How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team Is Remote

Live chat platforms are invaluable for quick and efficient remote communication, but limiting all conversations to a single, general-purpose channel can actually reduce productivity. When all discussion goes through the same channel, team members can become overwhelmed by pages of messages, most of which have little to do with their work. If a person knows that the chat will be full of messages irrelevant to them, they’ll disconnect or turn to other modes of communication outside of your ecosystem.

It lets you organize live corporate events, such as large-scale training sessions as well as town halls. In addition to the abovementioned functionalities, GoToMeeting is also equipped with meeting schedulers. These come in handy for large teams with varying shifts as it helps them organize appointments more efficiently. Among the other tools that this platform offers are personal meeting rooms, recording options, and mobile accessibility. In addition to these different real-time communication options, Slack reinforces collaboration through its robust file-sharing system. This not only lets you upload the documents you need for your projects but also archives and retrieves them later.

How an intranet improves the remote work experience

They have more social conversations, which create opportunities to collaborate professionally. They’ll struggle more if they aren’t laser-focused on clear communication. I get a ton of it, and I’m terrible at it, so if you send me a really important email, bump it at the end of the day or send me a text message. That kind of transparency and communication should be carried over into as many relationships as possible, especially when it comes to individual workers’ pain points.

Employees posted photos on a Slack channel of Halloween costumes, Thanksgiving dinner feasts and holiday decorations. Friends naturally collaborate more than colleagues who aren’t so friendly.

Best Practices in Remote Team Management

The platform also has tools like custom permissions, invoicing, and critical path automation. With these at your disposal, you can perform a more granular approach to your day-to-day operations. Another nifty feature of this mobile-ready platform is that it also acts as a communication hub where teammates can discuss each task through comments. Users may also upload files pertinent to their projects and set up checklists so your entire team can have the information it needs to perform their tasks as efficiently as possible. Other key features that this platform has to offer include email notifications, deadline reminders, and rule-based workflow automation.

With this, you can easily pinpoint who is working on what and spot bottlenecks in your workflow. Hive also has its mobile apps and integrates with a variety of apps, including Slack. Also, they recently announcednote-taking embedded within Zoom Meetings. Zoom attendees can make edits to notes in real-time and distribute them after meetings have ended, making meeting notes a breeze. Nextiva also doubles as a sales CRM tool with extended CRM integrations such as Salesforce, Zoho, HubSpot, and Zendesk. This allows you and your team to manage customer data and relationships and execute projects when you conclude sales. Remote collaboration refers to the ability people have to keep in touch from anywhere in the world.

Prioritise business process and accountability

Slack may be known for its instant messaging capabilities, but it also supports video conferencing and voice calling. With this platform, you can hold one-to-one virtual meetings as well as create private groups and separate conversation channels for your different teams. Moreover, it can be accessed via desktop or mobile devices to help you stay connected at all times. The platform supports video calls, instant messaging, conference calls, and a routing feature known as an automated attendant. This helps you communicate on the go with remote teams and automate repetitive calls through call routing, helping you focus on the most significant bits of your project. For remote workers video chat is the closest thing to face-to-face meetings. Text might be faster for quick comms but, particularly when there’s a conversation requiring a lot of back and forth, you can’t go past video calls.

She has covered business software for six years and has been published in Newsweek, Forbes, the Daily Beast, VICE Motherboard, Reason magazine, Talking Points Memo and other publications. Try using proven visualization techniques like mind mapping to achieve an easy-to-see work structure, put shared objectives front and center, and keep everyone accountable and present. Netflix is a great example of a company that continues to adapt and thrive while measuring productivity in terms of outcomes rather than inputs.

Remote Team Collaboration Tools

While working remotely you still have lots of opportunities to collaborate and be productive. All it takes are basic communication tools and smart strategies to involve everyone as a work team.

Teams may be in different cities, states or even countries, but with the right remote collaboration philosophy and tools to support them, their output won’t skip a beat. Communication is essential for collaboration; meetings and calls are necessary to get everyone involved in the tasks and generate more sync within your team. MURALis very useful for those remote teams that love to work with remote collaboration maps, diagrams, and notes. For example, you can plan activities to get to know each other or establish free discussions about something interesting. There are many things that you can plan in order to have a good time with your team, it’s a matter of finding creative ways to get engaged with everyone. By now, many of us have figured out how to be productive while working from home.