Communicating directly is one of the best ways for teams to increase trust, build connections, and create empathy for each other. When working remotely, these factors are much harder to create organically and can be transformative for building team remote collaboration cohesion. While remote collaboration utilizes strategies that help replace in-person collaboration, there will always be a need for face-to-face communication. Even remotely, it’s the fastest and most straightforward way to communicate information.
In addition to catching up on professional matters, regular check-ins will also help build the rapport that’s necessary for teams to function effectively, which is why they remain a staple for most companies. Healthier work-life balance – By stamping out lengthy commutes and giving workers greater control over their schedules, flexible working has the power to significantly improve work-life balance. With healthier distinctions between work and personal life being empirically proven to improve employee mental health and productivity, its benefits can’t be understated. Remote collaboration is what takes place when team members work together on common projects or goals, despite not sharing the same geographical location.
Remote Collaboration: Best Practices, Challenges, and Tools
Well, remote collaboration technology is a perfectly designed tool to ease the process of communication across the world. In the modern era, companies with multinational corporations aren’t an ordinary thing, https://remotemode.net/ and as a result, remote collaboration has become very important. Even if we see on a smaller scale, multiple branches of a company can be seen in different regions of the same country, state or even city.
- The practice also tends to accommodate more diverse work styles, as people can more organically problem solve, complete work, and collaborate with team members outside of the artificial environment of an office.
- With clear audio & visuals, as well as on-screen drawing tools, users can proactively engage with one another.
- Meetings are essential to any collaborative effort, but when they become excessive, they can hinder productivity and stifle creativity.
- By conducting collaboration sessions virtually, nobody has to miss out, and you can include a much larger pool of talent.
Once your team has a solid understanding of what they’re responsible for, they will be able to communicate effectively and target their biggest priorities with ease. When working in a remote workspace, not every question requires a collaboration session to answer. Sometimes, especially when working in a cyclical workflow, organizing a face-to-face call to clear up a quick question can end up wasting time instead of providing an efficient answer. In these situations, it can be more efficient to create a flowchart or workflow diagram to visualize common issues, tasks, and questions to help employees troubleshoot roadblocks on their own.
Integration with Other Collaboration Tools
Remote collaboration can have a demonstrably positive impact on an organisation. But to achieve this takes a mix of careful planning and implementation, including selecting the right digital tools, developing an inclusive working environment and active buy-in from employees. It’s also worth noting there’s no one size fits all solution – what works brilliantly for one organisation may be a disaster for another. Successful remote collaboration relies on developing a model that works for your organisation – and it takes ongoing work, assessment and interventions when it’s not working. Rather than limiting team participation, remote collaboration can help encourage contributions from more introverted team members. Actively encouraging engagement and participation is key, whether this is through contributing ideas to documents or during online meetings.
- When brainstorming in a remote work setting, nothing can beat the power of an online whiteboard.
- Time Doctor tells you what applications employees are using and how long they are using each one.
- For instance, you can conduct short video conferences with your teams to disclose sensitive/important company information instead of mailing it.
- Remote collaboration tools such as Notion, Coda, Basecamp, and Google Docs are fantastic ways for remote teams to work together on these.
Increased productivity is one of the main benefits reported by teams who have switched to remote collocation. Remote employees ditch their commute, saving an average of 54 minutes per day while benefiting from fewer interruptions, noise, and more efficient asynchronous communication. These benefits of remote collaboration compound and are estimated to lift the productivity of the entire U.S. economy by 5%. When collaborating remotely, it can be easy to fall out of practice and work in siloes rather than in collaboration. This means that an important defining factor of remote collaboration is routine collaboration sessions.
Your team isn’t actively collaborating
Considering the unique nature of remote collaboration, there is nothing more important than ensuring that your team’s communication is both clear and efficient. In that regard, it’s necessary for remote collaborators, who largely rely on text-based messages, to pay attention to the number of messages they send and the tone and manner they are using. In most situations involving remote collaboration, especially team members who regularly work from home, the traditional concept of ‘working hours’ may seem outmoded. However, another commonality in remote collaboration is the presence of team members from a litany of time zones, perhaps continents away from one another.
Finding the right remote collaboration tool is central to the success of remote collaboration. Remote collaboration tools are available with a range of features from video conference calling to complete remote collaboration software suites like Drovio! These valuable tools enable companies to reap the benefit of remote employees while saving overhead costs and improving overall corporate efficiency. Remote collaboration tools are vital instruments to bring remote collaboration that can’t be ignored at any cost. Tools help you to ease the process of conducting video conferences, real-time collaboration, group texts, tracking tasks and a properly managed system. It also assists in simplifying specific issues regarding a particular project or project management.