5 Strategies To Help Distributed Teams Work Better Together

Remote working is on the rise. However, there are plenty of reasons to be cautious. Here are five strategies to ensure that your distributed team works together as effectively as possible.

Stay aligned

The first and most important step to connecting your distributed team is to ensure that they really are a team. Does everyone understand their role and responsibilities? Does everyone understand what is expected of them? And do they understand the bigger picture and how their roles fit into the success of the company? You might assume that workers in an office will organically absorb this information, but with more limited communication channels with a distributed team it’s important to be explicit.

Thorough documentation might sometimes seem excessive, but when working with a remote team it’s hugely valuable.

Furthermore, from a managerial perspective, it’s also worth considering how staff output and productivity is measured. This isn’t about micromanaging, or just ticking boxes, but is about making sure that staff have productive, engaging work to be doing.

Conference call

A key part of keeping the team aligned is to have regular meetings and to keep the conversation going in the meantime with chat threads. Communicating solely through emails and text messaging can be effective but it can ultimately feel isolating, lacking the human element of verbal communication.

Scheduling regular video and audio calls between colleagues and between line managers and reports ensures that staff stay on the same page and that they feel included. If workers are split between remote staff and an office team, this is particularly important in ensuring that employees feel plugged in together as a single entity.

Ensure you have always-available communication channels – and that you use them.

Make time

Processes carried out remotely can often be notably more time consuming – however, the overall efficiencies gained by distributed working often outweigh the costs. Meetings can take time, for example, but it’s important to make the investment, and to ensure that everyone checks in at regular intervals.

Furthermore, if you’re working with international staff then time zones need to be considered. A UK company with Australian employees, 11 hours ahead, for example, will find it difficult to stay in contact. That will mean some mean some awkward meeting scheduling (ie 8am here and 7pm there) or staggered hours to accommodate the time difference. If these factors aren’t taken into consideration then staff are likely to feel fundamentally disconnected from the team.

Use the right tools

Of course, staying connected relies on having the right tools. Remote working is a modern phenomenon – and would have been simply impossible in previous decades. Nowadays, free video calling and collaborative editing in the cloud via internet browser makes it easy to work almost anywhere (think the coffee shop – or the beach). Of courses, it’s important to have the right tools for what you want to do, and to ensure that constant communication is both easy and frictionless.

Instant messaging, voice notes, audio calls, screensharing and multi-way video conferencing are all powerful channels, providing more fluid communication than can be achieved by email. Beyond this, collaborative editing, file sharing and online tools and platforms can all provide highly effective channels for distributed teams. These tools can, of course, be extremely useful for teams in a single location as well – making workflows far more fluid and secure. Having the tools to connect, and to document and archive communications, is extremely useful whether you’re working with someone in a foreign country, someone who’s 50 metres away or someone who’s on the next desk over. And for a team that is part-time remote (think work-from-home Fridays), the same tools can be used throughout.

Having one platform where you can communicate, plan projects and share files, all in one place, rather than needing to use a handful of tools or applications is invaluable. Typically platforms focus on a single function, such as file sharing (like Dropbox), meaning that other channels then have to be used for communication or other functions. Using an array of tools naturally makes team workflows quite disjointed (are the files in Google Drive, Dropbox or email?) – so if you can find a unified solution it comes with significant benefits.

Meet in person when you can

When possible, it’s also great to bring the remote team together in person. That can mean for department or company-wide meetings or simply for social purposes (like bowling and drinks). This gives the team the opportunity to relate to one another on a personal level that might be otherwise absent and to air topics that have previously remained unsaid. Whatever the case, having the opportunity to occasionally connect in person can have a huge impact, whether that is applied to key decision making or simply to team bonding.

Conclusion: engage, communicate and energise

In a worst case scenario, distributed teams can feel divided, disconnected from the core team and poorly resourced. To effectively combat this, it’s important to ensure that every member of the team is engaged; that you have clear and open channels of communication; and that you have the time and tools to connect. If it’s done right, remote working has the potential to energise and significantly expand the scope of your operations – for example, giving staff the perk of working from home one day a week, at one extreme, or taking on freelancers from around the world, at the other.

Remote working isn’t something that’s going away anytime soon – and with the potential of collaborating across mixed-reality work spaces, it’s something that’s only going to become more immersive.