How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team Is Remote

Team communication is a cornerstone of employee motivation, proactivity, and productivity. And it becomes even more critical when dealing with remote teams.

First, people become less proactive when they don't see colleagues and the whole picture of business processes. Second, it's still challenging for some managers to control remote teams and influence their work effectiveness and performance.

In this article, we'll cover five critical factors to consider for building efficient communication with your remote team. From setting clear goals and OKRs to developing a positive team culture, you have the power to organize them all.

1) Set Clear Goals and OKRs for Every Team Member

It stands to reason that your remote team will be more proactive and productive with a clear picture of what (and why) they need to do to achieve goals. They aren't physically present at meetings; they can't communicate with you in person anytime they have questions, so you need to help them flow into working processes to prevent conflicts and misunderstandings.

What you can do:

• Clarify your business vision and goals for remote employees.

• Specify every team member's responsibilities.

• Let them know what a company expects from them and help them understand their role in the overall process.

• Set tasks so the team would see those tasks' purpose. Explain how their accomplishments correlate with business goals.

Your remote team will better understand the work process if they have both goals and assigned OKRs (aka objectives and key results) at hand. It will also help them organize their working time accordingly to meet deadlines.

Focus more on SMART goal setting if your working environment is project-based, and consider team collaboration via OKRs for process-based environments.

2) Nurture and Encourage Transparency

Together with clear goals and OKRs comes another problem:

Once your remote employees get their tasks and understand what and why to do, they may appear to stay one-on-one with themselves and "forget" about the team. With the focus on personal performance, they will work without even knowing what other team members do.

For more effective collaboration of all team members, do your best to encourage transparency. Motivate the remote team to communicate what they do and plan to achieve. Your challenge here is to make them understand it's not for strict control but for knowing others' roles and the project's state.

Transparency in remote team collaboration brings tons of benefits:

• More open and personal written communication between all members

• Better understanding and appreciation of what colleagues do

• Proper organization of working time and tasks priority

• Timely updates on the project's progress, allowing the team to feel satisfaction from their work and get motivated to continue

• More efficient management of the whole process

Your first step toward transparency in remote teams could be organizing a group chat in messengers like Slack, Mattermost, and others agreed in your company. Also, it's worth trying a team task management tool like Trello or Asana, where all the members can collaborate and see what others do.

3) Organize Regular Meetings for Feedback Exchange

Effective collaboration is about proper communication with your remote team members. Not only do regular online meetings help you organize and manage work processes, but they are also an instrument for feedback exchange and strengthening the relationship in the team.

The trick here is to choose proper team collaboration channels that will work for every member.

Remote teams are often multi-generational or dispersed, and every member may have different habits and preferences for communication kind or time. While some prefer reading the company's news and getting tasks via email, others rely on one-on-one messaging or group chats. Your mission here is to communicate with each team member via their preferred channels but think of flexible work windows and a meeting management tool the whole team could use for regular gatherings.

For individual collaboration, consider the following:

• Phone calls to discuss the tasks and share feedback

• Video calls to ask how things are going. (You can also organize group video calls for small talks from time to time to get every team member engaged)

• One-on-one online messaging to discuss individual goals, tasks, and accomplishments

Why focus on individual collaboration?

When remote workers get tons of information from different communication channels, they may feel stressed and start missing critical messages from you. Individual communication, when you personalize it accordingly, helps them not get lost and focus on the essential info only.

For group collaboration, decide on the flex time windows that are comfortable for all remote team members and schedule those hours for them to be available and connect with teammates. 

Give every member a say, encouraging them to share feedback on the tasks and their overall role in the projects. It will help remote workers feel the involvement and be more proactive.

4) Provide Perks

Perks are essential for remote workers: It's a signal that you care about team members and value their work and well-being. Provide perks to reward an employee for hard work, business ideas, and accomplishments.

How do perks help team collaboration?

• They bring a positive atmosphere to your team, influencing their retention and increasing their productivity.

• Perks promote collaboration, creating a sense of camaraderie and an engaged workforce.

• They influence employee loyalty and overall performance.

For remote teams, the following perks may be an option: flexible working hours, online training or courses, discounts for gyms or dinners in some cafes, tiny surprises like sending a T-shirt or a coffee certificate, etc.

5) Develop a Positive Team Culture

While some managers consider team culture and team-building activities unrelated to work performance, it's critical for fruitful collaboration. Promoting a strong and positive culture, you'll naturally motivate the team to work together and better for shared success.

If not all your employees work remotely, a good practice would be to organize the collaboration of remote and in-house specialists: When feeling connected with the rest of their colleagues, workers become more productive. Virtual communication will help here:

Create a channel where everyone can get together and share everything they find interesting for the team: trends, insights, practices, and even fun facts. Help your team members learn about each other's interests and know each other better. They'll bond over experiences, trust each other, and build a more efficient collaboration.

And remember to encourage and participate in those virtual discussions. Support the channel's activity.

You can also try to organize online team-building activities like Wednesday talks, playing games, Friday horror stories, book or movie discussions, etc. Ask your team if they support such things, decide on the time, and schedule their most preferred activity with corresponding tools, thus encouraging your remote team collaboration.

Start Collaborating With Your Remote Team Effectively

Now that you've got all five factors to consider for remote teams' efficient collaboration, it's time to organize all the communication channels and processes properly. By understanding that remote specialists may feel unvalued, experience a lack of networking, and get troubles with team flow, you will look for different methods to collaborate with them for better engagement and performance.

Learn which channels work best, consider your team's preferences, and adjust and schedule collaboration accordingly. And remember to measure communication effectiveness, providing your remote team with the required tools to ease their work for your business success.