2020 brought an increase in remote working across all industries. It has become imperative for leaders to develop techniques to ensure the team remains strong and productive even while working remotely.
Here are five (5) proven ways to develop a formidable team with a remote workforce:
Open Communication: It is quite easy for communication to get lost in meaning or transmission when working remotely. To ensure that is not the case with the team, keep communication open and free. Leaders should be approachable by members of their team and vice versa.
Active Engagement and Collaboration: Team members need to feel like they are still a part of the team even while working from home. It is easy to work solo when you don’t see anyone around. Sometimes, as leaders, we dig into the work once it gets to us without carrying our team members along, which can then lead to disconnected team members and unproductive teammates. Engagement also involves identifying fun activities such as ice breakers to sustain the attention of team members during and outside of meetings. A way to ensure collaboration is to work through shared storage and on shared documents.
Learning Sessions: Organizing periodic intra-team learning sessions is another proven method to keep your team engaged and active. Sharing knowledge about what new thing you have picked up in your week or month makes up for the distance you experience as a virtual team. While working from the office, it is not unusual to share something new you picked up from the internet or in a book with your team, which could be directly or indirectly related to your work. Such sessions now need to be deliberately organized to help your team to look forward to learning and sharing with teammates. It is important not to restrict these sessions to only topics that directly relate to the work you do, sessions on etiquette, soft skills, general knowledge amongst others can also be discussed.
Virtual Celebrations: Birthdays, wedding anniversaries, work anniversaries, promotions are major milestones for which many organizations naturally celebrate their employees. Virtual work should not make that stop. Identify ways to celebrate your team virtually, host virtual parties, get creative and watch your team come alive.
Teamwork: Like the second tip, do not encourage working in silos. As a leader, you should lead by example and ensure that projects are executed as a team, and no one is applauded for doing work by themselves when they could have engaged other members of the team. Building a culture of teamwork could be the single most important determinant to whether your virtual team would be actively engaged or not.
Author: Vishal N.
Date: December 2022
