This includes any organizational charts, company benefits packages, training manuals, contracts, employee handbooks, etc. The digital era has ushered in a revolution in communication thats equivalent to the one surrounding the invention of the printing press. And norms can also exist on an individual level, such as peoples preferred response time, writing style, and tone. Try different tools and channels to see what works for your specific team based on workflows, goals, preferences, and personalities. Keeping track of performance and building a strong team culture can feel daunting when youre not all in an office together. Here are a few simple ways to get the ball rolling. You know culture is important. Break the ice and help your employees build stronger relationships with easy but fun get-to-know-you games that spark conversation like: Collect facts and trivia about people on your team (and even the company in general) and see how well you each know your coworkers. With remote teams, its nearly impossible to over-communicate. Perhaps they were writing their note to you after a stressful call with a customer. No matter where your employees are, managers are tasked with helping them do their jobs successfully. Instituting a "no-work-on-weekends" policy to ensure employees get weekend breaks, Checking in regularly with employees to see how theyre doing and make sure they arent overworked, Allowing greater schedule flexibility so workers can manage their time in a way that works best for them, Providing generous employee benefits including health and PTO so employees can prioritize their wellbeing. As a remote manager, heres what you need to clarify with your team about to match the message with the channel: To learn more, you can watch our 60-minute free Workshop Live! From team collaboration and meetings to performance management and schedules, remote work is transforming how, when, and where we work. Working remotely doesnt mean you cant feel close to your team. Remote workers already work longer hours than office workers, putting them at risk for extra stress and even burnout. Theres still a great deal of meta-communication and virtual leakage that happens in digital environments, and it only takes paying attention to read between the lines. In other words, its not enough to throw in virtual happy hours or remote perks. Need help getting access? Another makes a critique that comes across as insensitive. Virtual happy hours are a fun way to wind down at the end of the day and enjoy more casual conversation and company. Invest in virtual learning resources and programs for remote employees to access from anywhere. For example, the use of exclamation marks or a negative emoji after referring to someones gender, nationality, or religion is as powerful a marker of disapproval as a disgusted face.
We have a culture of (recognition, feedback, transparency, etc.). When your teams are working together towards a shared purpose, this drives performance and accountability and makes it easier for leaders and their teams to prioritize their work and communicate from a place of unity. But such brevity can mean that the rest of the team wastes time trying to interpret your messages. Pulse surveys are short, focused questionnaires, typically just 5-15 questions on a given topic. Its changing how we speak often in bullet points. Make sure feedback is: Cultivate a feedback culture that goes both waystop-down and bottom-up so that both employees and leaders have a chance to give and receive constructive input. But distance doesnt have to result in disconnection. Take time to intentionally build connections among your employees and cultivate a cohesive, remote team. Use the following guide as a crash course for remote work best practices, strategies, and tips so you can better lead, manage, and perform on your remote teams. Steps both large and small can add up to make a big differencefrom holding regular virtual team meetings and communicating via video and Slack channels for personalities to shine through to implementing organization-wide policies that promote connection, inclusion, and wellbeing. CEO of Know Your Team. When employees are remote, it can be easy to feel disconnected or even invisible to the rest of the team or organizationespecially if your workforce has a hybrid mix of in-office and at-home employees. Naturally, you have things you also want to communicate remotely via email, chat, video call, phone call. While we may have become used to these types of asynchronous interactions, they can still conflict with our normal rules for social interaction.
I feel informed about the organizations goals and priorities when working from home. Annoyed by this micromanagement, he immediately responds with his uncensored thoughts. One path to overcoming this obstacle is to cultivate as many opportunities for you and your team to receive those in-person cues. They want to know their work is valued and that their contributions matter. Clarifying how, when, and where your team will work can improve efficiency, keep everyone aligned, and prevent conflict from the start. But you cant take professional development for granted. Remote managers all over the world use Know Your Team to hold effective one-on-one meetings, gather status updates, and build social connection in a remote team.. Seeall the features in Know Your Team here, and sign-up for a free trial today to see for yourself. But ultimately, managing people remotely relies on many of the same leadership principles as in-house management. This means dedicated check-ins are even more critical to building trusted relationships with your remote employees and taking the pulse on their work performance. Documenting how people should ideally communicate isnt just a nice-to-have, but a cornerstone document to align your staff and help onboard new folks as the company grows. Would your boss see your late night email and consider it to be an intrusion on her private time? Research shows that introverted individuals are less inhibited in online versus offline interactions. Find ways to shorten the affinity distance. As more and more of our interactions happen digitally, we will continue to experience new forms of miscommunication and misunderstanding. One company we worked with celebrated new talent by creating a personal emoji for each employee who had been there for six months. Communicating in a remote work environment doesnt have to feel as all-consuming and frazzled as it does today. How many times have you written an email and, immediately after hitting send, felt concerned about how it would land? Maybe theyve got a kid at home whos sick and its been weighing on their mind. The delay between our messages can often postpone or hide emotional reactions to our comments. You think to yourself: Communication best practices for remote teams must existright?. But managing employee performance remotely can be daunting. Say hi to me on Twitter at @clairejlew. Give asynchronous writing a shot. Remote workers typically value and appreciate greater flexibility and autonomy over their work and schedules. While we often tend to regard human predictability as a defect, few qualities are more sought-after at work, especially in virtual collaborations. During the first week, set up virtual introductory calls with team members and other leaders to help them get to know who they will be working with and start building those relationships from the beginning. Quiet time, as a result, is indeed a communication best practice. In The Watercooler, our online community of leaders in Know Your Team, one manager mentioned how his team always turns their cameras on for video calls be it one-on-one meetings, team meetings, discussions, or brainstorm sessions. When remote teams communicate well and leverage their strengths, they can actually gain an advantage over co-located teams. Paul Farnell, Co-Founder of Litmus (a Know Your Team customer), emphasized this when he wrote: Its more important to give employees quiet time than it is to cram them into an open office.. When we work in person and are co-located, communication feels obvious. For some organizations, this comes in the form of a How We Communicate document, which outlines all communication best practices. You can find your own unique way to create team spaces for social connection. Burnout is a real risk for both in-house and remote workers. Processes and communication in remote teams can be sustainable and well-thought-out not merely hurried and duct-taped together. Get our latest insights on leadership, as they're released, directly from our CEO Claire Lew. This no doubt happens with greater frequency in a remote environment, as you cant physically hear someones tone of voice or interpret a persons facial expression. Keep these tips in mind when crafting your strategy for engaging remote employees. Technology is your friend when it comes to remote work. The solution lies in building a skill set that reflects the demands of our digitally-driven age. Video calls and meetings are ideal for this, as they give you the closest fidelity to being co-located. HBR Learnings online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Team Management. Dont let physical distance create emotional distance between your team members. However, there are overlapping strategies and many shared principles. Understanding this, companies can build more inclusive and equitable remote work policies that attract and retain top talent from anywhere in the world. Contact Customer Service: Hulton Archive/Hayon Thapaliya/Getty Images. Like any good process, its value comes from its utility and how well its helping your team not holding your team back. But working remotely can make it easy for employee contributions to go unnoticed. When I interviewed Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, on our podcast, The Heartbeat, he echoed this, describing how hard it is to read people in a remote work environment and how facile it is to assume how someone is feeling. How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Work from Home, How to Stay Focused When Youre Working from Home, How to Work Remotely Without Losing Motivation, I'm a subscriber, but I don't have an HBR.org account. There are also challenges to remote work that can impact culture. If your company can afford to, set aside a weekend for a casual retreat to strengthen team connections and company culture and make shared memories. Thats why its important to focus on building a healthy and productive culture from the start. Or, rather than holding a Google Hangout to ask questions about a project and eating up a whole hour of your teams time, you write-up a project online, share it via email, and have folks respond the next day with a full 24-hours to digest the contents. Silence is golden in a remote team.
When you add remote work into your company dynamics, that will impact how employees and leaders work together. Stay connected and involved with regularly scheduled one-on-one meetingswe recommend at least once a month, but for remote teams, more frequent check-ins can be especially beneficial. People want to be trusted to do their work, they want to be recognized for their contributions and feel a sense of purpose in their work, and they want regular feedback so they can continue to grow and develop. Our culture supports the mission and vision of the organization. Based on our survey with 297 remote managers and employees, insights from working with 15,000+ people in over 25 countries with Know Your Team, and the research weve done across dozens of remote companies, I share the most essential communication best practices for remote teams below. Make time for activities other than work communication to foster team connection remotely.
After a long and liquid client dinner, an advertising executive opens an email from his boss reminding him to submit his expenses on time. Engaging employees from afar will look different than some of your go-to in-office initiatives. Here are some best practices to master: Dont conflate brief communications and clear communications: In our efforts to be efficient, we sometimes use fewer words to communicate. Below are a few ideas for keeping your remote employees engaged from day one.
Give Know Your Team a try here today. Dont bombard your team with messages: Do you follow up on a task by email, text and phone? We know if we need to get a hold of someone how to get a hold of someone. Try switching most remote communication to regular video calls, which are a much better vehicle for establishing rapport and creating empathy than either e-mails or voice calls. And the absence of body language doesnt necessarily mean that were not giving away more than we intend to when we communicate remotely. This means you writing down your message to give your team time to digest your note and respond to you thoughtfully a few hours later instead of firing off a chat to someone via Slack or Microsoft Teams and adding to their infinite queue of chats. In the office or at home, employee recognition remains a key driver of employee engagement and performance.
People need quiet, uninterrupted time to get work done. Work with your team to establish clear expectations and boundaries so everyone is on the same page and can take ownership of their work. Passwords must have at least 10 characters, one number, one lower and Engaging remote employees will require strategic efforts and ongoing evaluation. When your team is remote, you dont have the same opportunities to connect with your team organicallyfrom popping over to their desk for a quick chat to catching up in the break room. If you dont have a plan, youre not going to achieve the results you hope for. For example: PS: To house these asynchronous messages, we here at KYT use Basecamp a project management tool to have a committed, organized place for all our asynchronous writing.
And fortunately, there are tons of options and solutions to help remote teams stay connected and productive from anywhere.
You can avoid a lot of frustration, confusion, and misalignment through clear expectations from the start. Send out an employee survey with questions and ranking statements like: A culture survey can give you insights into what is working well and opportunities to improve so you can target your culture-building efforts strategically. Spend the time to communicate with the intention of being ultra clear, no matter the medium. And its affecting what we hear, as the jumble of information coming at us can lead to frequent misunderstandings and confusion. 4 ways to boost employee performance while remote, Professional development for remote workers. Err on the side of communicating clearly.
Here are few things to consider: Since remote employees arent coming into your office, they wont necessarily come equipped with all the tools they need to be successful. Building a strong remote work culture from the start can help you capitalize on the benefits of remote work while mitigating some of the risks and challenges that are unique to distributed teams. So rather than writing an email or phoning a colleague, ask if they can hop on a quick video chat. Collaboration can happen in real-time with meeting tools like Zoom or Lucidspark, but it can also happen asynchronouslywith team members contributing to the conversation at different times of the day or week and following up on the work later. Your transition to asynchronous writing does not have to be a waterfall but a slow drip. This is a fun way to learn more about each other and build team spirit with some healthy, low-stakes competition. Please explain your ideal work environment (hybrid, remote, at the office) and why. In fact, in a 2019 survey we conducted with 297 remote managers and employees, remote managers said that the second hardest thing for them was communicating without in-person cues (15% of remote managers said this). Surveys play a crucial role in understanding your remote employees needs, preferences, and unique challenges. People who work on remote teams face communications challenges consistently.
Thats a huge cost for companies who have invested time and money to hire and train new recruits. How you do it is less important than whether you do. (And then misinterprets them anyway.) This continuing shift calls for a new range of behaviors and skills. Developing your remote employees requires strategic planning, honest communication, and consistency. Working from home can blur the lines between personal life and work life.
Additionally, with the line between home and work blurred, workers may end up working long hours and have difficulty taking breaks and signing off at the end of the day or on weekends. A remote work survey could focus on: Pick a focus for your survey and craft questions around that theme. In our survey, remote managers and employees said that they used video to hold meetings and conversations either several times a week (32%) or every single day (22%). When you do need to use real-time communication, youll want to have a method to your madness. Give them the tools they need to succeed and regularly check-in and check up on them to see how they are adjusting, identify any challenges they may be facing, answer questions, and create opportunities for coaching and long-term development. Show appreciation for achievements big and small, both publicly and privately, so your employees know their work is valued. Before they even start work, make sure they have what they need to get started, such as Wi-Fi capacity, user logins, and access, conferencing tools. Real, lasting engagement goes deeper than that. If there is one practice out of all the communication best practices for remote teams to try, it is this one. Even when were co-located, the tone of a text or the formality of an email is left wide open to interpretation, to the point that even our closest friends get confused. Your remote work environment will feel lighter, more coherent and perhaps, dare I say even more delightful.
Culture is built with intention, so include remote work as part of your overall organizational and engagement strategy. Focus on these five communication best practices for remote teams: Enact even one of these practices, and youll find a meaningful shift that occurs in your own remote team. And as employees increasingly expect and demand flexibility and remote options, leaders will need to adapt to a new normal for managing remote teams. Clarify early on how your team will communicate and the best channels for different types of work and topics (e.g., performance reviews vs. project updates). This can translate to a positive culture of mutual trust and accountability. Quick tip: Many remote managers use Know Your Teams Icebreakers and Social Questions to help build this empathy and social connection in a remote team, so communicating in absence of in-person cues can feel more fluid. Consider building a remote mentorship program, pairing senior employees with newer or early-career team members. Looking to further support your remote team? Thats why feedback is so important. You now have access to all your subscriber benefits on HBR.org.
Thats why remote managers need to pay special attention to managing and promoting positive remote team dynamics. Dont assume that others understand your cues and shorthand. Dont let that happen. Choose your digital volume wisely. Regular, constructive feedback from managers, coaches, and peers can help remote employees understand what is expected, identify areas for improvement, and better align their efforts with the overall goals of the team and organization. And choose and use your communication tools wiselyremember that sometimes simple is better, and not all shiny features are necessary for leading a productive, focused meeting. I feel connected to my team when working from home. Here are 4 strategies to get started: To build a strong culture, you first need to understand what your current culture is and how your employees experience it. Foster trust and connection through honest communication, feedback, and team-building exercises. If youre new to remote work, it can be a big shift from working in an office. Communication in a remote team doesnt have to be as overwhelming or all-consuming as it currently exists in your organization. Free for a limited time! This means you need to find other ways to communicate effectively and clearly. When people arent sharing an office space, they dont have the same opportunities for connection, communication, or collaboration. Confirm your subscriber information and enter your password. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. (Where to start first? you may be wondering. From opening up the interview process to remote video interviews to allowing flexible schedules for remote employees, remote-friendly policies can transform and empower your business to include and value employees no matter where theyre from or how and where they work. In other words, its the heart and soul of your company and its people. They give people leaders valuable insight into whats working and whats not, and help identify gaps or opportunities in performance and engagement initiatives. Understanding these pros and cons of remote work and how they can impact your culture can help you strategically develop your remote culture. Dont drop them in and let them sink or swim. At 10 p.m., a corporate lawyer gets a text from a colleague and wonders (not for the first time) if theres a protocol about work-related texts after a certain hour. Want to see the other articles in this list? Luckily, with the right technology and employee engagement solutions, managing remote workers can be just as rewardingand productiveas managing an in-house team. Instead, hiring managers can look outside the immediate area surrounding the office to recruit workers from a diverse range of locations, backgrounds, experiences, and identitiesall of which can bring new perspectives, improve the culture of your organization, and create an inclusive environment for people to do their best work.
And design virtual team-building rituals that give people the opportunity to interact regularly and experience their collaboration skills in action. If a remote work cardinal sin exists, its relying on real-time communication. The medium you choose creates different demands on the time of the receiver. Managers should regularly solicit feedback from their remote teams to understand how best to support individual employees, identify areas of potential conflict or friction, build trusted relationships, and drive performance. Understanding how remote work impacts your teams will help you better address potential problems and prioritize the things that matter most to your employeesand that will make the biggest difference in long-term performance and engagement. A message that is a longer description or project outline might be posted in a certain section in Notion and is only expected to be read within 24 hours. Show appreciation and recognition for their contributions, Give employees the right tools and resources, Keep workers in the loop on company news and changes. These are the building blocks of engaged and productive employees no matter where they do their work. Why do remote teams demand new collaboration skills? By prioritizing culture and approaching engagement, you can better address barriers to remote work and ensure your talent initiatives align with the culture youre trying to create. Dont take someone from their work if you dont have to. They know how precious their teams time and attention is and that communicating 24/7 is not conducive to productivity.
We have a culture of (recognition, feedback, transparency, etc.). When your teams are working together towards a shared purpose, this drives performance and accountability and makes it easier for leaders and their teams to prioritize their work and communicate from a place of unity. But such brevity can mean that the rest of the team wastes time trying to interpret your messages. Pulse surveys are short, focused questionnaires, typically just 5-15 questions on a given topic. Its changing how we speak often in bullet points. Make sure feedback is: Cultivate a feedback culture that goes both waystop-down and bottom-up so that both employees and leaders have a chance to give and receive constructive input. But distance doesnt have to result in disconnection. Take time to intentionally build connections among your employees and cultivate a cohesive, remote team. Use the following guide as a crash course for remote work best practices, strategies, and tips so you can better lead, manage, and perform on your remote teams. Steps both large and small can add up to make a big differencefrom holding regular virtual team meetings and communicating via video and Slack channels for personalities to shine through to implementing organization-wide policies that promote connection, inclusion, and wellbeing. CEO of Know Your Team. When employees are remote, it can be easy to feel disconnected or even invisible to the rest of the team or organizationespecially if your workforce has a hybrid mix of in-office and at-home employees. Naturally, you have things you also want to communicate remotely via email, chat, video call, phone call. While we may have become used to these types of asynchronous interactions, they can still conflict with our normal rules for social interaction.
I feel informed about the organizations goals and priorities when working from home. Annoyed by this micromanagement, he immediately responds with his uncensored thoughts. One path to overcoming this obstacle is to cultivate as many opportunities for you and your team to receive those in-person cues. They want to know their work is valued and that their contributions matter. Clarifying how, when, and where your team will work can improve efficiency, keep everyone aligned, and prevent conflict from the start. But you cant take professional development for granted. Remote managers all over the world use Know Your Team to hold effective one-on-one meetings, gather status updates, and build social connection in a remote team.. Seeall the features in Know Your Team here, and sign-up for a free trial today to see for yourself. But ultimately, managing people remotely relies on many of the same leadership principles as in-house management. This means dedicated check-ins are even more critical to building trusted relationships with your remote employees and taking the pulse on their work performance. Documenting how people should ideally communicate isnt just a nice-to-have, but a cornerstone document to align your staff and help onboard new folks as the company grows. Would your boss see your late night email and consider it to be an intrusion on her private time? Research shows that introverted individuals are less inhibited in online versus offline interactions. Find ways to shorten the affinity distance. As more and more of our interactions happen digitally, we will continue to experience new forms of miscommunication and misunderstanding. One company we worked with celebrated new talent by creating a personal emoji for each employee who had been there for six months. Communicating in a remote work environment doesnt have to feel as all-consuming and frazzled as it does today. How many times have you written an email and, immediately after hitting send, felt concerned about how it would land? Maybe theyve got a kid at home whos sick and its been weighing on their mind. The delay between our messages can often postpone or hide emotional reactions to our comments. You think to yourself: Communication best practices for remote teams must existright?. But managing employee performance remotely can be daunting. Say hi to me on Twitter at @clairejlew. Give asynchronous writing a shot. Remote workers typically value and appreciate greater flexibility and autonomy over their work and schedules. While we often tend to regard human predictability as a defect, few qualities are more sought-after at work, especially in virtual collaborations. During the first week, set up virtual introductory calls with team members and other leaders to help them get to know who they will be working with and start building those relationships from the beginning. Quiet time, as a result, is indeed a communication best practice. In The Watercooler, our online community of leaders in Know Your Team, one manager mentioned how his team always turns their cameras on for video calls be it one-on-one meetings, team meetings, discussions, or brainstorm sessions. When remote teams communicate well and leverage their strengths, they can actually gain an advantage over co-located teams. Paul Farnell, Co-Founder of Litmus (a Know Your Team customer), emphasized this when he wrote: Its more important to give employees quiet time than it is to cram them into an open office.. When we work in person and are co-located, communication feels obvious. For some organizations, this comes in the form of a How We Communicate document, which outlines all communication best practices. You can find your own unique way to create team spaces for social connection. Burnout is a real risk for both in-house and remote workers. Processes and communication in remote teams can be sustainable and well-thought-out not merely hurried and duct-taped together. Get our latest insights on leadership, as they're released, directly from our CEO Claire Lew. This no doubt happens with greater frequency in a remote environment, as you cant physically hear someones tone of voice or interpret a persons facial expression. Keep these tips in mind when crafting your strategy for engaging remote employees. Technology is your friend when it comes to remote work. The solution lies in building a skill set that reflects the demands of our digitally-driven age. Video calls and meetings are ideal for this, as they give you the closest fidelity to being co-located. HBR Learnings online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Team Management. Dont let physical distance create emotional distance between your team members. However, there are overlapping strategies and many shared principles. Understanding this, companies can build more inclusive and equitable remote work policies that attract and retain top talent from anywhere in the world. Contact Customer Service: Hulton Archive/Hayon Thapaliya/Getty Images. Like any good process, its value comes from its utility and how well its helping your team not holding your team back. But working remotely can make it easy for employee contributions to go unnoticed. When I interviewed Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, on our podcast, The Heartbeat, he echoed this, describing how hard it is to read people in a remote work environment and how facile it is to assume how someone is feeling. How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Work from Home, How to Stay Focused When Youre Working from Home, How to Work Remotely Without Losing Motivation, I'm a subscriber, but I don't have an HBR.org account. There are also challenges to remote work that can impact culture. If your company can afford to, set aside a weekend for a casual retreat to strengthen team connections and company culture and make shared memories. Thats why its important to focus on building a healthy and productive culture from the start. Or, rather than holding a Google Hangout to ask questions about a project and eating up a whole hour of your teams time, you write-up a project online, share it via email, and have folks respond the next day with a full 24-hours to digest the contents. Silence is golden in a remote team. When you add remote work into your company dynamics, that will impact how employees and leaders work together. Stay connected and involved with regularly scheduled one-on-one meetingswe recommend at least once a month, but for remote teams, more frequent check-ins can be especially beneficial. People want to be trusted to do their work, they want to be recognized for their contributions and feel a sense of purpose in their work, and they want regular feedback so they can continue to grow and develop. Our culture supports the mission and vision of the organization. Based on our survey with 297 remote managers and employees, insights from working with 15,000+ people in over 25 countries with Know Your Team, and the research weve done across dozens of remote companies, I share the most essential communication best practices for remote teams below. Make time for activities other than work communication to foster team connection remotely.
After a long and liquid client dinner, an advertising executive opens an email from his boss reminding him to submit his expenses on time. Engaging employees from afar will look different than some of your go-to in-office initiatives. Here are some best practices to master: Dont conflate brief communications and clear communications: In our efforts to be efficient, we sometimes use fewer words to communicate. Below are a few ideas for keeping your remote employees engaged from day one.
Give Know Your Team a try here today. Dont bombard your team with messages: Do you follow up on a task by email, text and phone? We know if we need to get a hold of someone how to get a hold of someone. Try switching most remote communication to regular video calls, which are a much better vehicle for establishing rapport and creating empathy than either e-mails or voice calls. And the absence of body language doesnt necessarily mean that were not giving away more than we intend to when we communicate remotely. This means you writing down your message to give your team time to digest your note and respond to you thoughtfully a few hours later instead of firing off a chat to someone via Slack or Microsoft Teams and adding to their infinite queue of chats. In the office or at home, employee recognition remains a key driver of employee engagement and performance.
People need quiet, uninterrupted time to get work done. Work with your team to establish clear expectations and boundaries so everyone is on the same page and can take ownership of their work. Passwords must have at least 10 characters, one number, one lower and Engaging remote employees will require strategic efforts and ongoing evaluation. When your team is remote, you dont have the same opportunities to connect with your team organicallyfrom popping over to their desk for a quick chat to catching up in the break room. If you dont have a plan, youre not going to achieve the results you hope for. For example: PS: To house these asynchronous messages, we here at KYT use Basecamp a project management tool to have a committed, organized place for all our asynchronous writing.
And fortunately, there are tons of options and solutions to help remote teams stay connected and productive from anywhere.
You can avoid a lot of frustration, confusion, and misalignment through clear expectations from the start. Send out an employee survey with questions and ranking statements like: A culture survey can give you insights into what is working well and opportunities to improve so you can target your culture-building efforts strategically. Spend the time to communicate with the intention of being ultra clear, no matter the medium. And its affecting what we hear, as the jumble of information coming at us can lead to frequent misunderstandings and confusion. 4 ways to boost employee performance while remote, Professional development for remote workers. Err on the side of communicating clearly. Here are few things to consider: Since remote employees arent coming into your office, they wont necessarily come equipped with all the tools they need to be successful. Building a strong remote work culture from the start can help you capitalize on the benefits of remote work while mitigating some of the risks and challenges that are unique to distributed teams. So rather than writing an email or phoning a colleague, ask if they can hop on a quick video chat. Collaboration can happen in real-time with meeting tools like Zoom or Lucidspark, but it can also happen asynchronouslywith team members contributing to the conversation at different times of the day or week and following up on the work later. Your transition to asynchronous writing does not have to be a waterfall but a slow drip. This is a fun way to learn more about each other and build team spirit with some healthy, low-stakes competition. Please explain your ideal work environment (hybrid, remote, at the office) and why. In fact, in a 2019 survey we conducted with 297 remote managers and employees, remote managers said that the second hardest thing for them was communicating without in-person cues (15% of remote managers said this). Surveys play a crucial role in understanding your remote employees needs, preferences, and unique challenges. People who work on remote teams face communications challenges consistently.
Thats a huge cost for companies who have invested time and money to hire and train new recruits. How you do it is less important than whether you do. (And then misinterprets them anyway.) This continuing shift calls for a new range of behaviors and skills. Developing your remote employees requires strategic planning, honest communication, and consistency. Working from home can blur the lines between personal life and work life.
Additionally, with the line between home and work blurred, workers may end up working long hours and have difficulty taking breaks and signing off at the end of the day or on weekends. A remote work survey could focus on: Pick a focus for your survey and craft questions around that theme. In our survey, remote managers and employees said that they used video to hold meetings and conversations either several times a week (32%) or every single day (22%). When you do need to use real-time communication, youll want to have a method to your madness. Give them the tools they need to succeed and regularly check-in and check up on them to see how they are adjusting, identify any challenges they may be facing, answer questions, and create opportunities for coaching and long-term development. Show appreciation for achievements big and small, both publicly and privately, so your employees know their work is valued. Before they even start work, make sure they have what they need to get started, such as Wi-Fi capacity, user logins, and access, conferencing tools. Real, lasting engagement goes deeper than that. If there is one practice out of all the communication best practices for remote teams to try, it is this one. Even when were co-located, the tone of a text or the formality of an email is left wide open to interpretation, to the point that even our closest friends get confused. Your remote work environment will feel lighter, more coherent and perhaps, dare I say even more delightful. Culture is built with intention, so include remote work as part of your overall organizational and engagement strategy. Focus on these five communication best practices for remote teams: Enact even one of these practices, and youll find a meaningful shift that occurs in your own remote team. And as employees increasingly expect and demand flexibility and remote options, leaders will need to adapt to a new normal for managing remote teams. Clarify early on how your team will communicate and the best channels for different types of work and topics (e.g., performance reviews vs. project updates). This can translate to a positive culture of mutual trust and accountability. Quick tip: Many remote managers use Know Your Teams Icebreakers and Social Questions to help build this empathy and social connection in a remote team, so communicating in absence of in-person cues can feel more fluid. Consider building a remote mentorship program, pairing senior employees with newer or early-career team members. Looking to further support your remote team? Thats why feedback is so important. You now have access to all your subscriber benefits on HBR.org.
Thats why remote managers need to pay special attention to managing and promoting positive remote team dynamics. Dont assume that others understand your cues and shorthand. Dont let that happen. Choose your digital volume wisely. Regular, constructive feedback from managers, coaches, and peers can help remote employees understand what is expected, identify areas for improvement, and better align their efforts with the overall goals of the team and organization. And choose and use your communication tools wiselyremember that sometimes simple is better, and not all shiny features are necessary for leading a productive, focused meeting. I feel connected to my team when working from home. Here are 4 strategies to get started: To build a strong culture, you first need to understand what your current culture is and how your employees experience it. Foster trust and connection through honest communication, feedback, and team-building exercises. If youre new to remote work, it can be a big shift from working in an office. Communication in a remote team doesnt have to be as overwhelming or all-consuming as it currently exists in your organization. Free for a limited time! This means you need to find other ways to communicate effectively and clearly. When people arent sharing an office space, they dont have the same opportunities for connection, communication, or collaboration. Confirm your subscriber information and enter your password. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. (Where to start first? you may be wondering. From opening up the interview process to remote video interviews to allowing flexible schedules for remote employees, remote-friendly policies can transform and empower your business to include and value employees no matter where theyre from or how and where they work. In other words, its the heart and soul of your company and its people. They give people leaders valuable insight into whats working and whats not, and help identify gaps or opportunities in performance and engagement initiatives. Understanding these pros and cons of remote work and how they can impact your culture can help you strategically develop your remote culture. Dont drop them in and let them sink or swim. At 10 p.m., a corporate lawyer gets a text from a colleague and wonders (not for the first time) if theres a protocol about work-related texts after a certain hour. Want to see the other articles in this list? Luckily, with the right technology and employee engagement solutions, managing remote workers can be just as rewardingand productiveas managing an in-house team. Instead, hiring managers can look outside the immediate area surrounding the office to recruit workers from a diverse range of locations, backgrounds, experiences, and identitiesall of which can bring new perspectives, improve the culture of your organization, and create an inclusive environment for people to do their best work.
And design virtual team-building rituals that give people the opportunity to interact regularly and experience their collaboration skills in action. If a remote work cardinal sin exists, its relying on real-time communication. The medium you choose creates different demands on the time of the receiver. Managers should regularly solicit feedback from their remote teams to understand how best to support individual employees, identify areas of potential conflict or friction, build trusted relationships, and drive performance. Understanding how remote work impacts your teams will help you better address potential problems and prioritize the things that matter most to your employeesand that will make the biggest difference in long-term performance and engagement. A message that is a longer description or project outline might be posted in a certain section in Notion and is only expected to be read within 24 hours. Show appreciation and recognition for their contributions, Give employees the right tools and resources, Keep workers in the loop on company news and changes. These are the building blocks of engaged and productive employees no matter where they do their work. Why do remote teams demand new collaboration skills? By prioritizing culture and approaching engagement, you can better address barriers to remote work and ensure your talent initiatives align with the culture youre trying to create. Dont take someone from their work if you dont have to. They know how precious their teams time and attention is and that communicating 24/7 is not conducive to productivity.