Effective Remote Team Communication

Challenges of effective remote team communication

What are the first challenges of communicating remotely that come to your mind? Perhaps you’re thinking about time zones and the difficulty of staying in sync. Or maybe you’re worried about issues with an unreliable internet connection. These are valid concerns, but the challenges outlined below often turn out to be more serious, even though they’re not that easy to anticipate or notice.

Lack of visibility – 1st reason for decreasing effectiveness of remote team communication

The lack of visibility that could be difficult for remote teams is evident on several levels:

• Who’s available?
  When you don’t see your team face to face, it’s harder to know who’s at work and who’s on vacation. Things are even more complicated for part-time employees and freelancers who tend to work remotely. On top of that, many remote workers work flexible hours, juggling work duties with personal activities.

• How do you know if they’re available?
  There are two ways to solve this problem: First, introduce an absence tracking process and a place where your team can see who’s available and who’s not on a given day. Then, ask your team members to announce their current availability, e.g., using Slack statuses: short updates like “in a meeting” or “out for lunch” will be enough.
• Who is working on what?
  “I don’t know if you’re the right person to ask about this project, but here I go” – ideally, you would want to eliminate guesswork from your team’s communication. If you have fewer than, say, 25 team members, it’s relatively easy to remember who’s working on what. If your team is bigger, things get much more complicated. Again, you could use an online space where your teammates can check who is involved in which project.

Teamdeck’s resource calendar is a single source of truth regarding your team’s availability and workload. You can see who’s assigned to which project, who’s on vacation, and who’s some capacity left (if you’re looking for people that can join your project). 

• Who should know about this?
  Effective communication means that the right people are getting the right message and the right time. For that to be true, your remote employees need to know who should be in the loop regarding different things. Write down some simple rules like “Jane Doe, who is managing our website, needs to know about new milestones in your projects so that she can publish updates.”

Lack of context – 2nd reason for decreasing effectiveness of remote team communication

When communicating with someone who is working remotely, you don’t have the context that direct communication provides. In essence, you don’t see the body language, most of the time you don’t know what that person has been doing recently, what’s their mood, etc. Consider this example: you receive a very curt message from one of your coworkers asking you to share some information. At first, you may be thinking: “Is this person mad at me? Annoyed? I haven’t done anything wrong”. You can see how that might lead to miscommunication or even conflict. This is why it’s vital to:

• Provide context when you contact your teammates about something. Instead of writing “Send me stats from the last campaign ASAP”, say “I’m having an unexpected meeting with XYZ in an hour. Can you send me the stats from the last campaign so that I can show them during the meeting?”. More context = Fewer misunderstandings.
• Make use of video communication. When you’re not sure about the context, and you’re worried that getting to the bottom of things might take a while, just say: “let’s jump on a quick call and discuss it”. Chances are you will be able to clear things up faster.

The difficulty of staying connected

People working in remote teams need to make a conscious effort to stay connected. It’s quite easy to limit communication to short messages exchanged on Slack or via email, especially if people’s roles are independent or they’re working in different time zones. As a team leader, you can foster team spirit by encouraging to have regular video calls, team-building activities, or even a chat channel that’s dedicated to posting memes (you can see ideas for other culture-strengthening channels here). 

Few opportunities for 1:1 meetings

This point is a little tricky. You might think: how come there are fewer opportunities for 1:1 meetings? After all, people can chat privately whenever they want: many communication tools used by remote teams allow for private conversations.

That’s true for employee-to-employee chats, but manager-direct report 1:1s might quickly get forgotten when you don’t see your team every day. Alternatively, you might get a false sense of security when you do chat with your team regularly—everyone looks happy, there’s no use for additional 1:1 meetings. Only there is, regardless of your team’s perceived well-being.

Granted, this challenge is not exclusive to remote teams. In-office team members may also get fewer chances to meet with their boss than they need. When it comes to remote workers, however, you need to make sure that they get an opportunity to talk to you every once in a while. You can schedule a fixed time for these meetings or remind employees regularly to pick a time slot for a 1:1. This way, you’ll be able to connect with your distributed employees better and also build trust with your team.