discovered that streamlining its team’s communication patterns resulted in a 300% gain in performance.

5) Meetings should be improved

Meetings are a great method to interact, but if they are not well managed, they can rapidly become a waste of time.

Make sure that regular team meetings are only 15 – 30 minutes long so that your team can perform their actual work.

You can also improve the effectiveness of your meetings by:

• Making a schedule and keeping notes.
• Making meetings as efficient and brief as possible.
• Only invite those that are required to the meeting.
• Before the conference ends, assign future steps and to-dos.

Final Thoughts

Collaboration is essential for all teams. However, remote team collaboration is more challenging due to the constraints such as geography, language, and time.

Essentially, communication and clarity are critical when working with distant teams.

But you can make use of the 5 practices that this blog post mentions for maximizing the benefits of remote work and improving remote team collaboration in your organization.

Lastly, yet importantly, you can use WorkHub, which is specifically designed to make remote team collaboration efficient.

Book a free demo and learn how WorkHub can help you with making your remote team collaboration better.