When you add remote work into your company dynamics, that will impact how employees and leaders work together. But building a strong onboarding program can help reduce turnover and give remote employees the tools and support they need to do welland want to stick around. You now have access to all your subscriber benefits on HBR.org. When remote teams communicate well and leverage their strengths, they can actually gain an advantage over co-located teams. So what exactly is remote work? In other words, its the heart and soul of your company and its people. And while some may start returning to work full-time or in a more hybrid capacity, the trend towards remote work seems here to stay. One path to overcoming this obstacle is to cultivate as many opportunities for you and your team to receive those in-person cues. GitLab, a remote company with 700+ people, perhaps espouses this better than anyone. Invest in virtual learning resources and programs for remote employees to access from anywhere. Consider building a remote mentorship program, pairing senior employees with newer or early-career team members. The main goal is to make sure your remote hires feel welcomed, supported, and included from day one. The medium you choose creates different demands on the time of the receiver. No matter where your employees are, managers are tasked with helping them do their jobs successfully. Consider creating team acronyms for digital communications like Four Hour Response (4HR) and No Need to Respond (NNTR) that bring predictability and certainty to virtual conversations. For example, some individuals prefer short and quick messages, while others favor lengthy and detailed responses; people also differ in their preference and tolerance for humor and informality. My mission in life is to help people become happier at work. Break the ice and help your employees build stronger relationships with easy but fun get-to-know-you games that spark conversation like: Collect facts and trivia about people on your team (and even the company in general) and see how well you each know your coworkers. Of course, the dynamics of a remote team are different from an in-house team. And the absence of body language doesnt necessarily mean that were not giving away more than we intend to when we communicate remotely. Foster trust and connection through honest communication, feedback, and team-building exercises. We need a little more information to find your subscription. Naturally, you have things you also want to communicate remotely via email, chat, video call, phone call. Here are just a few remote work statistics illustrating what the present and future of remote work might look like. They are also starting to reap the added benefits and improved productivity that remote work can bring. According to SHRM, employee turnover can be as high as 50% in the first 18 months of employment. But other tools remote managers use for asynchronous writing include Asana, Confluence, email (of course! Looking to further support your remote team? As more and more of our interactions happen digitally, we will continue to experience new forms of miscommunication and misunderstanding. The rise of cloud technology and improved communication and collaboration tools have allowed more and more teams to join the remote work movement. Additionally, remote work also makes it easier for people with disabilities or workers who need more flexible schedules (like caregivers), to pursue and succeed in full-time employment. As more and more companies and employees embrace remote work, leaders and managers will need to re-learn and re-think some of the old ways of doing things. Engaging remote employees will require strategic efforts and ongoing evaluation. This can create an unhealthy burnout culture that stretches your team thin and makes employees feel like they have to be available to each other at all times of day or night. Despite initial hesitation from more traditionally-minded leaders to invest in remote work as a viable option for the workforce, most people now agree that remote work has compelling advantages. Effective remote leaders recognize this, respect this, and encourage this. However, you need to watch out for virtual unconscious bias, where punctuation, grammar and word choice might reveal prejudiced attitudes towards certain groups. Text-based communication places less importance on interpersonal skills and physical appearance, offering an effective way to share power and decision-making. Focus on these five communication best practices for remote teams: Enact even one of these practices, and youll find a meaningful shift that occurs in your own remote team. You can host them on Zoom and invite the team to make their own drinks at homebonus if they share their favorite recipes! Whats missing from our texts, emails, conference calls, and other digital communications? Instead, what Wade tries to account for this by rigorously clarifying his intentions. Take time to intentionally build connections among your employees and cultivate a cohesive, remote team. For example, for us here at Know Your Team, we have a company-wide doc called How We Work which outlines what to do if something is urgent, how quickly to expect that someone will get back to you, how to share what youre working on etc. People work better together when they know and trust one another. Indeed, you can never be too clear, but it is too easy to be less clear than you should. Plus, when workers have fewer organic opportunities to connect with their team members in person, they may be more engaged with team-building activities that foster connection. According to a Gallup poll. Dont bombard your team with messages: Do you follow up on a task by email, text and phone? However, when working remotely, things are different. Lacking an immediate response, we can become distracted, second-guess ourselves, or even grow frustrated with our teams. 
You're a subscriber! Since you arent all working together in an office setting, you dont have the opportunity to collaborate in person, check in at each others desks, or chat in the break room to stay up to date. We are all unique, but our consistent behaviors help others predict what we do, and in turn help them to understand us and we all benefit from being understood. Learn how to manage your remote teams and lead the way (remotely). Keeping track of performance and building a strong team culture can feel daunting when youre not all in an office together. Begin with a single moment of real-time communication and see if you can convert it into asynchronous writing. Give them the tools they need to succeed and regularly check-in and check up on them to see how they are adjusting, identify any challenges they may be facing, answer questions, and create opportunities for coaching and long-term development. From team collaboration and meetings to performance management and schedules, remote work is transforming how, when, and where we work. A message that is a longer description or project outline might be posted in a certain section in Notion and is only expected to be read within 24 hours. Silence is golden in a remote team. Make employee recognition an integral part of your remote work culture and engagement strategy. And they want to see a future at the company that allows them to grow and develop. Confirm your subscriber information and create a password. However, not all things you want to communicate can be relegated only to writing. People who work on remote teams face these challenges consistently.
Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor. This is your new normal, and it feels bleak. Individual teams can also establish their own norms e.g., to use or not use Slack, Google Docs, or Whatsapp groups. Dont assume that others understand your cues and shorthand. Just like your in-house employees, remote workers want to feel part of the company culture and team. Here are some other examples of other companies How We Communicate documents: Or, for something less intensive, you can create a little Communication Cheat Sheet for folks to reference. When employees are remote, it can be easy to feel disconnected or even invisible to the rest of the team or organizationespecially if your workforce has a hybrid mix of in-office and at-home employees. And design virtual team-building rituals that give people the opportunity to interact regularly and experience their collaboration skills in action. Weve said it before, but its worth saying again. Remote team building doesnt have to be complicated either. Stay connected and involved with regularly scheduled one-on-one meetingswe recommend at least once a month, but for remote teams, more frequent check-ins can be especially beneficial. When your teams are distributed, its easy for the right hand to be ignorant of what the left hand is doing. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. In their remote manifesto, GitLab shares this gentle reminder: Can it wait a few minutes, a few hours, even a few days? According to recent estimates from Gallup and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 22% of Americans work from home, while nearly 50% are involved with remote or virtual team work. How many times have you written an email and, immediately after hitting send, felt concerned about how it would land?
Luckily, remote work expands an organizations opportunities to embrace diversity and inclusion because the talent pool is no longer limited to a specific location. Remote managers all over the world use Know Your Team to hold effective one-on-one meetings, gather status updates, and build social connection in a remote team.. Seeall the features in Know Your Team here, and sign-up for a free trial today to see for yourself. When you do need to use real-time communication, youll want to have a method to your madness. The number one way to effectively manage remote teams is to prioritize effective communication. Contact Customer Service: Hulton Archive/Hayon Thapaliya/Getty Images. Upworks Future of Workforce Pulse Reportestimates that by 2025, 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely, an 87% increase from pre-pandemic levels. As more and more of our interactions happen digitally, we will continue to experience new forms of miscommunication and misunderstanding. Its changing how we speak often in bullet points. Show appreciation for achievements big and small, both publicly and privately, so your employees know their work is valued. Juggling communication and schedules across a remote team can be trickyespecially if people are working in different time zones. If someones message comes across as brusque to you, assume positive intent behind it. Thats why its important to focus on building a healthy and productive culture from the start. Here are some best practices to master: Dont conflate brief communications and clear communications: In our efforts to be efficient, we sometimes use fewer words to communicate. When people arent sharing an office space, they dont have the same opportunities for connection, communication, or collaboration. Keep these tips in mind when crafting your strategy for engaging remote employees. One of the biggest fears and challenges for remote managers is how to lead their teams from afar. 
The easiest way to do this is to ask! However, there are overlapping strategies and many shared principles. Based on our survey with 297 remote managers and employees, insights from working with 15,000+ people in over 25 countries with Know Your Team, and the research weve done across dozens of remote companies, I share the most essential communication best practices for remote teams below. One-on-ones are a crucial tool in the remote managers toolbox. The digital era has ushered in a revolution in communication thats equivalent to the one surrounding the invention of the printing press. Technology is your friend when it comes to remote work. If your Slack app looks something like this, Or if your calendar looks something like this with Zoom meetings. Building a strong remote work culture from the start can help you capitalize on the benefits of remote work while mitigating some of the risks and challenges that are unique to distributed teams. Youll need a multi-pronged strategy to meet your employees where they are and ensure they have the tools and support they need to stay engaged long-term. With remote teams, collaborating must happen virtually. In fact, in a 2019 survey we conducted with 297 remote managers and employees, remote managers said that the second hardest thing for them was communicating without in-person cues (15% of remote managers said this). Working in a different location than your colleagues can make you more productiveand sometimes its just a logistical necessity.
Give asynchronous writing a shot. Working from home can blur the lines between personal life and work life. And as employees increasingly expect and demand flexibility and remote options, leaders will need to adapt to a new normal for managing remote teams. How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Work from Home, How to Stay Focused When Youre Working from Home, How to Work Remotely Without Losing Motivation, I'm a subscriber, but I don't have an HBR.org account. Before they even start work, make sure they have what they need to get started, such as Wi-Fi capacity, user logins, and access, conferencing tools. This means dedicated check-ins are even more critical to building trusted relationships with your remote employees and taking the pulse on their work performance. People who work on remote teams face communications challenges consistently. Incorporating all of them into your recognition strategy based on employee preferences will ensure you meet the needs of your team and recognize employees in the ways that are most meaningful to them. Maybe theyve got a kid at home whos sick and its been weighing on their mind. When I interviewed Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, on our podcast, The Heartbeat, he echoed this, describing how hard it is to read people in a remote work environment and how facile it is to assume how someone is feeling. You might even include a stipend for workers to use to set up their own work-from-home office and desk station. The advantages of writing asynchronously are copious: Making the switch to writing asynchronously can feel daunting. By prioritizing culture and approaching engagement, you can better address barriers to remote work and ensure your talent initiatives align with the culture youre trying to create. In our survey, remote managers and employees said that they used video to hold meetings and conversations either several times a week (32%) or every single day (22%). Show appreciation and recognition for their contributions, Give employees the right tools and resources, Keep workers in the loop on company news and changes. Another makes a critique that comes across as insensitive. To get a better understanding of how to best approach remote work in your business, its helpful to have a clear definition: Remote work is essentially any work done away from a physical office location. After a long and liquid client dinner, an advertising executive opens an email from his boss reminding him to submit his expenses on time. Regular, constructive feedback from managers, coaches, and peers can help remote employees understand what is expected, identify areas for improvement, and better align their efforts with the overall goals of the team and organization. Find out what your remote employees want and expect for their future and have honest conversations about how to help them achieve their goals. On the weekly team conference call, a remote team member is confused about whether her colleague is really on mute when she delays a response to a question or if shes just not paying attention and is using this as an excuse.
Quiet time, as a result, is indeed a communication best practice. Would your boss see your late night email and consider it to be an intrusion on her private time? Create intentional space for celebration: Old school birthday cakes are still important for remote teams. Research proves time and time again the positive impact remote work can have on both employees and businesses. To perform at the highest levels, remote teams have to find new and better ways to operate. Despite the many advantages and benefits of remote work, employee engagement isnt a given. Your transition to asynchronous writing does not have to be a waterfall but a slow drip. And choose and use your communication tools wiselyremember that sometimes simple is better, and not all shiny features are necessary for leading a productive, focused meeting. How you do it is less important than whether you do. In other words, its not enough to throw in virtual happy hours or remote perks. Thats why remote managers need to pay special attention to managing and promoting positive remote team dynamics. Dont take someone from their work if you dont have to. They know how precious their teams time and attention is and that communicating 24/7 is not conducive to productivity. Spend the time to communicate with the intention of being ultra clear, no matter the medium. The solution lies in building a skill set that reflects the demands of our digitally-driven age. Enter your email address and we'll send you a link to reset your password. So rather than writing an email or phoning a colleague, ask if they can hop on a quick video chat. A strategic planning conversation or a time-sensitive question requires real-time communication. Professional development helps employees feel a greater sense of purpose and direction, increased motivation and sets employees up for successful long-term careers with your company.
Small steps like these go a long way towards creating a welcoming, inclusive, and positive hybrid team. Thats how people get into a state of flow, which is critical to thinking creatively or generating something from scratch. Find ways to shorten the affinity distance. In the office or at home, employee recognition remains a key driver of employee engagement and performance. Confirm your subscriber information and enter your password. Additionally, with the line between home and work blurred, workers may end up working long hours and have difficulty taking breaks and signing off at the end of the day or on weekends. Sometimes work breaks and meetings are too stuffy for people to open up and connect more genuinely. Processes and communication in remote teams can be sustainable and well-thought-out not merely hurried and duct-taped together. Surveys play a crucial role in understanding your remote employees needs, preferences, and unique challenges. Dont let that happen. Here are a few best practices to prioritize and optimize remote employee development: When employees arent sharing a workspace together, it takes extra effort to ensure teams feel connected and build a strong culture of trust. Someone makes a request that comes across as harsh. The most effective remote teams do so, utilizing asynchronous writing in particular as their primary mode of communication. This is a fun way to learn more about each other and build team spirit with some healthy, low-stakes competition. Published May 27, 2021 | Written By Jocelyn Stange, Uncover engagement obstacles and opportunities. Thats a huge cost for companies who have invested time and money to hire and train new recruits. But such brevity can mean that the rest of the team wastes time trying to interpret your messages. Whether full-time or hybrid, for many organizations remote work is here to stay. How do you know if youre under siege by real-time communication? Thats why its important to align teams on strategic goals. I feel informed about the organizations goals and priorities when working from home. They want to know their work is valued and that their contributions matter. Even when were co-located, the tone of a text or the formality of an email is left wide open to interpretation, to the point that even our closest friends get confused. If you dont have a plan, youre not going to achieve the results you hope for. Do you tend to ask people if they got your previous message? Thats why its crucial to build employee recognition into your team culture.
Throughout the workday, be it using video more often or assuming greater positive intent in communications, looking to establish more empathy is a key best practice of remote communication. I understand and support our organizations mission and vision. Theres still a great deal of meta-communication and virtual leakage that happens in digital environments, and it only takes paying attention to read between the lines. A remote work survey could focus on: Pick a focus for your survey and craft questions around that theme. Use the following guide as a crash course for remote work best practices, strategies, and tips so you can better lead, manage, and perform on your remote teams. Perhaps they were writing their note to you after a stressful call with a customer. During the first week, set up virtual introductory calls with team members and other leaders to help them get to know who they will be working with and start building those relationships from the beginning. Here are a few ways to keep performance on track. Make time for activities other than work communication to foster team connection remotely. Its about knowing what your employees need and want and making sure your culture, processes, and policies support them.
For example, we know remote work can improve productivity and performancebut it doesnt always translate to higher employee retention. If a remote work cardinal sin exists, its relying on real-time communication.
If youre new to remote work, it can be a big shift from working in an office. Below are a few ideas for keeping your remote employees engaged from day one.
Annual team or company retreats are a great way to bring people together in person for some deeper team bonding. Bottom line: Remote work is good for your bottom lineand your people.
Working remotely doesnt mean you cant feel close to your team. As you recognize your remote workers, you will build their confidence, motivation, and sense of purpose and direction resulting in better performance and stronger engagement. Dont drop them in and let them sink or swim. Please explain your ideal work environment (hybrid, remote, at the office) and why. Plan out regular meetings ahead of time on the calendar so everyone knows when they need to be available. The solution will not come from new technologies (although, no doubt, developers will keep trying to bridge that gap). There are also challenges to remote work that can impact culture. by 2025, 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely, 61% of employees prefer being fully remote, remote work expands an organizations opportunities, remote workers also tend to work more hours, recognition strategy based on employee preferences, Build wellness into your team activities (e.g., host regular mindfulness breaks), Share about family life or personal interests outside work. Choose your digital volume wisely. Pulse surveys are short, focused questionnaires, typically just 5-15 questions on a given topic. Youll move toward cultivating a less reactive culture where your team can make more thoughtful decisions. Real, lasting engagement goes deeper than that. Unfortunately, that means we have to temporarily suspend subscriber syncing. Employees want and value the flexibility and autonomy that remote work affords them. Culture is built with intention, so include remote work as part of your overall organizational and engagement strategy. Experiment with different tools and strategies for collaboration. Burnout is a real risk for both in-house and remote workers. My team has the tools and resources needed to support remote work. Make sure you have clear processes in place for how and when your team will communicate with each other. To free you and your team from the oppression of real-time communication, default to asynchronous communication. When leaders understand these core values and needs, they can better manage their teams no matter where theyre located. Here are a few remote working tips to make the transition successful for you and your team. When your team is remote, you dont have the same opportunities to connect with your team organicallyfrom popping over to their desk for a quick chat to catching up in the break room. The delay between our messages can often postpone or hide emotional reactions to our comments.
People need to trust each other in order to do good work. When teams work remotely, culture can be harder to define and implement. These misinterpretations create an anxiety that can become costly, affecting morale, engagement, productivity, and innovation. Try switching most remote communication to regular video calls, which are a much better vehicle for establishing rapport and creating empathy than either e-mails or voice calls. Instead, hiring managers can look outside the immediate area surrounding the office to recruit workers from a diverse range of locations, backgrounds, experiences, and identitiesall of which can bring new perspectives, improve the culture of your organization, and create an inclusive environment for people to do their best work. Professional development is a key driver of employee engagementwhether theyre in the office or remote. And fortunately, there are tons of options and solutions to help remote teams stay connected and productive from anywhere. To manage a remote team, what tools, resources, or training do you need to be effective? In fact, 54% of employees say they would change jobs for one that offered them more flexibility, which results in an average of 12% turnover reduction after a remote work agreement is offered. In a remote team, if we want to communicate well, we should be conscious of how our communication pulls peoples attention in too many disparate directions.
Becoming a better managerstarts here with, survey with 297 remote managers and employees, watch our 60-minute free Workshop Live! 4 ways to boost employee performance while remote, Professional development for remote workers. Create a plan and work on cultivating a strong culture for the long run. Meetings are your most expensive management tool. Whats helpful about this remote communication best practice is that it means that your team will now know that they should check their Slack DMs likely once an hour, and check Notion once a day rather than hovering over 10 Slack channels and checking each one every 15 minutes.
They give people leaders valuable insight into whats working and whats not, and help identify gaps or opportunities in performance and engagement initiatives. Need help getting access? Help keep your remote employees happy and well by setting healthy boundaries around work: Just because you arent all gathered in an office doesnt mean you dont have a team or company culture. See the hidden opportunities in written communications: Being behind a screen can create new opportunities for certain team members, making space for those who might be less inclined to speak out in groups. Abusing those access points can be a form of digital dominance, a relentless and uncomfortable form of harassment. The next logical question, of course, is how do you onboard new employees when youre remote? Youre drained working remotely, more than you were when you were working in-person and your team is too. Video calls and meetings are ideal for this, as they give you the closest fidelity to being co-located. If there is one practice out of all the communication best practices for remote teams to try, it is this one. This continuing shift calls for a new range of behaviors and skills. While we often tend to regard human predictability as a defect, few qualities are more sought-after at work, especially in virtual collaborations.
Quick tip: Many remote managers use Know Your Teams Icebreakers and Social Questions to help build this empathy and social connection in a remote team, so communicating in absence of in-person cues can feel more fluid. For most, this means working from home or a favorite coffee shop. In The Watercooler, our online community of leaders in Know Your Team, one manager mentioned how his team always turns their cameras on for video calls be it one-on-one meetings, team meetings, discussions, or brainstorm sessions. (And then misinterprets them anyway.) Virtual happy hours are a fun way to wind down at the end of the day and enjoy more casual conversation and company. Thats an excellent first step. This will not only help employees progress in their careers but also build a strong connected culture among your teams and organization. For example, the use of exclamation marks or a negative emoji after referring to someones gender, nationality, or religion is as powerful a marker of disapproval as a disgusted face. For some organizations, this comes in the form of a How We Communicate document, which outlines all communication best practices.