Top Remote Collaboration Practices to Adopt

The way of remote work becomes a commonplace practice and extends to further areas of business. Nevertheless, the employees’ transfer to a remote work schedule causes a predicament for managers to maintain and practice operational efficiency implementation. The topic of organizing remote collaboration is one of the most burning ones.

Fortunately, everything is easier than it seems. By following the best practices, you can help your teams achieve remote collaboration. Let’s consider this topic.

The Definition of Remote Collaboration

Remote work is being applied to new business sectors. According to Flexjobs, the prevalence of remote work has increased by 44% over the past 2 years, and with good reason.

Companies that have already performed remote collaboration clearly show by their example that remote work contributes to increased efficiency and employee satisfaction. Employees leaving tiresome offices show unchanged efficiency improvement gratitude to flexible working conditions. In practice, some methods and activities have shown maximum effectiveness.

Give Employees the Right Tools

Before disquieting about other factors, make sure the remote team has all the tools needed.

After all, working from home is obtaining popularity primarily due to digital innovations, such as flexible teamwork solutions and project management platforms.

Here are some of the most advantageous programs:

• Wrike is an online project management solution that presents a variety of concert management features.
• Teams is a video chat and video conferencing solution that allows diversifying online meeting schedules.
• CloudApp makes it easy to share information and documents.
• G Suite is a set of business tools that enable the implementation of online document assistance.

All these tools help to organize appropriate remote collaboration.

Create Ongoing Teamwork Schedules

As employees change over to remote work, their biggest concern is their availability. While flexible working hours are seen as an obvious benefit from working from home, they are not suitable for all teams. If you want to provide effective collaboration, you need definite work schedules.

It is preferable to create individual schedules conveniently and follow them. At the same time, you can sign a couple of working hours, during which employees from different time zones are vacant to each other.

You can conduct an employee survey to determine a single, convenient schedule.

After collecting all the necessary information, establish different schedules for each day or work week, which will allow each employee to participate in joint meetings or face-to-face discussions.

Conduct Clear Goals

The key challenge for remote workers is brainstorming. The problem is that uncertain or blurred assignments are often an obstacle to the effective work of creative teams.

This can lead to minor misunderstandings and serious mistakes that can slow down the entire project. Therefore, it is significant for both managers and ordinary performers to express thoughts as clearly as possible.

When preparing critical schedules or plans, do not leave space for misunderstandings and do not rely on employees to predict possible difficulties and understand the context.

In addition, you can develop a planning system with your team members and use it to set tasks for the day or the overall plan quickly.

Use Communication Sophisticated Features Tools

As mentioned above, text-only messages make communication impersonal and can damage cooperation. Therefore, it does not hurt to use other communication channels from time to time.

For example, instead of a group chat with hundreds of messages, hold a video conference or a presentation, transfer files and archives, and plan a calendar.

Use the most proper channels to communicate and tell colleagues to follow. For example, if the manager wants some task to be completed as quickly as possible, you should not write about it by e-mail. Instead, it is better to use a messenger so that the recipient sees your message immediately.

Relieve Team Tension

A remote work schedule reduces the common level of office tension and conflict situations at the domestic level of work organization. Employees begin to miss each other, and it is easier to tolerate criticism since it does not happen in person but through online communication.

Expanding Operational Capabilities

With the introduction of a remote work profile, the number of software that simultaneously performs the function of a messenger, task scheduler, and control over the presence of an employee is growing. The introduction of such software greatly facilitates the process of remote collaboration.

Continuous Control Over Execution

In the issue of the implementation of the collaboration, it is impossible to let the current processes take an uncontrolled course. An effective manager is always aware of the implementation stage of the project or the company’s progress. These measures’ compliance is a guarantee that employees will not perceive remote work as a vacation.

Avoid Multitasking

It is excellent if the employees are in the wings of each other and can distribute the duties of a colleague if one is temporarily out of the process. This scheme is perfect for daily work in the office, but it is highly undesirable for a remote schedule. Employees will already receive an additional burden of complexity due to remote collaboration. Performing several tasks simultaneously or increasing the workload will not positively affect the work.

Reduction of Physical distances

Employees of the same company with a remote work schedule can be located in various parts of the region and scattered throughout the country or the globe. On the one hand, it is a huge plus for the company’s promotion, since attracting “new blood” contributes to the modernization of work and allows looking at development from a new perspective. At the same time, these are additional difficulties in managing workflows.

Organize Team-Building Activities

The last remote team’s tip is organizing a team-building event. Team building activities help to strengthen cooperation.

Here is a list of activities to bring your team together:

• Virtual tours to a public place or cultural institution
• common e-sport tournament
• Virtual tea parties or coffee breaks
• Games in multiplayer mode

Ask colleagues to suggest other activities or hire an agency according to this purpose.

Final Thoughts

Establishing a remote collaboration is both a challenging and easy process to implement. It requires the most effective activities and organizational skills from the manager. Effective collaboration within a particular team is initially an exciting task to implement. With the added complexity in the form of distances between employees, its solvability also increases. The complexity of establishing processes’ efficiency and effectiveness is in the first place in implementing remote collaboration.