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Working with a remote setup is growing in popularity around the world. It has lots of benefits for businesses and team members but it also has its fair share of challenges. Now, as the manager or the team leader, ensuring that you effectively include all team members in the conversation is the key to the success of your business. The team members might be distributed, but their input is still significant towards the success of your business.
You need to get feedback from them on the progress of work. You also need to give an ear to their concerns and even suggestions. In short, you need to collaborate with the team members to realize the vision of your organization. Here are a few proven ways to make collaboration in a remote workplace setup smooth.
Making Collaboration Effective with a Remote Team
Set clear goals
For your business to thrive, you must ensure that you lay bare the goals that each team member should work towards realizing. That is, you should be on the same page with the team members, working towards a common goal while in remote places. Besides, ensure that the explicit goals are well articulated to avoid any ambiguity. That way, you will ensure that you move together as a distributed team.
Use the right technology
From handling contracts or daily documents, you will continuously be sharing information in various formats and pretty much managing many files. Thus, you should simplify management with secure file sharing tools. Yes, you need to key an eye on your file and data security as you collaborate in a remote workplace to avoid cyber security issues.
There are tons of many other cool apps you can use to make collaboration in a remote workplace easy. One of the most popular ones are the likes of Slack that’s great for messaging, Asana that’s good for task management, Trello that’s good for project management in a remote team, zoom for meetings, etc.
Evaluate collaboration tools with team members
It is important to remember that you need to make the working experience easy for each team member. As a result, you should consult on the appropriate and convenient tools to employ while undertaking tasks. Such tools should be easy to use by all team members and should meet their individual needs and tastes. That will be necessary as there will be no excuse for any unfinished work or hurdles at work.
Maintain a stress-free work environment
One of the reasons that attract qualified personnel to work remotely is so that they reduce the work stress that comes about with the standard work setup. It is, therefore, essential to consider maintaining an environment where each teammate works freely. You can do so by ensuring that you smartly plan their tasks, and also consider tracking the tasks instead of bombarding them with endless communications. In fact, show that you trust your teammates by allowing them to be in charge of their responsibilities.
A free remote working environment ensures that the workers are not distracted from their work goals.
Assign each team member an active role in the team
It is essential to draw the team members to some key active roles in your remote workplace. This instills a sense of belonging in them and also helps the new hires in familiarizing themselves with the engagement tools. You can assign the team members the roles of screening and organizing the work files, maintaining the contact data, and closing or combining given tasks etc.
Motivate your team members individually
One way to ensure that all the team members are actively playing their roles to the success of your organization is to motivate them on a personal level. Sending out complements to individual workers serves as a constant reminder that you are observing and tracking their work and also taking notes. Besides, it means that you have not abandoned them; instead, you are working together towards the success of the organization. Suffice it to say, complements bring the employees closer to the business.
Schedule bonding moments
Working individually and remotely can sometimes be monotonous. As the business leader or team leader, it is worthwhile to arrange for non-work related hangouts over such tools as Skype or Google Hangouts. Here, you can hold a free discussion on issues outside work and which may be affecting the individual work in one way or another. You can even meet with the team once in a while to get to know each other, catch up and have some fun!
Conclusion
For some people, working remotely can be a challenge, mostly owing to loneliness. Well, we hope that our tips can help you make collaboration in your workplace better, a feat that will translate to increased productivity in your business!