How to improve remote team communications?

"Communication is key" has never been more noticeable than in the remote workplace. While working in the office gives employees more space and activities to connect together, while remote employees only connect with their colleagues through the screen. This is a challenge for both employers and employees. In this article, let’s find out how to improve effective communications with your remote team.

 

According to the Buffer State of Remote Work survey 2020, nearly 20 percent of remote employees struggle with collaboration and communication, which is also the top challenge of remote workers currently. 

 

Many employees, when communicating remotely, often face difficulties such as miscommunications, scheduling difficulties, and ineffective meetings. This might lead to conflicts, decrease in team productivity, hindering collaboration, and driving work to a halt. 

 

Every company, team, and group has a different culture, style of communications so it is important to explore tools and styles. Read on to discover 5 different ways that help you to communicate with your remote team more effectively. 

 

 

Some colleagues, when working remotely, prefer to get messages via email, while others like instant messaging or video calls. By learning people’s differences in remote communications, it would be easy to connect with your team members to process the work and focus on important things. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you try to determine who enjoys what and then follow a suitable way for them.

 

Besides, since technology tools have their limitations, you should have more options to communicate with your teammates in terms of communication platforms to make sure you can totally connect with them no matter what the situations are.

 

Almost all remote team interactions are likely written, which might be misinterpreted. Therefore, word choice, even icons should be carefully selected to avoid being too aggressive or, on the flip side, too vague.

 

In some companies where there are many remote employees working from all over the world, it might take hours or even days before your teammates in other countries can answer you due to time zone differences. Therefore, you should always have clear and detailed communications that can save your and others’ time, preventing misunderstandings.  

 

Also, when communicating through writing, you can make use of images, colors, icons, gifs to make your words more colorful and emotional as nobody likes reading a wall of text at the best of times.

 

 

Making time for more remote informal and casual discussions is beneficial, not only for communications but also to remote workers’ loneliness. This is the time for remote workers to know more about others’ personalities, lifestyles while understanding the people they are working with thoroughly. This might lead to learning about something important, such as a loved one's illness, or something joyful, such as a new pastime.

 

Some topics such as food, traveling, personal interests, trips, or personal plans can help you develop a relationship and connection with coworkers.

 

Video calls are also preferable to conference calls since you can ensure that everyone is paying to listen, avoiding the need to repeat content later. Also, seeing each other regularly builds familiarity and bonding that’s difficult to do with faceless people in a conference call.

 

We hope you’ve learned useful tips to improve remote communications with your team. We’re a remote job portal that has relevant resources for modern workers like you, whether you’re a freelancer, remote worker, or digital nomad. Actively offering jobs from many industries, from Engineering/IT, Marketing, HR, to  and Freelance Projects, you can always count on us to offer legitimate jobs from reputable companies.

 

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