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Even teams of carefully picked individuals perfectly suited for the task at hand can underperform if they can’t communicate effectively.
Ensuring clear, impactful communication is hard enough when everyone’s physically present. Shifting to remote collaboration introduces many new challenges team members and leads need to overcome.
Here are the strategies you should adopt to maintain clarity, boost engagement, and maximize productive collaboration in a remote work environment.
How to Maintain Seamless Communication in Remote Work?
Set Expectations
Confusion is the arch-enemy of clarity and can quickly set in when you’re managing a team with different cultural backgrounds and communication preferences. Avoiding this involves setting clear guidelines from the outset.
These should include the type of communication you’ll engage in and the appropriate tools for each. For example, you can send formal reports via email while confining brainstorming and informal conversations in appropriate Slack channels.
Everyone should also have an unambiguous understanding of their role. This includes their responsibilities, whom they report to or receive reports from, and expectations regarding the frequency and scope of communication.
Make Consistent Check-Ins
Remote work has stripped a lot of nuance from colleagues’ interpersonal relations. As team lead, you’re responsible for getting to know team members and ensuring as few obstacles as possible stand in their way.
Organizing regular check-ins can help. On the one hand, scheduling virtual real-time progress reports creates a touchstone around which colleagues can organize their work.
On the other hand, taking the time to check up on everyone individually lets them express concerns or ask for clarification.
Embrace Asynchronous Communication
Time zone disparity is among remote teamwork’s most prominent challenges. While getting together in real time remains vital for alignment and cohesion, day-to-day minutiae should be communicated asynchronously.
That means sending status updates, feedback requests, and responses, or learning materials via messages the recipient can access later.
Working asynchronously is the key to maintaining productivity across time zones while respecting everyone’s office hours and work-life balance.
Ensure Communication Security and Privacy
Teams that work remotely are at considerably greater risk from cyberattacks than their in-house counterparts.
On the one hand, they remain outside the protections your IT team has placed on your internal networks and systems.
Remote colleagues can connect from anywhere, including public Wi-Fi susceptible to traffic monitoring and data interception. For example, if part of your team is based in the UK, consider making your team adopt a UK VPN is a good idea.
After all, VPNs should be a standard and mandatory part of your team’s cybersecurity toolkit. It’s because they create an encrypted tunnel around the user’s connection, shielding any sensitive information or files they transmit from third parties while maintaining privacy.
On the other hand, all the communication and collaboration tools remote workers depend on present a security risk if their accounts get hacked. Such a compromised account may expose intellectual property information or your client’s personal and financial data.
Safeguarding access to remote employee accounts happens in two stages. First, you should use a business password manager to issue complex and unique passwords for each account and user.
After that, they can secure accounts further using two-factor authentication provided either by the service itself or your password manager.
If you are not sure what a VPN, password manager, or other tools are and how they benefit you, do thorough research on cybersecurity tools and educate your team about the importance of cybersecurity.
That way, you can safeguard your team and business information from malicious actors online.
Establish Documentation Practices
Institutional knowledge tends to develop organically and informally in a traditional office setting. Conversely, asking Becky from accounting how she handled a tricky invoice that one time may not be an option for remote colleagues.
Structured, thorough documentation is the backbone of your remote team’s collective knowledge. Insist on recording the decisions, processes, and key information to make them easily accessible to current and future colleagues.
Create a Culture of Your Own
Despite its benefits, remote work can feel alienating and negatively impact gregarious colleagues used to water cooler banter.
Efforts to create a sense of team identity where everyone knows and respects each other beyond a superficial level are beneficial for productivity and morale alike.
Transparency and inclusivity are the foundations to build other activities. Encourage team members to openly communicate their ideas and bring attention to any insensitivities colleagues may not be aware of.
From there, cultivate a sense of belonging by setting up virtual meeting places and channels where everyone can discuss both work and other matters in a more casual manner.
You should also consider virtual bonding events like Q&A sessions, games, or other fun activities.