6 Tactics to Improve Your Remote Collaboration
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Once you've mastered remote collaboration best practices, you can use these 6 tips to improve your team's focus, openness, and collaboration.
Project managers and team leaders working remotely often wonder how they can make remote collaboration more productive.
After all, working together as a team can be difficult enough. But managing remote workers across multiple time zones and under different cultural work norms requires a broad and diverse range of skills.
In addition to highly effective communication skills, you also need experts in interpersonal relationships and conflict resolution, as well as an integrative strategy for brainstorming and knowledge sharing.
That's why we provide you with the best practices for that Remote -Collaboration tools that can help you improve team communication, promote more trusting and open collaboration, and keep all your projects on track.
But before we get to those, let's do this:
First, master the basics of remote collaboration
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Die Remote -Collaboration allows your team to work together to achieve your company's goals, regardless of location.
Whether you work in a company where you work remotely or you have temporarily switched to this way of working due to COVID-19, you should master some remote collaboration techniques before moving on to the improvements of the phase 2 start.
In our guide to How to Collaborate Productively When Your Team is Remote, we shared eight key tips that remote teams should follow to be successful, including:
- Establish a central hub with virtual project management and remote collaboration tools
- Creating asynchronous communication guidelines
- Look for an overlapping communication window
- Minimizing Video Conferencing (to Combat Zoom Fatigue)
- Encourage active brainstorming
- Rotating team members for different projects
- Time for team unity
- Always keep an eye on and celebrate project milestones
As you can see, there is a lot of useful information in this Remote Control Guide Cooperation Therefore, you should start there to get a complete overview.
Today we'll build on that foundation and share strategies to help you Remote -Be able to take collaboration to the next level.
6 Tactics and Tips to Improve Remote Collaboration
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If you have the basics of the Remote -Mastering collaboration will help your team work efficiently. The following tactics will improve your team's dynamics and morale so remote collaboration runs like a well-oiled, highly productive machine:
1. Always start with a common goal and vision
Starting with an ideal result is one of the Best practices for leading effective virtual team meetings .
Whether you're hosting a brainstorming session on a new project or reviewing the progress of an ongoing project, a statement of purpose lets everyone know how you want and expect the session to go.
In order to do this:
Set clear goals for what you want to achieve During this time. Be clear about why you want to hold this meeting and briefly review your agenda. This allows your team to focus on these specific points and develop coherent thinking.
At the end of the meeting, check whether you have achieved the previously set goals. . Was this meeting productive for everyone? What still needs to be clarified? Is everyone confident that they can complete the tasks assigned to them?
A common beginning is important in order to lay the foundation for future cooperation.
2. Strengthen supportive, open-minded attitudes
2. Strengthen supportive, open-minded attitudes
Successful remote collaboration requires employees who value the opinions and ideas of their colleagues. If this is not an integral part of your company culture, you need to lead by example.
Practice active listening That is, you let others talk without judging or interrupting them, and then you summarize what you heard. Your teammates will feel like everyone really understood what they were saying, or they can provide clarification if they didn't quite understand it.
Encouraging a “no stupid ideas or questions” policy . If no one feels comfortable speaking up or contributing, your brainstorming sessions will be unproductive and quiet, and you'll increase the chances of misunderstandings occurring later.
Instead, let all ideas and questions have an equal say. Discuss all the benefits of each option before discarding it. Ask everyone what is interesting about each idea or problem solution and give them the opportunity to ask their own questions before forming an opinion.
Give everyone a voice . If some employees feel more comfortable sharing their ideas via email rather than a Zoom call, consider bringing them up during meetings and discussing them on their behalf. You don't want ideas or information to be ignored or for introverted team members to feel disconnected from their extroverted colleagues.
Promoting open-mindedness and curiosity . When employees resist new ideas or unfamiliar approaches, they can hold back the progress of the rest of the team and the company. Praise employees who are willing to think and think outside the box, and others will be more willing to follow suit.
All of these tips will help create a polite, professional atmosphere where your team can tactfully discuss ideas and offer constructive criticism to collaborate productively.
3. Help build trust between teammates
3. Help build trust between teammates
Remember how in school your teacher assigned group projects where one person always did most of the work?
If you build trust between team members, no one will feel like they have to carry the lion's share of the work. Every employee can rely on their teammates to complete their tasks, allowing them to focus on their own performance.
Project managers are particularly prone to taking on extra work and overexerting themselves. Therefore, building trust and delegating tasks are some of the best ways to a balance between self-management and supporting your remote team .
Build trust in your remote team:
Recognizing individual strengths and weaknesses . When assigning teamwork, ask each employee where they are most (or least) committed to a project based on their skills and abilities.
Once your employees know exactly how to meet expectations and become reliable team members, they will feel like they are the perfect choice to deliver exactly what is needed. They will own their role and make more meaningful progress for the entire team.
Occasionally assign tasks that are outside of their comfort zone . When employees are sometimes forced to rely on the expertise of others, they may stop stubbornly clinging to the idea that their ideas are the best. They will learn and realize that others can contribute valuable knowledge, and they may be more open to new ideas.
4. Increase your team's emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is one of the most in-demand soft skills in the remote workplace, and for good reason.
Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to recognize, be aware of, and control or respond appropriately to one's own emotions and the emotions of others. According to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist who helped popularize this concept, there are five key elements of emotional intelligence[ * ]:
- Self-experience
- Self-regulation
- Motivation
- empathy
- Social skills
High emotional intelligence means that employees can cope better with constructive criticism. Since they are not easily offended or take this feedback personally, they can better Develop ideas and advance professionally.
High emotional intelligence is also useful for being sensitive to the feelings of other teammates. Instead of unproductively arguing with a passive-aggressive colleague, a person with high emotional intelligence will get to the root of the problem and open an honest discussion to steer projects in the right direction.
5. Address underlying biases that are holding your team back
With so many companies hiring from all over the world, you will inevitably have a team with diverse backgrounds and cultures. Unfortunately, some of your employees may have unconscious biases against colleagues who don't think or work like them.
For example, some employees believe that employees from underdeveloped countries can only do menial tasks, preventing them from contributing to higher-level brainstorming sessions. They may even ignore their ideas or talk over them in meetings.
To show that you and your company Commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I), you must address these discriminatory beliefs and behaviors to promote more productive collaboration. Ensure that all employees have respect and sensitivity to diversity. Welcome a variety of perspectives and encourage taking different paths to accomplish work tasks.
6. Encourage adaptability and take responsibility for mistakes
No Remote -Team is 100% perfect. Mistakes and missteps are inevitable when working together in a group. The way you deal with these shortcomings is critical for your customers and your team's morale.
A remote collaboration process must provide ways to quickly and professionally handle potential failures, customer reactions, and rookie mistakes. To get the train back on the tracks:
Make adaptability the norm . Sometimes your team needs to adjust expectations, game plan, or priorities at short notice. When these unexpected events occur in your project planning, don't freak out and leave your team to figure out how to pick up the pieces.
Stay calm, calm and collected and focus on the next steps. Adaptability means your team will be able to find a solution or workaround without the added pressure or stress of starting over.
Own up to your mistakes . It's okay if you're the one who made the mistake. Take responsibility, explain to the team what happened, and communicate how you will fix the problem. Your employees will be more likely to trust you if you offer them the same transparency.
Never blame anyone or publicly denounce mistakes even if you have a guess or know that a particular team member dropped the ball. No one responds well to harsh criticism, especially in front of their colleagues (or virtually via Slack or an email chain). This will only make it more difficult for your employees to admit when they mess up.
Be encouraging and forgiving when mistakes occur . Create a virtual work environment where admitting mistakes doesn't result in punitive consequences. Try to view every setback as an opportunity for growth. Forgive others, don't hold grudges, and don't take your frustrations out on the rest of the team.
Getting used to conducting project debriefs . At the end of every project or collaboration, try to discuss all the successes and failures you experienced as a team. Discussing these will help you avoid making the same mistakes in the future and provide a stronger, unified front.
Ask questions like these:
- What went well that we can repeat next time? What didn't go as planned?
- What did we do or not do that caused A to happen instead of B?
- How do we best move forward to achieve our remaining goals/priorities?
- Did you have the support and tools you needed to achieve your goals?
- What can I do to avoid this situation next time?
These notes should provide valuable information to improve remote collaboration and resolve issues before they become larger problems.
Successful remote collaboration starts with you and improves as your remote team grows
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By following remote collaboration best practices, your team can think, work, and complete projects cohesively and productively. However, project managers and team leaders need to build on this with the tips presented today to encourage greater trust, adaptability and open-mindedness.
Successful remote collaboration starts at the top with someone who values all the unique perspectives and ideas that come to the table. Employees will appreciate this supportive work culture and then strive to emulate this spirit of collaboration to do their best work.
However, if you're unable to get stubborn or narrow-minded employees to work together, perhaps it's time to find employees who believe the sum is greater than its parts. Place your job advertisement on Remote Scout and you enjoy access to the best remote workers in the DACH region.
