29 April 2022
It’s a great challenge to provide first-class remote communication. However, this is what will lead to the success of your business. If you aim to create a well-coordinated dedicated team, you should know why communication is important in remote companies. And some proven strategies сan help in this complex matter.
What Are the Greatest Challenges in Organising Remote Communication
Hybrid and remote formats become more popular every year. This approach leads to greater flexibility and autonomy of employees. Despite the hardship of the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of people note that they had optimised their work schedules and found more time for personal life.
Still, there are some drawbacks to such an approach. Igloo’s State of the Digital Workplace report revealed that 70% of hybrid and remote employees feel “abandoned” in their workplace. People need to interact with each other, so you should think more of this when you can’t meet face-to-face. Furthermore, some employees work together with people they’ve never seen in person, leading some remote and deskless workers to feel “left out” of the company.
Strategies for Improving Communication for Dedicated Teams
All challenges we mentioned above were related to geographically remote workers. But now, it has affected everyone. The good news is that you can choose some unique strategies to boost the connection between employees in your dedicated teams. Let’s review the nine most effective approaches to improving remote communication.
Be Ready for All Obstacles of Remote Work
When you start organising a remote workflow, you should remember some challenges:
- Making your schedule;
- Transferring your communication to the digital environment;
- Understanding that you cannot be super productive while working in bed.
If you previously worked on in-house positions only, it may be challenging to adopt new rules of the game. But if you know about all challenges, you will be ready to face them.
When you transfer your staff to remote work, it is worth considering the possible difficulties of such a process. Think about technical obstacles, work/life balance, and reluctance to do the job. You should note all of these aspects in a communication strategy implementation plan. It will help you create unique solutions to solve all problems that relate to your dedicated team.
Moreover, you should ensure that your workers discuss all changes and edits qualitatively. If your company is finally shifting to a remote format, send an official email to all employees. Another vital step is establishing a remote work policy and presenting it to your team.
Set Adequate Expectations
They will help to implement remote team communication strategies for your remote and deskless staff. However, the remote format of the work doesn’t mean your personnel must be on call 24/7.
It is better to organise a call to share your expectations from employees regarding the time when you can contact them. You also need to set some formalities for reaching out to your dedicated team.
And most importantly, you should always find out if your workers are free at any time. It shows that you respect and value their time.
Create Precise Communication Guidelines for Your Dedicated Team
You can manage your dedicated team more effectively by creating specific guidelines. They need to show how to communicate effectively with remote workers. For instance, you can specify types of messages and their corresponding messaging solutions. Another part can highlight the opening and closing times of different communication channels. Finally, determine the appropriate solutions for reaching out to your personnel. After that, you should join all these points into a unique guide and give it to each employee.
Support the Wellbeing of Your Staff
This question always remains relevant, especially when we are talking about the organisation of the remote team. Due to the nature of the work, it is not always possible to detect problems. If employees skip meetings, turn off the camera or feel sick, they struggle with “isolation fatigue.”
There are many ways to support personal and professional wellbeing. For example, you can fund or provide them access to training courses or therapy. It will help save some extra time for employees and show you value them as a person.
Use the Right Communication Tools
If you strive to maintain effective virtual team communication, you should consider investing in first-class solutions. Some of them are the most popular among project managers and other staff so that you can make your digital work as efficient as possible.
There are messaging, project management, and digital collaboration tools. They help monitor the whole workflow and organise top-notch communication between your dedicated team and customers.
Let’s look at the most powerful software.
At Rocketech, we use various tools to build and improve products faster. Especially in this regard, DevOps specialists stand out. Check out the list of top 10 tools that help them communicate effectively.
Train Your Personnel to Use This Software
You can choose the best effective communication techniques to implement in your company. Still, you should find some time to teach your developers, managers, lawyers, and other staff to work with communication tools. If they know how to make the most of the first-class software, they will lead your company to success.
Further, it will be helpful to set precise guidelines on using communication software. For instance, how your dedicated team can create and share documents or maintain cyber security by creating strong passwords.
Involve Your Remote Staff In Corporate Culture
It is challenging to provide a precise definition of the corporate culture. At the same time, the ubiquity of hybrid work only complicates the communications management with other employees. As a result, they can’t bring the essence of the company culture or involve remote staff in it.
However, you still can make your employees feel part of your philosophy. Think about how your company values fit into the current situation and encourage remote and deskless workers to fuel the corporate spirit. You probably need to emphasise brand values across all communication channels. It is not enough to follow your “feelings” because your strategy will only work when you gather all the employees in one place.
Here is a basic example: start each weekly meeting highlighting one company value and ask your dedicated team employees to describe their role in feeding into it. Plus, try to find methods of rewarding their efforts with small bonuses.
Use Visual Approach to Present Your Ideas
Presenting your pitches requires more than a marker pen and a whiteboard. Spread the energy, show self-confidence and think about the presentation of your vision to all the staff.
But how to behave online? It is much more complicated to convey the energy through the screen. However, eye-catching slides with a catchy design are among communication best practices for remote teams. This approach covers the following items:
- Simple colour palette;
- Diagrams, graphs, and icons;
- Strong CTA.
As a result, you will bring the concept to the online audience, so encourage your dedicated team to create colourful slides to propose ideas.
Provide Quality Feedback In Real Time
If you can’t maintain feedback from both sides, your remote performance is not efficient. Such an essential form of communication helps foster your staff to give you feedback on current tasks, working methods and things to change. Meanwhile, give your dedicated team feedback to assess what has been achieved and what can be done better.
Remember that you don’t need to point out the “mistakes” alone. It is also better to show ways to solve them as soon as possible more actively.
Wrapping Up
Providing high-quality communication with remote and deskless employees is not so difficult. You need to develop precise guidelines, offer alternative solutions for collaborating, and strive to be sincere. These concepts should form the core of your effective communication while working remotely. Therefore, keep them in mind and apply our tips to guarantee that your staff performance is beyond reproach. And Rocketech will help to solve this issue in the best possible way. We are a fully remote team that knows about all the difficulties and can solve them like no one else. If you are looking for a dedicated team to create first-class software and bring innovative ideas to life, don’t hesitate to contact us.