Collaboration is at the heart of effective teamwork, but it can be challenging to foster when team members are physically distanced. When team members work in silos, fail to share ideas or seek input from others, the potential for innovation and synergy diminishes. Allowing team members to work from anywhere and at any time will enable them to take advantage of their most productive hours and avoid distractions that may arise in a traditional office environment.
- During this time, all team members should ideally be accessible and able to communicate on a moment’s notice.
- Who doesn’t like being told they’ve done a good job, or want to celebrate a colleague’s good news?
- To fix that, let’s examine some practical strategies that can help overcome these challenges.
- These responsibilities should be created for each sprint and tracked in the shared documentation to further communicate and formalize individual and shared priorities.
- Regular check-ins and virtual meetings are pivotal in maintaining strong communication and alignment within remote teams.
- Routine collaboration doesn’t just happen with large team meetings and regroups; it needs to be present in inter and cross-team collaboration as a daily practice.
Depending on your needs, you will require a different set of tools, and there are multiple categories of tools that are increasingly important to remote teams. Below are some brief identifiers for the types of https://remotemode.net/ tools your team might require and some examples of the top performers to get you started. Choose reliable communication tools such as project management software, chat platforms and video conferencing applications to facilitate seamless communication.
Collaboration and Coordination
Standardize how individual team members should document their job duties and workflows, so the information can be passed on if they switch roles or leave the company. Centralized information improves efficiency because the information your team accesses on a day-to-day basis becomes self-serve. The more your team knows where to quickly find the information they need, the better.
You can share designs and turn them into prototypes, as well as add a range of different elements such as animations in each project. When meetings can be the only face-time that remote remote collaboration employees have, it’s important that they’re productive. With a shared online agenda, meeting participants are able to contribute to the conversation and come prepared to every meeting.
Overcoming challenges in remote performance reviews
Team members may suffer from feelings of isolation, and communication may be stilted due to lack of face-to-face interaction. Additionally, the reliance on software or other collaboration tools puts teams at risk when there’s a malfunction or connection issue. However, you can take steps to combat all of these challenges and create a productive remote team.
Most async teams rely on written documentation and text-based communication, which can be challenging at first. The COVID pandemic and has put to bed the myth that virtual teams can’t facilitate real-time collaboration to work effectively and productively. Recent research by Owl Labs and Global Workplace Analytics found that 79% of workers believe video conferencing is at the same level or more productive than in-person meetings.
