How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team Is Remote

Here are 15+ remote collaboration tools that promise seamless collaboration for remote teams smoothly. Remote work tools can be a great way to address your team’s productivity needs. To successfully manage a virtual team, you’ll need to make sure their remote work collaboration tools have features that can help them carry out their project management requirements. Choose multi-faceted options serving all or most of these functions to enhance productivity and work from home software adoption rates.

Beyond work-related matters, the purpose is to ensure remote employees are feeling engaged and empowered. This helps build a rapport and maintain an employee’s connection to what is happening within the company. In the wake of the events of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations found themselves faced with the necessity for remote collaboration among employees. It’s an advantage if organizations can bring diverse groups of talented people together no matter where they live to collaborate, innovate, and tackle complicated challenges online. Slack is yet another tool that you can deploy for business communication and collaboration, regardless of where your teams are located.

Working from home and management controls

Decisions help eliminate many of the pitfalls that tend to come along with remote meetings by providing a range of purpose-built solutions. Feeling appreciated at work has been linked to better physical health, higher levels of engagement, and greater workplace satisfaction. Despite these obvious benefits, many companies fail to establish recognition as a core element of their culture. This is a problem—especially for remote companies and teams, who have less opportunity to show appreciation in the first place. Trello is a list-making application that provides a good overview of who’s doing what, how far they are with their tasks, and what still needs to be done.

Don’t just log in to your video conferencing app of choice and make it up as you go—respect the time of your employees. Your team needs to know when they can—and when they can’t—get in touch with each other. It’s a good idea to set a clear window when remote team members are expected to be contactable. Anthony Powell’s passion for psychology can be traced back to studying at San Diego State University, where he spent significant time working on studying behavior therapy. Now working as an in-house psychologist, he is especially passionate about helping individuals and teams in overcoming the challenges of the digital era. There will still be times when right now means right now, which is why it’s so important to have a protocol for such emergency situations.

Integration with Other Collaboration Tools

Collaboration is at the heart of effective teamwork, but it can be challenging to foster when team members are physically distanced. When team members work in silos, fail to share ideas or seek input from others, the potential for innovation and synergy diminishes. Remote collaboration often requires a higher level of coordination and cooperation compared to traditional in-person settings. Your team members may have different schedules, work in different locations or even belong to separate organizations, making it challenging to synchronize efforts and work together seamlessly. As a fully remote company, we’ve successfully tackled various obstacles to maximize team productivity. If you have enjoyed this article you may also be interested in reading successful collaboration while telecommuting, or click here to learn more on how to collaborate more effectively.

This allows for a better work-life balance and gives employees the flexibility to work when they are most productive. According to a survey by FlexJobs, 55% of 2,100 respondents said their productivity has increased while working remotely. The physical aspect of the team is the fact that your distributed team could be anywhere in the world! A coffee shop in New York could be your head office and a beach in Thailand your tech hub. Share documents and pre-work ahead of time when possible and ask your team to review them beforehand.

Invest in the right collaborative tools

To that end, a shared workspace such as a project management tool or collaboration software can keep teams on track. These tips should help set the stage for high-quality, timely work delivery, no matter where in the world people are. Hence, it’s important to have the tools, structures and communications channels https://remotemode.net/blog/10-best-remote-team-collaboration-practices/ set up to enable seamless remote collaboration across remote teams. The old business tools of email attachments, word documents and Powerpoint files just won’t cut it in this new digital office. One of the disadvantages of remote work from home jobs is that people miss out on daily interactions in the office.