Teamwork is crucial in your department because it directly affects the productivity levels of your team members. If you can effectively collaborate with them, you can build strong relationships, minimize workload, and increase learning opportunities. Aside from that, you might be able to reduce employee turnover, which will lessen hiring and onboarding costs.
However, with the remote workplace setup, you might face challenges in encouraging your staff to work with your team. These obstacles may include difficulty communicating across groups, remotely managing projects, and nurturing relationships with them. In addition, you might also deal with issues in holding them accountable when they don’t meet your ideal outcome in their performance tasks.
This article provides a guide to improving teamwork in your remote team.
1. Hosting Virtual Happy Hours
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Scheduling a corporate happy hour contributes to the satisfaction of your team members by helping them foster connections with their colleagues. This activity gives them an avenue to socialize with other employees, enabling them to communicate well as they work on projects. Rather than focusing on work-related topics, they’ll be able to talk about their personal lives, bringing them closer together and increasing their engagement in their tasks.
When hosting a virtual happy hour, you must consider factors like the time, date, and purpose of your get-together. Next, you should select a virtual conferencing platform, choose a happy hour theme, and send digital invitations to your teammates. After that, you must carefully plan the remote team-building activities that will offer you lots of opportunities to boost their creativity, ensuring they’ll all have fun.
2. Opening Lines Of Communication
Effective communication lets your team stay informed on relevant factors affecting their tasks and productivity. When you encounter issues while collaborating, this practice will allow you to brainstorm possible resolutions to counter the obstacles and prevent misunderstandings. Doing so helps you avoid costly downtime and ensure that your team will consistently deliver high-performance levels.
To improve communication, you must invest in virtual platforms where you and your teammates will be able to transmit information in real time. This technology helps you monitor their latest progress reports so you can immediately figure out where each team member is as they work on their tasks. As you view these insights, you need to provide adequate feedback by scheduling one-on-one virtual meetings so you can correct an issue and guide them as soon as it emerges.
3. Offering Peer-To-Peer Learning Opportunities
Peer learning is a practical training tactic that promotes collaborative learning by enabling your team members to share ideas as they work through projects. This workplace strategy will help them overcome team challenge, increasing their engagement and productivity. As a result, your staff will gain new perspectives by listening to the opinions of others, helping you foster meaningful connections and support diversity.
You may incorporate peer-to-peer learning in your remote workplace whenever you welcome new hires into your team and help them adapt to your team quickly. For instance, you may assign your top-performing team members so they can teach the newbies how to properly use your online tools and introduce them to your organizational practices. However, you must check their work schedule and availability to ensure they can effectively guide your new hires in the remote onboarding process.
4. Making Documentation Accessible
When traditionally managing a remote team, your employees have to send emails to ask for documents that are relevant to their tasks. However, you might need to prepare and look for these files for some time, which causes downtime on your staff’s end and slows down the progress of the project. In turn, this incident might create tension in your team and reduce productivity, affecting team collaboration.
To combat this challenge, you must ensure that all your team members have access to the files so they won’t need to ask for each document manually. Thus, you need to use a document management platform so your team can quickly access information from multiple locations, boosting the visibility of business processes. Aside from that, this technology will protect your sensitive data by revoking access to third parties who might cause cyber threats like credential stuffing and unpatched systems.
Key Takeaway
As a manager, your priority is to lead your team members to keep them on track with the project goals and avoid costly mistakes in the long run. You can consider this guide to improving teamwork in remote teams. Once you do so, you might be able to strengthen your connections with them and prevent arguments within your team to have high productivity levels.