5 Tips To Establish Effective Communication with Remote Workers
5 Tips To Establish Effective Communication with Remote Workers
12 May 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions have forced nearly every business niche to adjust and move online in order to stay afloat. At the same moment, it managed to open up some new opportunities. For example, switching to working remotely allows business owners to hire talented employees regardless of their location.
However, to ensure that all work processes will continue to run smoothly, it is crucial to establish effective communication within remote teams. In this article, you will find 5 tips for communicating with your remote employees, ranging from investing in messaging tools and scheduling regular virtual meetings and team check-ins to setting clear expectations and deadlines and creating online company culture, among other things. Keep reading!
Keep the Lines of Communication Open
Effective communication is one of the most crucial factors when working with remote employees. If you want to be successful in managing a remote team, you should have the right tools to facilitate communication between all members of your team.
To make sure that your remote employees will continue to collaborate effectively and efficiently, you should invest in a great communication platform such as Slack or Skype. These platforms will allow your employees to stay in touch with each other, no matter where they are located.
Another useful tool is a softphone which is perfect for remote work environments. What is a softphone, you might ask? A softphone is an application that provides voice communications over a data network. It allows you to make and receive phone calls using your computer or mobile device without any additional hardware. The term “soft” refers to the fact that it’s not an actual physical phone but rather a digital representation of one.
Set Clear Expectations and Deadlines
One of the reasons why many employees don’t enjoy working remotely is because they feel disconnected from the rest of the team. To prevent this from happening, you should try to create an online work environment that mimics an office environment.
The first step towards building such an environment is setting clear expectations and deadlines for every task. It means that all employees should know exactly what’s expected from them and how much time they have to deliver results. In addition, you should also set up regular virtual meetings and team check-ins to review progress and set new goals for the upcoming period.
Create a Positive Online Company Culture
Since remote workers often live in different countries, cultural differences can sometimes lead to misunderstandings and conflicts among your team members. However, these conflicts can be avoided if you take into consideration local cultures when working with your remote employees.
For example, if you want to hire a remote sales representative from India, it’s crucial to understand that in that country, it’s not appropriate to ask employees why they haven’t completed any tasks yet. Instead, Indian employees prefer virtual meetings during which they discuss their tasks with the manager ahead of time. After discussing their tasks, employees have more motivation and are more likely to complete them on time.
Communicate in Real-Time
While working together on specific tasks, it’s important for remote team members to communicate in real-time so that they can easily reach a solution for any problem that might occur during the process of completing a specific task. For this reason, it’s important to schedule regular virtual meetings with your team members so they can update each other on the progress of their tasks. The same thing applies to individual project managers who need to make sure that their team members are always updated on what they are doing on a daily basis.
Let Go of Perfectionism and Embrace Flexibility
As soon as you realize that perfectionism is one of the main reasons why many people avoid working remotely, you will be able to adjust this behavior and embrace flexibility instead of chasing perfectionism each time your team completes a task or works on a project for your business. Since it’s impossible to perform perfect work on every occasion, you need to let go of this mindset and understand that there will always be room for improvement no matter how well they perform on every task. That’s why it’s crucial for you to accept imperfection as part of life and focus instead on results rather than on perfectionism.
In Conclusion
Hopefully, these tips will help you establish effective communication and motivate your remote workforce. The key is to be proactive and establish a set of guidelines for collaboration, communication, and feedback.
Be sure that your remote team members know what the expectations are so they can plan their day accordingly. You’ll want to make sure you have an open line of communications with each other and invest in tools that will help facilitate this process.