Tip of the Week: How to Encourage Remote Collaboration

Recent events have shown how useful a remote workforce can prove to be, but this method of maintaining productivity isn’t without its challenges. For instance, a staff that is used to working side-by-side in an office may have difficulties in adjusting to this new work paradigm. Fortunately, there are a few company activities that can help make better remote habits stick. Let’s go over a few for this week’s tip.

1.  Set the Precedent for Communication

The importance of communication is always present, but it is even more critical to your operations when your people are working from home. To encourage your team to communicate with one another properly, you will need to actively take the first steps and establish procedures that require them to. What do I mean by this?

It’s simple enough. Rather than relying on your team to take it upon themselves to reach out to their coworkers, add a morning meeting time that involves everyone on a given team or within a certain department. By requiring your team to actively communicate with one another you are establishing a standard for your employees to live up to throughout their workday. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your employees on an individual basis to check in on them and see how they are doing as well, whether this happens each week or even every other week.

2.  Provide the Tools Needed for Collaboration

Again, when people are working in the office setting, collaboration is frequently as simple as facing one another and starting a dialogue. Remote work complicates this process considerably.

You can simplify it again by making sure your team has the solutions they need to communicate efficiently with one another. Plenty of tools are now available that give your team the means to communicate their messages in the best way possible.

You should make sure that your team has the tools needed to do so, including email, instant messaging, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), and conferencing platforms that provide them with different options for the assorted kinds of communication that will have to be exchanged. Emails aren’t the best for quick-response-needed messages, for instance, so having a combination of programs at your team’s disposal will help.

3.  Embrace Business Casual

No, I’m not talking about the work-from-home dress code. One of the big shortcomings of remote work is the inherent lack of company engagement it can frequently cause. To counter this and prevent the burnout that many remote workers can see, make use of your communication tools and share some fun, not-strictly-work-related things.

Encourage your employees to share what they’re having for lunch with each other, or any pictures they took while out on a weekend walk. The unity and low-key competition that these activities foster will help your team keep up the coworker relationships that help move business along.

With the tools and support that we offer, SMART Services can provide your team with the means to exercise this kind of collaboration. Give us a call at 586 258-0650 to learn more today.