How to achieve teamwork in a remote workplace
Many companies fail to recognize the importance of team development and neglect to integrate team-building activities outside of the business. For businesses, team development offers several advantages. It boosts productivity, and employee enthusiasm promotes cooperation and fosters trust and respect among employees.
Outside of the office, team-building activities should be done to offer workers a cause to connect in a non-work-related setting and to urge them to work together to solve a problem.
Strong teams are not formed simply by employing talented individuals; instead, they are created via activities to bring employees together. Any action or strategy that brings a group together and inspires them to work together is called team building. Every team-building move aims to create a more cohesive group of employees.
Employees today hold a significant value on corporate culture. They want to work for a firm they are happy to be a part of. Team building activities contribute to developing a corporate culture in which people like to work every day, cooperate effortlessly, and have trust and
respect for one another.
Advantages of Managing a Remote Team
Cost-Efficient
One of the primary benefits of virtual teams is that they may be significantly less expensive than keeping an in-office workforce.
Because most virtual or remote workers work from home, they are liable for most of these expenditures, allowing you to save a lot of money!
However, the only thing you’ll most likely have to spend money on is software that your staff will require to do the assignment correctly because these cloud-based SaaS products are so inexpensive.
Global Talent
Because your team is not required to operate in the same office, they do not have to be situated in the same place. You don’t have to settle for people who live and work in the same area as you to establish your virtual global team; you may recruit anyone from anywhere.
You can also profit from recruiting virtual labor from less expensive nations with lower wages, such as the Philippines and India. This way, you can receive high-quality talent for a fraction of the cost.
Our article will assist small enterprises in increasing team communication and cooperation in this long-term cultural shift and in the way we operate. Let’s take a look at some ideas for improving remote workflows and technologies that might help you become more successful and productive in your remote work life.
One of the most fundamental fears that businesses have regarding remote working is losing control. How can organizations be sure that anyone is working?
However, now that many remote teams have been effectively working from home for months, many of those fears may be put to rest, especially because both employees and company owners agree that remote work has positively influenced productivity.
The next challenge for many businesses is adjusting management techniques to empower and encourage a remote workforce. Establishing trust by giving workers the flexibility and responsibility to operate autonomously is an excellent strategy how to improve teamwork virtually.
Trust Is The Pillar
Building trust requires a two-way exchange of information. Companies must believe that their workers are professionals capable of managing themselves in a remote work environment. Still, employees must also trust that their supervisors understand the difficulties of working from home.
Trust in the workplace implies that your workers live in an environment of honesty, psychological safety, and mutual respect. They are more eager to go above and above for your organization because they are proud of where they work.
The most efficient ways to build a trusting environment in the workplace are as follows:
Lend Your Ear
Your workers are independent individuals with their own opinions and points of view. Invite them to express themselves, and when they do, truly listen to them. This is the basis for effective working interactions founded on mutual respect and trust. Train your listening skills.
Feedbacks Are Important
Constructive criticism in the workplace is critical: organizations require excellent communication to flourish and develop. Feedback boosts employee morale and teaches us more about ourselves, our strengths and shortcomings, our behaviors, and how our actions affect others. It also improves our self-awareness and promotes personal growth.
It is not always necessary for feedback to be favorable. Negative feedback reveals areas for improvement and helps us do a better job in the long term. However, you must provide input skillfully and productively; otherwise, there would be no basis for progress.
Recognition goes Extra Miles
Everyday recognition fosters a feeling of community and makes employees feel emotionally comfortable, so when you appreciate your staff regularly, they will be more inclined to trust you.
Paychecks alone are insufficient to indicate that you regard and trust them. It is critical to present them with regular, real-time recognition. Sending thank you cards, vocal praise, and providing physical prizes such as bonuses and staff awards are all ways to demonstrate your appreciation.
Empower and Encourage
Encourage professional development and flexibility to empower them. Increase their workload by assigning them more obligations. Invite them to meetings that they would not usually attend.
When you encourage and coach workers, you provide them extra training, support, and encouragement, which is especially important when they are suffering.
Set Your Boundaries
Working from home has its challenges. You may have kids at your house or share the home office with your partner.
Team members must establish clear boundaries between their professional and personal lives. Organizations may support this by aggressively pushing employees to sign off at a particular time each day and modeling this behavior through senior management. You might also declare weekends a no-go zone for work-related communications.
Make Your Point Clear
It may not be easy to discern tone and form connections with remote employees, especially if they have never met. Communication plays a vital role in team building. The golden rule is to over-communicate and make the point clear to everyone rather than under-communicate.
Make practice over-explaining and spelling out particular needs, especially when building remote procedures, where there is frequently too much opportunity for interpretation. Clarity is a good thing to have when you’re in uncertainty.
Establish guidelines
When shifting to a remote workforce, it’s important to establish clear and straightforward workplace rules to ensure your team’s success. For example, consider scheduling weekly video meetings around everyone’s working hours and establishing team forums for effective and inclusive communication tactics (like Slack or Teams).
Deadlines are Important even in Remote Work Culture
Because deadlines make goals less abstract, they are an essential component of productivity. Working within a set time constraint is a practical, proactive strategy to keep team members on track and engaged. Goals should be attainable while also posing a challenge for the team to overcome.
Why Do Remote Teams Have a Hard Time Being Productive?
Lack Of Communication
A remote team necessitates remote communication, which is very different from working in a shared office area. Employees who are accustomed to strolling over to a coworker’s desk or meeting a teammate in the breakroom for informal and unplanned talks may find it difficult to communicate successfully in a remote work environment.
Technological Glitches
Working from home is primarily reliant on technology, so when gadgets malfunction, remote team members may find themselves in the dark while attempting to communicate with their coworkers. Whether it’s a dead battery, a bad WiFi signal, internet glitches, computer problems, or a lag during a conference call, technological challenges may stifle your work.
Facetime and cultural formation
Face-to-face interactions, as opposed to electronic conversations, result in faster replies and less misunderstanding overall. However, while face-to-face communication is an invaluable advantage, it is sadly absent in many remote teams. Because not all remote employees embrace this form of collaboration, they are missing out on the potential for increased clarity, connection, and culture-building.
Scheduling Challenges
There are specified hours for workdays and breaks in between that provide a clear timetable of when employees should be working or taking time off in typical office environments. It’s challenging to maintain a comparable timetable in remote offices because employees aren’t seated just a few feet apart from each other.
This makes it difficult for individuals who work remotely to guarantee they are being productive during their work hours or taking the necessary time off to recharge and return to work ready to be efficient.
Tools that Make Remote Work Easier
Remote work success requires more than simply having the appropriate tactics in place; teams must also have access to contemporary technologies to assist bridge the gap. These five tools are meant to make remote communication and cooperation easier, so your remote squad can master teamwork no matter how far they are apart.
Monday.com
Slack
ClickUp
With ClickUp, you can make collaboration more accessible and manage work from anywhere. The remote work OS tool can help with task planning and keeping track of the team’s work and progress. Users may simply eliminate emails pertaining to action-based communications, develop clear protocols with the team, send reminders, evaluate weekly targets, and so on.
To make it simpler to track employees, ClickUp allows users to select work views, filter workflow, and display tasks on dashboards. It aids in visualizing project progress, adjusting timetables, and seeing what staff are up to.
DocuSign
It just does not make sense to force employees to print, sign, and scan documentation at home when all of your operations are going digital. This not only necessitates that team members have printers at their home offices (which may incur additional costs for the organization), but it also adds time and effort to a procedure that might be streamlined online.
DocuSign enables remote teams to sign and complete secure documents online, which is critical for collaboration. Everything from team member recruiting and onboarding to obtaining customer signatures on sales contracts. Core workflows must be available and simple to use on any device in order to provide the most seamless experience and genuinely drive team collaboration.
Zoom
Zoom is an internet video conference tool that allows users to connect up to 50 HD video streams at once. The developers at Zoom have over 900 years of combined expertise in developing real-time communication software. It is used by over 200,000 enterprises for virtual team meetings. It supports video, audio, and screen sharing, as well as group chat, across all platforms.
