More and more companies are moving away from physical offices, thus remote work is gaining popularity. The teams that embrace remote work can be beneficial to their employees and can offer attractive work arrangements.
But working remotely isn’t as easy as giving up the traditional office environment. Remote work requires different guiding principles, team collaboration software and accountability systems.
This content focuses on remote work, the skills and principles apply to any work environment. Whether your team works partially remotely, offers flexible arrangements in some way, or simply has employees who travel, you will benefit from applying these Acheter cialis en ligne france
remote working principles.
Align Your Team Around A Shared Vision:
In a remote environment, it is imperative for leaders to convey the overall vision to the team. It can be easy to set someone up and start issuing tasks. This can be done in the short term, but in the long term employees want to know about long term goals.
In order to work together effectively as a team, a company must excel at conveying the big picture. From the upper level of the organization to the entry level, everyone must share a mission, a language, and a set of values in order to operate as a team.
Communicate Within The Framework Of Your Projects:
Communication is the lifeblood of remote work. But communication is more than sending messages and making phone calls. For communication to be effective, it must take place in the right context.
It’s difficult to talk about work when the critical details aren’t clear. Or to talk about responding to a difficult customer email when that email isn’t right. Or to refer to a colleague’s comment from last week that you can’t find right now.
If you’re communicating outside of the project context—a phone call here, an isolated email there—then every piece needs to be explained every time or you can also create tickets through ticketing system software. And when the task returns to its larger project, you’ll have to explain everything again.
The solution is to have a system that can be the single source of truth for your team, allowing conversations to take place in the context of work itself. When the work is connected in a single place where the communication takes place, there is no need to constantly add context. Everything is where your team can access it.
Set Expectations For Better Communication:
When you think about remote work, you often envision a more peaceful workplace, freed from the distractions of the office. Perhaps, in many cases, nothing could be farther from the truth.
Remote workers can be prone to constant distractions, as chat and email result in “instantaneous answers” in many teams. If there is an expectation of always being available, stress will be high and the quality of work will suffer. Significant, lasting change requires real cultural change with room for focus.
If you are a chief or manager, you should do your part to create expectations that immediate responses only apply to a crisis, which would then result in a phone call. Most quick chat messages can wait.
Make The Most Of Meetings:
For remote work to be successful, a row of meetings is essential. Follow these best ways to ensure your meetings have purpose and help the team work together.
Create An Agenda: A best practice for effective communication is for the meeting creator to provide an agenda with bullet points, estimated time, and goals for the meeting.
Daily Standup Meetings: A daily scrum is a quick check-in to cover what tasks you did yesterday and what you’re working on today. These scrums are a helpful way to keep everyone informed and avoid confusion. Meetings can be arranged conveniently with software for scheduling.
Regular Meetings: In addition to the daily standup, you also need regular meetings with your respective team. The purpose of these scrum is to track goals and progress. Most projects take time and as a manager you need to ensure that the right progress is made.
Use Video: Being face-to-face keeps you fully occupied instead of working on your computer at the same time during a call. Whenever possible, prioritize video chat to add personalization and empathy to the meeting.
Your distributed collaboration can feel lonely at times, so make the most of your meetings and interact face-to-face.
Prioritize Thorough Task:
It sounds obvious to focus on quality tasks, but in many cases teams can fall into a trap of being busy for the sake of being busy. Prioritizing a quality task means the focus is always on the work. It’s easy to fall into an unfortunate and all-too-common trap: working extremely hard, doing lots of “things,” but not getting little depth in any activity.
Cal Newport, an American author introduced us to the idea of deep work, where he defines as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive abilities to the limit.”
It may be best to understand deep work by looking at the opposite. Flat work is the distracted multitasking, with and without multitasking, that most workers today are used to. This is the kind of work that happens when you end the day without accomplishing much. You’re starting a project, but you have 15 tabs open and responding to instant messages, email, and phone notifications. This is superficial work and the norm for most workers.
Depth requires focus. When you are focused on a task for a block of time, you can really leverage creativity and quality. Deep work is where the magic happens.
Sum Up:
Your team can thrive in a remote environment. They avoid unnecessary commuting, offer flexibility at the location and open up a broader talent pool for your team. Follow these principles and you can ensure your remote team is on the same page and doing their
most important work.
Overcoming shared challenges is part of what makes teamwork rewarding, but remote collaboration doesn’t have to be one of them. Successful teams use collaboration tools for remote teams that remove roadblocks. Streamline redundant and time-consuming work so you can focus on solving creative tasks. The best tools make individual contributors better teammates, more efficient collaborators, and more engaged communicators.
Remote work has not only increased because of the pandemic. Team collaboration software has made it possible to work effectively from anywhere. World-class tools are critical to planning, sharing, and communicating as a working unit, and WorkHub has the power to bring them all together.
