Something that many employees demand these days is the freedom and flexibility to work remotely. As beneficial as remote working is, it is critical to make your remote team feel like a team. What are the best ways to do this?
Focus on the Quality of Team Meetups
Lots of people schedule regular meetups in person, but the problem with this is that many employees may not feel like it is worth their while, especially if it is a casual meet-up. It’s important to get the balance right to ensure that people go away feeling reinvigorated, ready for collaboration, but also come away having learned something. There are so many team building activities for work environments out there, but it’s important to choose team building activities that go beyond surface-level exercises, but actually cement your team.
Have Longer Meetings
There’s a lot of information out there on how to make your meetings more efficient, but if you want to improve that team spirit, you need to recapture that downtime that used to occur before, in between, and after meetings. Remote working is fantastic for people because they can get a lot more done at home, but if you want to improve team spirit, you’ve got to build in some form of buffer into the meetings so you can instigate and support conversation without there being any sense of structure. That idea of enforced conversation may seem counterintuitive to building a team, but this is why you may benefit from starting the meeting a few minutes early and just letting people filter into the online conversations more gradually. And if you are running a meeting, think nothing of stepping away so others can either take the lead or instigate some more conversation. This feeling that people should be able to express themselves is important, which is why we should, on occasion, stray from that tightly wound structure.
Encourage More Collaboration
You may have a very small team where everybody has a specific duty and “ne’er the twain shall meet,” but if there’s one way to improve that feeling of togetherness in your remote teams, it’s encouraging more collaboration. There’s an abundance of amazing collaboration tools you can use like Evernote, and of course, platforms like Slack, and it’s important that we don’t neglect these. They can make our working lives easier, but they can also be the perfect place to start brainstorming. Lots of people feel that when it comes to creative work, they can easily exhaust their ideas within a matter of months, which is why encouraging collaboration will pay for itself many times over.
An Open-Door Policy
Ensuring your business can work more effectively is a lot to do with how you lead. If you want to make your remote team feel more like a team you’ve got to meet them on their level. An open-door policy is a very simple thing, but if you are to make any team remote or otherwise feel like a connected unit, it’s important to remember that it always comes from you.
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