Collaboration is hard enough when everyone is in the same room. Now that many of us are working remotely, the challenges are multiplied. Many companies though, including the one I work for, have found that while productivity can be enhanced by everyone working remotely, a number of factors come into play when the team is working remotely for an extended period of time.
Factors that Influence Remote Team Collaboration
In the research paper The Role of Virtual Distance in Innovation and Success, the authors Karen Lojeski, Richard Reilly and Peter Dominick identified 10 factors that impact teams working remotely. These ten factors are:
- Spatial Distance: Research indicates that people are more likely to develop social ties if they are located close to each other.
- Temporal Distance: Having team members operating in different timezones can increase the complexity of communications, and can reinforce the feeling of distance between team members.
- Relational Distance: The different organisational affiliations or backgrounds of the team members.
- Cultural Distance: The cultural backgrounds of the different team members.
- Social Distance: The social affiliations, class or status differences can impact the feeling of social closeness or distance within the team in social situations.
- Relationship history: This refers to whether there is exists any previous relationship between some of the members of the team, such as working together previously, or a social relationship.
- Task interdependence: This refers to whether the tasks the team perform can be shared or are interdependent, creating the need and opportunity for collaboration and communication.
- Amount of Face to face interaction: More frequent face-to-face interaction creates a feeling of social closeness, and especially important for remote teams.
- Team Size: Team size impacts the feeling of closeness between team members, and also impacts team decision making and satisfaction.
- Level of Multi-tasking required of team members: The need to multitask increases the level of stress in the team, and also influences productivity and effectiveness, which is why the work in progress (WIP) limit is a key part of the Kanban framework.
- Technical Skill: The more competent in the knowledge or technology the team uses increases the team member’s confidence and impacts the level of social distance – less technically competent members of the team may be less likely to participate in team discussions, increasing the distance between them and the other team members.
They can be grouped into three main components: physical distance, operational distance and affinity distance.
What this tells us that there are a number of factors at play, and to help your team collaborate remotely, you have a number of factors to be keep in mind.
8 Tips for Effective Remote Team Collaboration
Agree as a team on communication channels
There are a number of channels and technologies that can be used for communication and many organisations have several to choose from. Spend time agreeing as a team on which ones should be used in which situations. Do you do most communication over Slack or similar platforms, or via email? Should you use Skype/Microsoft Teams or Slack for calls, or just a regular phone conference line? Do you want the camera to be on in calls? Discuss and agree as a team.
Ensure there is a channel for asynchronous communications
Teams need channels where they can ask questions or post updates where they don’t need or expect and immediate response. By using these channels team members can do they deep thinking work, and then periodically check the channel and respond if needed. Using these channels also mean that they can be more flexible with their working time.
Schedule Short Team Checkins During the Day
Schedule a time for the team to checkin with each other. It is not a status meeting, but rather a time for the team members to discuss questions together or checkin on each other on their feelings, discuss challenges they are facing, or just have virtual catchup over a coffee.
Create a Time for Team Celebrations
It’s really easy to get stuck in the ‘always working’ mode because you’re at home, everyone else is home, and all it takes is to keep checking your phone or computer for messages, to use the excuse of ‘just one more email’, and after a few months you’re drained, the team is drained, because all you’ve been focussing on is work.
Carve out time for the team to celebrate. Celebrate the wins, the failures, celebrate the fact that it is Friday and you’re all still happy and healthy.
Maintain and Enhance Team and Organisational Culture
Because the team are working remotely, it is easy for the culture you had beforehand to slip. How do you maintain, or even improve the team and organisation’s culture when everyone is working remotely? These tips might be able to help
- Meeting facilitators need to put in extra effort to make sure everyone is heard during the meeting.
- Encourage everyone to put on their video in meetings.
- Accept, and ensure it is acceptable to have the normal background noises in the meetings – a customer even requested that my children practice their piano during our daily call as it helped lighten the mood in an otherwise stressful situation.
- Because ‘watercooler chats’ don’t happen spontaneously anymore, give your team time to chat during the day.
- Ensure that everyone in the organisation clearly understand’s the company’s policies – for example the hours when everyone is expected to be online and contactable.
- Leaders need to be open and available, and also to model the behaviour they want in their teams.
Communicate in Bursts and Give the Team Uninterrupted Focus Time
Research by Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley suggests that effective teams communicate in bursts. Having communications close together in a limited period allows long periods of deeper thinking and work. And they don’t just mean meetings, they also mean email, Slack messages, and so on. Set a time period for this communication, do it, and then the other periods everyone can do focussed, deeper work.
To establish this in your team, it should be encouraged that all communication be done within a set period, or conversely, have a set period where communications should not occur (unless critical of course!) so that deeper thinking and work can happen. Most people respond better if this is not mandated with hard rules and penalties, and instead it should be promoted and encouraged by everyone.
Surprisingly, Reidl and Williams Woolley also found that by not having the cameras on during a teleconference leads to better equality in airtime for all members of the team. But remember, sometimes having those visual cues helps to avoid misunderstandings that can happen when there is only voice.
Seek Feedback and Make Adjustments
This is important regardless of whether you’re working remotely or co-located. But it becomes extra important because when you’re remote you have fewer cues available to pick up on issues. Asking questions during team chats, using survey tools, snap polls, etc. all help to gather the feedback. Use them regularly. The key then is to act on the feedback, and then check in with the team again to see if they think things have improved.
Use Remote Collaboration Tools
There is a huge selection of remote collaboration tools available now. Communication tools like Zoom or Skype, virtual whiteboards, project management and agile tools are all available to remote teams and organisations to collaborate effectively while working remotely. In this post we outline some of the remote collaboration tools available.
For many teams and leaders, this is a time of learning, so be patient with your team and with yourself. Expect that there will be challenges, the main thing is being aware of what they might be, and then acting on them to improve things for yourself and the team. Listen to the team, and ask them for advice on how to resolve issues.
Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash.
