Sergey Konoplich is the COO of Smart IT, a full-scale software development services provider. In an effort to preserve team members’ autonomy without sacrificing productivity, he recommends introducing a time monitoring tool, so people can manage their time while staying on schedule. Remote collaboration is necessary in today’s workplaces, but it doesn’t always come naturally. With these five best practices, you can promote effective remote collaboration. It can be difficult to coordinate meetings across different time zones, and the distance between teams can make it hard to work effectively.
To create that sense of safety, the team needs to be able to empathize with one another. When it comes to being collaborative in the workplace, psychological safety is key so the team feels comfortable speaking up. “People can’t be afraid, when they speak up and say something, that the reaction from the room is gonna be ‘Wow, that was a stupid idea’ or ‘How do you not know that?
Psychological Safety First: Building Trust Among Teams
Collaboration is the most important element of great teamwork and fosters communication to brainstorm ideas and achieve goals. When it comes to remote and hybrid teams, streamlining the communication process has never been more important. Align your teams and provide a common understanding of what the company is working towards. This common goal helps to align everyone’s efforts and prevents teams from working in silos. When team members understand what they are working towards, they can make better decisions about how to prioritize their work and how to allocate resources. It’s also important for teams to know how to use the systems you create for centralized knowledge.
- In this guide, we’ll help you navigate the transition, and understand how to manage a remote team more efficiently.
- Online, you still attend brainstorming sessions, project retrospectives, and Friday afternoon coffee breaks with far-off colleagues.
- In the downloadable versions, you’ll find space to add notes for each practice, so you can jot down ideas.
- Learn how high-performing companies are adapting to rapid workplace transformation.
- Accelerated by advances in technology and the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become an increasingly popular approach to working.
- When Jacobs, an engineering services company, wanted to find a better solution to organize resources that were spread out across multiple platforms, they turned to Mural.
Remote collaboration enables individuals and teams to work together, despite being physically separated from each other. It can also increase productivity because it lets workers contribute to projects as ideas come to them throughout the day and without the distractions of the office. Before diving into ideas for collaboration in the workplace, consider how you can implement the strategies listed above. But anticipating it and staying flexible along the way are the keys to getting through it and coming out on top.
According to a study from McKinsey, more and more companies are offering purely digital products instead of physical ones. That’s one reason why a growing number of offices are relocating to digital platforms, whether they follow a hybrid structure or are purely remote. This should be a key pillar of any working arrangement (remote or not), but ensure you prioritize your employees’ mental and physical well-being. Building trust as a remote team manager also comes with its own set of challenges.
To remedy this, leaders need to prioritize building a culture of effective remote collaboration. When done well, virtual collaboration can produce new ideas and innovative solutions that can meet or even surpass business objectives. There may be many collaboration tools on the market, but there’s only one right option for your team. This could be an all-in-one project management and communication platform or a bespoke suite of tools your team pulls together. Monday features virtual roadmapping tools, custom workflows, and project-planning task boards remote team collaboration that keep teams aligned, no matter where their members are on the globe.
Building a connection
For example, a meeting may have been created with an unclear agenda, with uncertainty around whose participation is required and which topics are going to be covered. There may be no single source of truth (SSOT) for team members to refer to for a particular subject, resulting in doubt and inconsistency. To fully realize the benefits of flexible work and get the best out of your people, you need to understand what these main blockers are. Remote teams are groups of people, often from different parts of the world, who work together in the same way a traditional, in-office team would. Accelerated by advances in technology and the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become an increasingly popular approach to working.
Managing remote teams with Remote
There are a few important steps you can take when it comes to improving remote collaboration. By encouraging teamwork, improving meetings, limiting distractions, and utilizing collaboration software, you can create a productive, streamlined team dynamic. Read our top four collaboration tips so you can start improving remote team communication today. Mural is a remote collaboration tool that makes solving complex problems easy, helping teams conduct effective brainstorming sessions, improve processes, and speed up decision making. Whether you’re looking for a way to brainstorm or plan a project, you can start from scratch on an online whiteboard, or get started quickly with Mural’s templates. The detailed project management platform has a solution for everything, from development project planning to human resource management.
You can create comprehensive task cards with images and chats so all details are in one place. And like Asana, Trello integrates with other popular platforms like Outlook and Google Drive. It might not have in-depth project management features like some other tools, but it’s a simple way to track tasks collaboratively. Anything from an instant messaging service like Slack to a calendar app like Google Calendar falls into this category. Each one gives geographically diverse teams the chance to collaborate online without hiccups.
Essential remote management skills and tips for success
Meaning all you need to do is focus on the topics we’ve discussed in this article. Which means you shouldn’t shy away from assigning accountability, even at the start. Meetings can be a great tool for reinforcing your team’s goals, boosting their performance, and helping remove any bottlenecks in their way.
Remote collaboration isn’t always easy, but using the right tools and frameworks will set you on the right path. For templates and recommendations, check out our resource on getting started with remote collaboration. To get out of bad habits, you might need to rework your virtual team dynamic into one that encourages effective collaboration.