82% of workers believe telecommuting leads to lower stress while delivering more production and less cost to the companies. It’s possible that remotely working people might feel disconnected and left out at times, but at the same time, it’s the team’s responsibility to keep everyone engaged with different ways to collaborate with each member.
Hence, as a team leader or manager, you must develop strategies to increase collaboration between remote teams.
There are several benefits of having collaboration in the team, especially remote ones. A few of them are as followed:
- A collaborative work culture increases transparency, inspiration, and innovation among the team members.
- Teams become productive with quick access to solutions and the status of the assigned tasks and responsibilities.
- Blockers and challenges get discussed efficiently and resolved with new ideas flowing in from individual members.
- A collaboratively working team is five times high performing than that works individually.
How to Increase collaboration between remote teams?
As a leader, you can introduce collaboration in the team with the help of the right tools and strategies that could deliver both qualitative and quantitative results.
1. Daily Video Recordings: Sharing video recordings of the finished task along with an explanation of each step, helps team members to understand basic functions of the final output.
A documented explanation is always helpful. However, a video keeps the viewer’s engagement longer. The video could be about the steps involved in processes or to highlight an issue.
A suggestion would be to keep the video raw and short to keep a high engagement rate. Create an open channel to receive and provide feedback.
2. Progress Trackers: The most effective way to present the status of the assigned task is to have a progress tracker. Its benefits are more than you can think.
- Right from work assignment to checking the deadline, the progress tracker helps you keep an eye on every stage of the process.
- Real-time feedback, updates on blockers to the status report, everything could be extracted on the report.
- Individual team members could monitor their current and upcoming assignments and can interact with team members in case any given task is not moving ahead.
3. Ask for Inputs: When it’s about collaboration, it shouldn’t be a one-way communication. Create a culture of sharing new ideas and opinions. Inputs help you identify better ways of doing things.
The advantage of asking for inputs is that everyone in the team feels valued, and it creates a feeling of trust in you. It renews the motivation when everyone believes they are the contributors.
4. Face-to-Face Interaction: Most of the time, remote teams feel face-to-face interaction is highly impossible, especially when team members are located in different marketplaces. But they can still do it using video conferences.
Video calls are better than no interaction at all. At the same time, video conferences give you the feeling of being in the same room. However, keep different time zones in mind and schedule a meeting that suits all participants. Find a midway.
5. Search For Your Community: Most of the time, to keep the fire burning, you need to move out of your circle and look for an external community that thinks alike.
One such community is GoFounders that allows its members to participate and discuss different goals but one big objective. Encourage your team members to join communities that match their team’s objectives.
One can successfully and without hesitant open up in front of the community members. It becomes easy to share highs and lows and receive feedback on your strengths and weaknesses, which are currently blindspot for you. After working on these blindspots, team members become more energized, efficient, and productive.
So these are the five ways of keeping the passion alive among your team members by implementing the right collaborative tools and strategies and getting your teams used to these.
In case, you are wondering which tool should you use for collaborating your team members, then let us suggest you that GoFounders community members are provided with AI-driven tools, such as Check-List (a progress tracker) and video-conferencing application (allows team members to schedule audio and video calls, record and share interactions with participants). These tools are ‘Free of Cost’ and are developed by the ONPASSIVE company only for GoFounders members.
Hope this article helps you drive collaboration effectively in your remote teams.
