How to Boost Cross-Collaboration in Your Remote Team

remote employees Nov 29, 2020

In the past few years, more companies have started embracing the flexible work philosophy to enable remote work for their employees. This has helped them collaborate with freelancers from all over the globe, hire versatile candidates, and above all, adapt to a fast-changing business climate. For many, however, office-based work has remained the pillar of healthy and productive collaboration.

Now that every industry has been affected by the pandemic and have had to send their employees to work from home, enticing collaboration among remote teams has been a struggle. Here are a few tried and tested ways to boost collaboration among your remote teams and help your organization thrive.

Weekly video calls to stay connected

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective for cross-collaboration in your remote teams. That especially applies to your weekly meetings and round-ups with your team. Use this time for more than just notifying them about the latest developments in the business – let your team leaders go over the weekly workload plan to make sure everyone has what they need.

Open communication can help boost your work day and it will help people have a clear idea of what your expectations are and what they need to do in order to complete their tasks by the end of each week.

Using PM tools to monitor milestones

Healthy and consistent collaboration is only possible when you leverage tech tools for core processes such as project management. Do some digging to find the most optimal PM tool for your business, train your teams to use this tool, and then allow them to take the lead.

PM tools not only serve to help boost productivity through a number of handy features, but they also allow employees to be more accountable for their work, and the entire collaborative process is far easier to maintain. The built-in chat helps your employees interact in real-time, while setting concrete milestones will allow you to monitor all your projects.

Enabling VoIP for smarter communications

Technology such as voice over internet protocol (or VoIP) has helped many companies move forward and ease into remote work. For starters, you can look into the best VoIP solutions available, to see what kind of features will help your remote teams collaborate seamlessly and successfully.

VoIP is ideal for customer service teams, but it’s also suitable for connecting the rest of your business and helping every employee use the available information for better marketing campaigns, sales processes, and the like. Phone calls aren’t the only reason VoIP is growing more popular, as the variety of built-in tools and functionalities allow companies to centralize communications with this single solution at hand.

Remote team-building opportunities

This is not the time to skimp on creativity when it comes to connecting with your employees. On the contrary, use this period to strengthen employee bonds, which will ultimately help them communicate more effectively and collaborate.

Remote team-building ideas such as organizing game nights, setting up virtual lunches, or learning circles when you share exciting stories and personal experiences – these are all great ways to keep your employees happy and engaged.

Build a feedback loop

One of the most effective, and yet neglected ways to make your business work together more seamlessly is to enable regular feedback exchanges among your teams and management, too. Setting the stage for success requires transparency every step of the way. Working remotely shouldn’t prevent you from asking the right questions regularly and allowing your employees to ask you anything if they have any ideas, concerns, or questions.

Feedback requires structure, so make sure that you let your remote teams know when and how it’s best to get in touch with you to provide their suggestions. Also, make time for one-on-one calls to understand their views on remote work and to provide them with personalized guidance on how they can adapt more easily to remote work.