For many employees, increased connectivity in personal and work lives have made the transition into remote-work environment a relatively easy one. Faster and more readily available Wi-Fi connection and easy-access cloud systems enable virtual team tools to bring ‘The Office’ anywhere you take your laptop. And more and more businesses are catching on to the fact that time zones are becoming increasingly closer together.
It takes more effort to make remote teams operate successfully but given this new norm it’s worth learning how to do it effectively. Building and managing teams is enough of a challenge when everyone is in the same location. Collaboration when working on a team that’s virtual requires more commitment and hard challenges.
Like any team you need to build trust, there are many behaviors that undermine trust in virtual teams, when teams are working in virtual offices it takes a bit more effort. All team members need proper guidelines, but virtual teams need them even more to enhance performance, focus on making it clear how you want the team to work. This means clearly articulating principles, recommendations and best practices.
Remote teams need set boundaries within which to operate and make decisions. But you also need to show your trust in their professional judgment, avoiding the temptation to manage, focus on protocols for effective team interaction like methods of communication and virtual meetings. Your standard of communication enhances as email, shared documents and chat functions leave little room for body language, so you need to be very precise, clear and efficient with how you communicate.
The virtual work environment is shaped by the combination of communication tools used to share information and documents, give and receive feedback, brainstorm, make decisions, and share knowledge. Effective communication is perhaps the biggest challenge facing remote virtual teams.
There are two main communication challenges for a virtual team. The first is the way they deliver messages. A good rule of thumb is to let the purpose of the message determine the tool used that is sending information in an appropriate format. The second challenge is that communication can easily lead to misunderstandings. Your team members must be able to judge the meaning of the message, read emails and judge someone’s tone of voice while video calling.
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