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Virtual Collaboration: 7 Best Practices for Hybrid Teams

Set expectations, set standards, and make sure your teams are comfortable using the solutions you’ve selected. Here’s why remote collaboration matters and why its success at your organization depends largely on the tools you choose to implement. Plus, we’ve listed our favorite tools for distributed and remote teams to highlight the variety of available solutions. Talking honestly about work issues and blocks, as well as sharing small victories, is crucial to increasing collaboration in a remote team. We have daily team video calls to discuss our work life and to chat about our personal lives a bit, as well as different topic Slack channels where everyone can post a message. Virtual meetings are online gatherings powered by specialized video conferencing software and meeting tools.

Best Remote Team Collaboration Practices

We recommend Disco for remote culture/employee recognition and rewards. It makes it easy for anyone to give colleagues praise and recognition for their contributions and accomplishments within Slack. Disco will also nudge workers to recognize each other with prompts like, “Who lived the company’s values this month? ” Disco also makes it easier for leaders to write and send out weekly Pulse surveys and displays the data in a dashboard.

Frequently asked questions about virtual meetings

Often, explaining something in detail over chat can make for a long-winded, unwieldy text that’s as tiring to read as it is to write. A recorded video can turn a 10-minute long back-and-forth in chat into a quick 30-second tutorial. It’s rarely enough to just have a general topic that you want to discuss over 30 minutes and just wing it once the meeting starts. If you’re the one in charge of the meeting, you’re responsible for coming up with an agenda detailing the major talking points you want to hit. Encourage your team members to ask questions if there’s an instruction, process, message, or anything that’s causing any confusion.

The ability to see a person in distress is compromised in a remote work setting. It can be easily masked, which is why asking about how someone is doing overall is an important part of the team-building process. The key to successful collaboration is embracing the remote world and shifting previous systems to fit the new reality.

Enterprise Unified Communications in 2020: The Complete Guide

A lot can get lost in translation when you can’t physically see what your team is up to every day at the office. To facilitate better collaboration and ensure productivity, make sure you establish and clearly communicate your expectations for how you want this remote work situation to go. Lay out your ideas for procedures, day-to-day activities, and other functions and methodologies for working collaboratively and productively. Pin these expectations in a visible location that your team members know to visit and view, such as your intranet. While using a combination of the tools above will certainly revamp the collaboration between your remote teams, it won’t be enough to boost your productivity. You’ll also need to implement some practices to leverage all those tools’ potential.

Viewing multiple assets at once helps participants see the bigger picture and spot opportunities or inconsistencies. Your team will also have their best and brightest ideas when they have all the information they need in front of them. Collaboration is essential if you want to see concrete results from remote work. That’s why it’s so important to be able to easily share files and apps in your online meetings.

Improve your remote work culture starting today

Embody your company’s culture and values through all of your communication and regularly remind your remote teams of common goals to keep them motivated towards the overall vision. It impacts synergy, camaraderie, and management as it concerns emotional and mental connections between team members. The best way to ensure a transparent and fair work environment is to use project management software that clearly shows everyone’s tasks and deadlines. When you divide responsibilities fairly and practice transparency, your team will be satisfied in knowing that everyone’s pulling their weight. At the simple and cheap level, you can dedicate a Slack channel to casual and random conversation.

What is the best way to collaborate well with remote team?

  • Communication. Effective communication is the key to enhance remote team collaboration.
  • Clear Goals and Objectives.
  • Support Each Other.
  • Maintain Transparency.
  • Virtual Team Building Activities.

According to a workplace survey conducted by Staples in 2019, 90% of employees believe that flexible arrangements increase employee morale. This also makes for a healthier work-life balance and saves both time and stress of the commute. Project Resource Planning Plan and allocate resources for timely delivery. Microsoft Teams remote collaboration Collaborate on Wrike projects without leaving Microsoft Teams. Creative & Design Create high-quality assets and get them approved in record time. Make sure everyone has the meeting link in advance, whether that’s via a calendar invite or email, and prepare everything you’ll need to reference during the call ahead of time.

Standardize Access to Hardware and Software

Leadership advisor Niamh O’Keeffe recommends implementing virtual coffee breaks. They promote team bonding while providing a nice mental break that can enable workers to recharge and ultimately increase their productivity. Constantly responding to each ping from every platform turns everyone’s working hours into countless opportunities https://remotemode.net/ for conversation, essentially “meeting-izing” the entire workday. According to the authors of three productivity bestsellers — Deep Work, Indistractable, and Make Time, synchronous communication is one of the mortal enemies of team productivity. By doing so, you help all the teams be on the same page with where the company is heading.

  • To handle conflicts or misunderstandings in a remote team, it is important to establish clear communication guidelines and encourage open and honest dialogue.
  • Its live chat system and integrations with popular platforms like Gmail and Outlook make it easy for team members to stay in touch and work together on tasks.
  • This is more difficult, despite the communication tools you have available to you.
  • This is a more effective way to communicate ideas that will keep participants engaged.
  • There are a number of different collaborative tools available that can make working together remotely much easier.

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