Remote work is a fixture of most successful organizations today. Offering employees the ability to work from home (or anywhere) boosts job satisfaction and opens your business to new opportunities for talent, retention and innovation. But empowering remote employees to collaborate effectively is often a challenge, even for the most cutting-edge companies.
In this post, we’ll explore ways to ensure your teams can collaborate remotely, including five proven strategies that will work for organizations of all sizes.
Key takeaways:
- Effective remote collaboration is the key to a successful remote work environment.
- Organizations and employees both benefit from effective remote collaboration in many ways.
- Managers should incorporate several strategies to foster remote team collaboration.
What is remote team collaboration?
Remote team collaboration refers to employees in different locations working together as a team. This includes employees who work at the same time in a single geographical location or distributed workforces that work on different schedules across multiple time zones.
In a perfect remote work model, employees work together to complete tasks regardless of locations. Team members brainstorm, share information, track deadlines, finish work and even socialize by using digital tools. Successful remote team collaboration requires technology, strong communication, flexible scheduling, collaboration tools and processes to ensure employees are equipped to work together effectively.
Benefits of effective remote collaboration
Fostering collaboration in a remote team offers several benefits to employees and organizations alike. More specifically, it:
- Enhances productivity: The tools that make remote team collaboration possible also allow employees to be their most productive by removing distractions, empowering communication and allowing employees to set their focus time vs collaborative time.
- Improves creativity: When remote employees have effective channels to communicate ideas and collaborate, they’re better equipped to brainstorm with others and come up with creative solutions.
- Boosts morale and job satisfaction: Connection is an important aspect of work, and employees who can collaborate may see a morale and job satisfaction boost from engaging with others.
- Improves retention: As a result of the morale and job satisfaction boosts from strong collaboration, remote employees may be less likely to look for jobs elsewhere.
- Creates new talent opportunities: Organizations that adopt the remote model work gain access to a broader pool of talent than companies that restrict hiring to a single geographic location.
6 strategies to foster remote team collaboration
Whether you have remote employees in one area or several working across different time zones, these strategies can help you improve collaboration within your team.
1. Implement the right tools
If your team is fully remote, your organization needs to invest in the right digital tools. Collaboration software, project management tools and communication technology must enhance virtual collaboration. Teams must be able to access their tools from anywhere and get updates in real-time to meet common goals.
File sharing tools like Google Drive are easy to use and inexpensive to implement. Teams with more security needs or robust requirements can consider Microsoft Sharepoint. Communication tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack or Google allow team members to communicate via video call or instant messages. Email systems and shared calendars are also good ways to keep virtual teams in contact. Project management tools like Asana or Trello provide deadline tracking and updating capabilities to keep everyone aware of project statuses without intruding on peoples’ work.
At the same time, remote teams need a way to track productivity and goals. Workforce management software like ActivTrak provides ways to measure and boost productivity regardless of employee locations. Easily see how people spend their time, manage workload distribution and spot the signs of burnout quickly. See in real time how new tools, technology or processes impact productivity on a team level so you can determine if it’s helping or hurting collaboration.
2. Set SMART goals
Every employee should have a clear understanding of their roles, responsibilities and how their work contributes to the organization’s success. Setting goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) is the key to successful remote team collaboration. Hiring managers and supervisors must set these goals for each employee, team and department and ensure everyone understands them.
By setting SMART goals, employees and teams can hold themselves accountable for their work. If a single person’s missed goals poses an issue for the team, they’ll know they need to ask for help from others. Alternatively, a team that sees they’re falling behind on a shared goal may be encouraged to collaborate more to get back on track.
3. Establish communication guidelines
Remote workers need explicit guidelines on when and how to contact each other. This is particularly important for teams across time zones who may not be working in sync. Also, employees need to feel empowered to turn off notifications during focus time and off hours to establish good work-life balance. Using shared calendars to block off work time and vacations helps other remote workers know when it’s ok to contact someone — and when they need to wait or find someone else.
Managers should encourage good communication hygiene and model the behavior themselves. Avoid contacting employees during off-hours or micromanaging tasks by constantly checking in. Encourage employees to take advantage of their paid time off or take breaks throughout the day.
4. Seek process improvements
Remote team collaboration should involve proactively looking for ways to improve processes so employees can work together more effectively.
Seeking feedback from your employees is a good start to uncovering which processes work and which ones need refinement. Managers should encourage employees to discuss any barriers to their productivity or communication with others, both one-on-one and in team meetings. When holding team meetings, encourage employees to share opinions on ways to improve processes. It’s important to consider individual and team feedback and implement recommendations where possible.
5. Improve meeting effectiveness
A core strategy in promoting remote team collaboration is improving the effectiveness of meetings. Why? Because conducting a virtual meeting is more challenging than simply calling employees into a conference room for a few minutes. Remote employees have to check calendars, coordinate time zones and ensure connections are stable enough to support video and audio.
Outside the basic details, it’s also important to ensure remote employees don’t waste time in unnecessary meetings. To improve effectiveness, only hold meetings when a discussion is more efficient than an email or group chat. Additionally, create an agenda before the meeting that outlines goals and key discussion points. You should also consider who needs to be present so you don’t end up wasting someone’s time if they don’t need to be there. Finally, adhere to the timeframe you set for the meeting so employees don’t end up with less time for other priorities.
6. Prioritize culture and inclusivity
Last but not least, make sure you have a strong culture within your remote team so employees know who they’re working with and feel comfortable collaborating with others. A person who doesn’t know their peers or feels excluded from the team is likely to engage with others, so it’s essential to build an inclusive culture. Virtual team-building activities are a great way to do this, as are the occasional opportunities for remote employees to gather in person. Regular team meetings are another way to strengthen culture for remote employees, as long as you follow the guidelines above.
Boost remote team collaboration with ActivTrak
Get cutting-edge workforce analytics that transform how your remote workforce collaborates with ActivTrak’s hybrid and remote workforce management software. Gain insights into productivity, engagement and well-being with a suite of tools designed for the modern remote workforce. Contact our sales team to see the solution in action and get started today.
