First of all, move communications online. In a remote team, you need to make sure that everyone is up to date and can continue to work in an asynchronous manner or have a person sitting next to them. To be able to do that, you need to pick the right tools.
There are some great tools and apps out there that make collaboration between a remote team a lot easier.
At Beat, Slack is our virtual office. We use it to discuss, evaluate, coordinate and categorize our projects. In addition, tools like Jira, Confluence and Github help us work and collaborate in a nonparallel way — they allow others to pick up where you left.
One of the main challenges that people working remotely face is the sense of isolation. To avoid that, we have a 24/7 video connection in our physical office in case a remote member misses that office environment feeling.
A lot of times, random ‘by the water cooler’ conversations develop great ideas and help people connect. This phenomenon is quite common in an environment like the physical office. In the early days, our remote members didn’t have the opportunity to communicate in that way. And, this is where Discord’s Push-to-talk technology came into play.
Push-to-talk is the video gamers classic form of communication — a walkie-talkie-like functionality at your desktop. A group of people can share a channel and while someone keeps the “talk key” pressed on his keyboard, others in the channel can hear him talk. In this way, you communicate with anyone as if they were sitting next to you.
For us, push-to-talk is not just for chatting, but rather a way of doing stand-ups and other meetings.
Trust is a huge challenge for a virtual team. High-trust teams are those with more empathy, collaboration, recognition of co-workers, vulnerability, and personal growth for everyone around. Low-trust teams, on the other hand, are less productive and might form cliques within them. So how do you create trust when you can’t physically see your colleagues?
The key is to create productive face-to-face time so that you can all get to know each other. The primary goal is to encourage people to connect.
In our case, we come together once every two months for a full week. During that time, we try to encourage interactions and conversations between team members. When it’s time for our remote colleagues to leave our physical office, we need to make sure that everyone is fully aligned and we have a deeper connection with each other. We’ve found this to be vital, especially as we keep growing.
What is more, group gatherings help new hires. It’s a great opportunity for them to get comfortable with the team and bond with their coworkers. Typically, this happens in the first week of a new joiner -he receives a warm welcome from the entire team.
You can get a long way using just online communication, but if you want to build high-quality relationships in real-life between the people at your company, having physical meetings make a huge difference when disperse and go back to each remote location.
Building a remote culture needs time. If you feel that it doesn’t work as expected, talk to your team members and try to find ways to improve it.
Remember: Effective communication is an ongoing process and does not come naturally to everyone.
Remote working is here to stay. As it keeps growing and getting established, it’s crucial that today’s leaders and managers learn how to work with remote teams to build strong companies.