It’s no wonder that remote team building in the age of virtual collaboration is really taking off now. Company leaders are trying hard to build a thriving working culture and create a healthy environment to keep the pre-pandemic productivity levels.
Effective remote team collaboration is the one that suits both company and employees’ needs, allows to keep a healthy work-life balance, and ensures the ability to achieve the desired results.
But how to make sure that your company integrates all the mentioned elements and has chances to hit the big time in the remote work setting?
The answer is simple — leverage remote team communication strategies, tools, and software. They’ll help you make the most of your company’s work while keeping employees satisfied and motivated.
And what if you don’t have enough time to dive deep enough into the topic but still need to establish strong team collaboration for remote workers?
Then, you can consider hiring an outsourced HR professional, whom you can find at HR Bit. This specialist understands all the nitty-gritty of remote work and can easily manage your employees to help them come up with industry-breaking solutions.
But still, it’s necessary to be aware of what’s happening in this area. So, let’s take a quick rundown on the topic.
Team Collaboration for Remote Workers: Why Does It Matter?
A car with some broken details won’t get you to the desired point, and so won’t the team for which collaboration is an empty phrase.
The technology helps leaders keep their hand on the pulse even if they don’t see their employees in person and creates constant communication and ideas sharing opportunities. Remote team collaboration tools replace the physical interaction, preventing the companies from experiencing a productivity decrease.
That’s why we have decided to review some of the remote team collaboration software and share practical tactics. They’ll enable the main drivers of your company’s progress to work in close partnership.
Remote Team Collaboration Tools
These are the most efficient and affordable team collaboration for remote workers you can adopt in your company:
G Suite
Nothing beats G Suite in the context of functionality when it comes to remote team collaboration tools. It’s easy to collaborate with the employees using any program, be it Docs, Sheets, or Forms. You can also create a company email address that includes your web domain name to increase your credibility.
Slack
One of the keys to the effective remote team working is a convenient digital space for communication. Slack allows employees to exchange their ideas and introduce changes as soon as the issues arise. All the team communication is in one place, and your messages won’t be scattered throughout different communication tools.
Krisp
This noise-canceling app helps remote teams to focus on their tasks and be more productive. When on the call, it will remove the background noise on both sides and make it easy for the participants to take calls from anywhere. It can be used with any communication app (for example, Zoom, Skype, or Slack), improving the quality of the meetings.
Todoist
Keeping all the tasks in one’s head isn’t the right thing to do if you aim to get everything done. Todoist includes a set of features that allows users to create projects, divide their responsibilities into tasks and subtasks, upload files and add notes, and track their productivity chart.
Timezone.io
In case your team includes people from different countries who work across several time zones, you’ll benefit from this app. It will help other team members understand when their colleagues are available and help everyone manage their work and personal life.
Evernote
For many companies, organizing notes is the first step to being more organized and productive. Besides, it’s often when great ideas are being forgotten because nobody’s written them down. To avoid this, you can use Evernote, which is a renowned note-taking solution, which helps to organize all the memos and automatically sync them across all devices.
WooBoard
Recognizing and appreciating employees’ work is necessary because it motivates them and encourages them to achieve better results. The mentioned program allows creating reward programs for unlimited recognition to your team members. It’s easy to celebrate someone’s success by using WooBoard’s social engagement features.
Hubstaff
This employee tracking software helps managers understand what tasks take the most employees’ time and where they’re spending most of their working hours. It has many helpful features, including employee scheduling, screen recording, monitoring, online invoicing, and many more.
Remote Team Collaboration Software
We, at HR Bit, have tried out various software for remote work, outlining some of the most notable products below:
Monday.com
Project management solutions are a must for businesses, and Monday.com is an excellent choice because it provides a set of features and is quite flexible and versatile. With it, you can manage everything in one space, tracking the teams’ progress and help it deliver the best results.
Chanty
Not sure which chatting solution to use but need it to be simple and intuitive? Consider using Chanty, then. It boasts multiple handy features, including the ability to turn a message into a task, assign it to a particular group, or even share the latest scripts via the team chat. Your programmers won’t have to use third-party software to exchange essential parts of their development processes.
HelpCrunch
This is another remote team collaboration software that has everything you need on a single platform. It helps the teams communicate with their customers without having to hop between various apps to reply to tickets.
Trello
Trello is a sought-after productivity and project management tool. It uses visuals to help manage tasks and be confident all things stay on track. It uses a kanban approach to project management, implementing boards to help organize tasks by creating columns with assignments inside them. It’s great for remote teams because it helps see the stages for different projects and comment on them, facilitating asynchronous communication.
Screenflow
Finding a proper tool for screen sharing and recording is quite a challenge, but Screenflow has proven to be a popular alternative. With it, you can easily record your screen and audio, publish the files in one click, and share files to Dropbox. It also comes in handy when you need to record meetings or hold user-testing sessions.
Gitlab
Remote team communication for the development teams is a key to high performance, and Gitlab allows them to code in an organized way. It provides version control features and other functionalities for building applications and streamlining deployments.
Atlassian Jira
This is a perfect tool for planning software, tracking, and prioritizing the creation processes. Also, it includes the feature of providing reports on all project steps. You can choose a convenient work mode, be it an out-of-the-box workflow or your own one that matches your team’s approach to programming. Jira also integrates with over 3,000 various apps and third-party services.
Remote Team Communication Strategies
To ensure a flowing collaboration between your WFH teams, using remote team communication tools isn’t enough. It’s about combining different elements until you get a perfect “mix” that works out for your business.
That’s why we recommend using the following remote team communication strategies:
Don’t micromanage
Micromanagement has a rather negative subtext, treated more like limiting an employee’s freedom rather than helping them achieve goals. Besides, while it’s less complicated when working in-house, it becomes challenging when cooperating with remote teams.
Although some managers try to call their team members several times a day, use specialized monitoring software, or implement other ways of checking on the progress, it’s not a good idea in any case.
You should understand that your employees are responsible individuals who are able to spread their load wisely and get everything done in time.
Effective remote team collaboration is about providing enough freedom and opportunities for each team member and making them feel trusted and valued. Don’t look over the shoulder with intrusive tools or an abundance of messages and calls.
Decide what tools will be most useful
As mentioned above, there is an array of remote team collaboration tools, and it’s easy to get carried away trying to choose the best one. You don’t want to end up with a mix of unfitting tools that don’t even work together, right?
So, to avoid using tools with overlapping functionalities, select the tools that seem the most suitable and pay attention to their features. Make sure you and your employees understand how to use them and don’t purchase the subscriptions just for the sake of it.
Emphasize empathy and connection
An empathetic leader with whom the employees can easily communicate is the leader who can ensure the company’s success.
Everyone treats remote work differently, and your task is to determine whether your team members lack something and how they’re dealing with their work from home mode. Don’t assume how they’re feeling; ask each person to be confident.
Make sure that each person has a voice in the company, is heard and valued. Focus on internal communication and support your team members. Resolve all conflicts.
Also, don’t forget about the right context for the conversations. For example, if you need to discuss something that carries a lot of emotional information, opt for a video conference because you could use both verbal and nonverbal communication.
Leverage non-work communication
People are more comfortable around each other when they know their colleagues on a personal level as well. The co-workers can also become friends if they have the opportunity for non-work communication, like on special chats, virtual pizza parties, or coffee breaks.
Get and provide feedback
Encouraging employees’ feedback and providing it is one of the primary tasks for any employer. It helps to motivate the team members and act immediately in case they point out some weak points. Also, it will make them feel more valued.
To ensure continuous feedback, you can create anonymous pools because then, the workers won’t be afraid of mentioning the things they don’t enjoy about the company.
Ensure the opportunity for 1-on-1 communication
If a person knows they have someone who will help them deal with the challenges, they’ll feel more confident. So, if you pair up the employees with mentors, it will significantly boost their productivity.
Moreover, a leader who devotes time to reach out to one’s team members is more respected in their eyes. So, suppose you hold several calls during the week with different employees to catch up on them, both on working and personal levels. In this way, you’ll increase their motivation and address the issues before they even occur.
Conclusion
When the companies pay attention to remote team collaboration, their projects get more attention, and all the challenges are easily addressed. As a result, they manage to create healthy working environments and ensure a better output from the teams.
If you want to streamline the processes and get the most out of the remote team communication, make sure to hire an outsourced HR manager and choose an appropriate human resource management strategy. This person will keep an eye on all the processes and implement the necessary strategies and tools while you focus on core business tasks.
Feel free to reach out to us to schedule a consultation with our experts and get that first-to-the-market advantage.
