3 Practical Tips to Communicate Better in your Remote Team
It's hard to communicate effectively when your team is spread out around the world, but Remote Santa has got your back! This month, we have three easy and practical tips that will improve your team communication.
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Your remote team can’t use nonverbal visual cues that are so central to building trust. They don’t have a shared space that gives them a sense of togetherness. Although there are many communication tools, such as emails, messages, meetings, and calls, they are often left on their own without any progress updates about the projects and timelines.
Although there are many communication tools, such as emails, messages, meetings, and calls, they are often left on their own without any progress updates about the projects and timelines. This doesn’t mean that your remote team is stuck - it simply means that they have to put in some extra effort to communicate well.
Remote Santa brings you three practical tips to help you with this:
1. Asynchronous is a New Buzz Word (for a Good Reason)
Companies have allowed people to work from home, but they have decided to make them sit in countless meetings. And everyone is complaining about it! Such complaints are supported by research showing that meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years, to the point where executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. As one employee describes it for Harvard Business Review - “I cannot get my head above water to breathe during the week.”
So, how do you make sure your remote team is working in sync but not spending countless hours in meetings?
Here’s our suggestion - consider agreeing on response times as a passive communication method. This approach enables team members to check their emails or messages at their own pace, allowing them to be interrupted on their own schedule instead of multiple times per hour. It might sound radical, but it will be effective for a few important reasons:
• Your team will be allowed a longer period of time to focus without interruptions.
• People's productivity varies depending on the time of day, so everybody gets the freedom to do their best work when they are at their best.
• Not all tasks are urgent, and most questions can wait for a couple of hours.
2. A Single Source of Truth (and it’s not Google)
Our previous suggestion was to agree on response times with your remote team, and we still think it's a good idea! However, some questions may seem urgent enough to ask your colleague about, but what if the answers to these questions are not just in your colleague's notepad or head? What if everyone had easy access to them?
That's why you need a single source of truth - a handbook or a set of documents that contain all the most important information your team might need at any time.
It is essential that you:
• have an owner of this handbook, or owners for its different parts
• ensure that the information in the handbook is always up-to-date
Depending on what your team does, you can choose to use a CRM to store all necessary information (such as Hubspot or Salesforce) or a project management tool (such as Asana or Monday). We suggest using Notion to create a library that's easy to navigate (and pretty to look at!).
3. A Strong Sense of Community Comes First
The previous suggestions were important, but you still need people to communicate effectively! That's why empathy, trust, and a sense of community are essential for good communication.
Don’t forget - when they trust each other, they are more likely to communicate openly and honestly. Also, if they feel like they belong to their team, they care more and are willing to put in the effort to communicate effectively.
Unfortunately, without the ability to interact with colleagues face-to-face, misunderstandings and miscommunications can easily occur. So, you have to make an effort (and be patient!).
Here are a couple of practical tips on how to work on this:
• Lead by example and start by trusting them with their tasks and time management. If you don't trust them, they won't trust each other!
• Have a couple of random Slack channels that are dedicated to fun things (pets, sports, etc.).
• If you don't have resources or if your team is spread out around the world, try some of the fun tools that help you be intentional about it (Remote Santa helps your team stay connected!)
These practical tips have already worked wonders for many remote companies, so we're sure they will help your remote team become better at communication as well.
Become Better at Communication with Remote Santa
If you want to ensure that your team is engaged and connected, try our fun and collaborative gifting platform and make Remote Santa a part of your remote work plan.
Onboard your team in no time - the setup is easy and the app requires minimal effort from your side.