How to Encourage Collaboration When Managing a Remote Team

Be Honest, Approachable and Contactable – As an employer, team leader or manager it is important that you are honest, approachable and contactable, as you are the person that your team turn to for guidance. If you aren’t honest with your team then you can’t expect them to be honest with you or each other! Managers and team members alike should be able to share the things that they are going through, what is new for them and what they are struggling with. Due to the current climate, many managers may be worried about supporting a team in a situation where no one quite knows how long it is going to last for, or what implications it may have in the future. If you are feeling this way, then it is important for you to communicate openly with you team to allow them to have a better understanding of your situation. They will appreciate that you can’t and won’t have the answers to everything all the time, but just the fact that you are keeping them updated with what is going on within the business will hopefully encourage them to be more open and honest with you and one another. Furthermore, even something as simple as showing your face on a team video call once or twice a week can make you come across as more approachable and contactable to your remote team, with a recent study finding that 87% of workers felt more connected with their peers, managers and employers when video calls are available.  

Practice Regular Communication – Teams need to communicate in order to be able to thrive and collaborate effectively. The best way to do this is to open up communication streams within your team, and there a several ways that this can be done. For general conversations about work or day-to-day life whilst working remotely, you could look at implementing a real-time instant messaging software like Slack, Microsoft teams or WhatsApp. For more in-depth and thorough conversations, video or audio-conferencing platforms like Zoom or Skype seem to be the best and most reliable options. However, it is also important that you remember that conversations with your remote team don’t always have to be work-related. You need to be mindful of people’s different situations and personal circumstances, some people live alone or with young children and don’t always have people to turn to during these uncertain times. Giving your team the opportunity to discuss how they are feeling, share any anxieties or worries that they have, or generally talk about their days outside of work will allow them to bond and will result in better team collaboration.

Empower Your Team – If your team are not used to working remotely, then they may feel that they are missing out on being part of the decision-making process within your company that they would normally be involved in. Therefore, as a team leader or manager you should empower your remote team by giving them the autonomy to make decisions, as well as to communicate and implement ideas. Asking your team for their input on important tasks or projects is a great way to empower them and increase collaboration. A study showed that employees who felt that their voices were heard at work were 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to do their best work. When a manager can tap into the skills, creativity and expertise of a team and delegate tasks to them, the team become more motivated to perform more efficiently and are more likely to feel trusted and important. As put by Stephen Covey “an empowered organisation is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to a collective organisational success”.

Facilitate Team Learning and Knowledge Sharing – Whilst team meetings go some way to encouraging collaboration, there are other things you can do to further this. During the current situation, there are so many opportunities to take part in online courses or further training, so why not look at the courses or webinars available and ask a different member of your team to sign up to one course or webinar each week. Once they have undertaken the course or attended the webinar, suggest that they organise a Zoom video call or put together a presentation so that they can share and discuss what they have learnt with the rest of the team. All it would take is for the team to set aside one hour in the diary each week for a collaborative team learning session.

Shift the Focus – If you and your team find yourselves with more time and less of your ‘normal’ work to be doing then, take advantage of this! Use this time wisely to take a pause and to shift the focus onto working together on the tasks you never normally have time to do, as well as encouraging your staff to look at areas of improvement within the team or wider company. This can be things like asking a sub-group within your team to work on a new marketing or social media strategy, whilst the rest of the group look at researching and implementing new software or systems. Furthermore, you can also play to individual strengths within the team, for example, if a few people struggle with a certain software, such as Excel, you could ask more confident users to work alongside them to help them to brush up their skills and use this time to focus on improving the team’s development. This will allow the team to focus on an action plan and motivate them to work collaboratively to find other ways to help the business and each other.

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash