4 Ways To Enhance Collaboration With Remote Teams
Remote working teams have many advantages. Team members have greater autonomy, and they’re empowered in a way that they’re able to make decisions independently instead of following a predetermined procedure.
Remote teams generally have many challenges, and just one person can’t easily handle them. The team leader has a very important role to play here. They need to ensure that each member performs and contributes their share to achieve desired goals. Team leaders should also ensure a proper collaboration with remote teams to help the business achieve its goals.
If you’re a team leader and want to enhance the collaboration between your team members while they’re working remotely, read more below.
Why Is Collaboration Important?
Collaboration between remote teams is an important component of a business that can help increase efficiency in production and customer service. Aside from that, in a collaborative setting, different groups of people have access to different ideas and perspectives, allowing them to come up with innovative solutions to problems.
Through this pool of ideas, employees are provided with new perspectives, information, and experience that they can use to solve problems more efficiently. This increases the overall productivity of the team and helps identify problems more quickly, resolve them, and prevent similar problems from reoccurring.
Collaboration isn’t just about sharing the responsibility of doing the work but, more importantly, sharing the value of the work. All the members of the team should feel that they have a lot of value to contribute. Their contributions should not be just restricted to reports, bug fixes, and small assignments. All the members of the team should feel that what they are doing is vital.
How To Enhance Collaboration Of Your Team?
There are many benefits of encouraging collaboration in the workplace. Despite remote working teams not seeing each other when they’re doing their tasks, they can still collaborate with the help of their team leader. Here are some of the things team leaders can do to achieve this:
- Improve Communication
One of the most important things you should work on is improving communication between your team members. With good communication, ideas and concerns of employees can be aired, discussed, and resolved. It encourages individuals to participate actively and productively in the growth of the organization. It is a positive force in achieving desired business results, which, in turn, generate significant increases in company revenues and employee productivity.
Proper communication should also begin with the team leader. When you’re planning your workflow, the first thing you need to do is communicate effectively about your employees’ expectations and how you expect them to achieve their individual goals and deliverables.
You should provide them with all this information because they need to know how they can submit their work and how much time should be spent on meetings and tasks when they’re working remotely.
Team leaders should also ensure that the members communicate with one another. That’s why it’s also important to provide them with communication tools. These tools will allow each team member to talk to different people when they need to.
There are many different communication tools available today. Some examples include text messaging, emailing, voice calls, instant messaging, and video conferencing. It would be best if you utilized all available tools so members can connect with each other whenever they want to.
- Have Clear Goals And Objectives
To ensure proper collaboration, team leaders should establish clear goals and objectives. This is an important aspect of remote team collaboration because goals and objectives will guide members on how they can work together.
Team leaders must conduct regular team meetings. These meetings are meant not only for communication but also as an update on each other and on the progress of the tasks. This also ensures that everyone is on the same page and at the same pace so you can complete projects and assignments on time.
- Conduct Virtual Team Building Activities
Team building activities are designed to help people in the workplace bond with one another. Virtual team building is simply an ongoing process that helps bring together multiple remote teams under one common goal. It will aid your group in achieving deeper professional ties by developing a more interactive, collaborative atmosphere similar to an in-house atmosphere.
Holding virtual team-building activities will also give remote team members a short break from the stress and pressure. It also strengthens the bond between the members. Here are some virtual team-building activities you can try with your team:
- Online Bingo – There are many team-building bingo cards you can download online. The team that gets the most boxes marked on the card wins.
- Virtual Scavenger Hunt – this is an activity where players try to find the required items around them before the timer runs out.
- Show And Tell – This is a simple game where people should show and talk about anything they find within their arms’ reach. Each person gets a minute to talk about this item.
- Quiz Show – You can ask general knowledge questions, and each employee will get points when they submit the right answer. A prize can also be offered to encourage competition.
There are many other virtual games you can do with your team. Successful team-building activities can promote teamwork and a positive work environment and culture.
- Create Opportunities For Collaboration
As a team leader, it’s also your responsibility to create opportunities where remote employees collaborate. For example, when delegating tasks, you can ask two team members to work together to finish a particular task. You can also ask your team to group themselves and work together to generate the best idea to resolve an issue. This also encourages healthy competition between team members.
It’s important that when you provide them with tasks or opportunities to contribute, you also provide clear goals and deadlines. It would be best if you also were transparent about your expectations. As a leader, you should also let them choose how to collaborate, but ensure that you’re available when they need mentoring.
Final Thoughts
Collaboration is a very healthy and even necessary organizational behavior. That’s why team leaders should ensure that employees don’t only become productive while working at home but also learn how to work with others to achieve personal and business goals.
Good collaboration can be achieved through improved communication and setting clear goals and objectives for the team. It’s also beneficial if the team does virtual team-building activities to unwind and learn how to enhance their teamwork. Lastly, team leaders should create opportunities for collaboration through proper delegation of tasks.
