The remote working model can be incredibly beneficial for businesses and their employees. However, it does come with a number of challenges, not the least of which is the barriers to collaboration presented by distance. To overcome these obstacles and enjoy all the advantages of remote work, we recommend implementing the following tips:
1. Create collaborative spaces
Depending on where your team members are located, your collaborative spaces could be physical, virtual, or a mix of the two. For example, if you have a remote workforce based in California and Australia, you might want to rent serviced office space in San Francisco and Melbourne.
To get started, all you’d have to do is type “serviced offices Melbourne CBD” and “serviced offices San Francisco” into your preferred search engine. Then, look for buildings offering boardroom hire and virtual office space in their packages. This gives you and your team a flexible way to connect and collaborate, and it can work for almost any location in the world.
2. Arm your team with effective tools
In the digital era, an employee is only as effective as the tools they’re able to use. Arm your team with substandard apps, devices, and software, and you’ll be heavily limiting their ability to produce exceptional work.
To combat this, talk to all the subject matter specialists in your team and find out what tools, apps, and devices will help them perform and collaborate at a high level. Have them submit their requests along with a short explanation of why the tool is needed. From here, you can create a shortlist and determine what fits within your budget.
3. Create clear goals and milestones
It’s hard to collaborate effectively when no one really knows what’s expected of them. To ensure your team always knows what needs to be done, set clear and detailed goals with milestones to check off along the way.
This also makes it easy for you to check progress on projects and see at a glance whether your team is falling behind. Not only that, but you’ll also be able to see who’s actioning steps and contributing their fair share.
4. Set realistic but ambitious deadlines
A project may not be urgent right now, but if you don’t set a deadline, it will continue to be pushed to the bottom of people’s to-do lists until it does become urgent. To avoid this issue, always set deadlines for your projects.
When setting deadlines, it’s important to be ambitious as you want your team to push themselves. However, if you push beyond ambition into the realm of the completely unrealistic, you will overwhelm your team. This can lead to burnout or disengagement – neither of which is conducive to effective collaboration.
So, calculate what needs to be done for each project, consider anything else your team will be working on at the same time and set deadlines that make sense.
5. Be transparent
One of the most effective ways to demotivate your team is to ghost them when they contact you or keep important information from them. This kind of behavior creates uncertainty, and when people aren’t sure where they stand in the team or whether their next paycheck will come in, it’s hard for them to remain motivated and present in their roles. So, always keep them in the loop, and respond to them in a timely manner when they contact you.
Get started on these remote working strategies today, and you can look forward to a more cohesive and productive remote workforce.
