Are you struggling with communication among your team members, when things went remote? Here is a guide to get things right with a perfect communication tool for remote teams. Read on!<\/p>\n\n
No matter what business you operate in, teamwork is dream work. <\/span>Naturally, if your team members fail to communicate and collaborate efficiently, your entire business falls flat on its outcomes and goals. This challenge aggravates even more when your team operates on a remote work scape. <\/span><\/p>\n But all hope is not lost. <\/span>Today’s innovative communication tools ensure that remote working becomes the new normal.\u00a0 <\/span>The best part? Done right, it can even go on leveraging your overall team productivity and efficiency.\u00a0<\/span>So what are these game-changing communication strategies?<\/span><\/p>\n This post takes a deep dive into each performance-inducing communication module to create the smoothest workflow for your remote working team in 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n Also Read: Depth of knowledge | A priceless list of tips to succeed<\/a><\/p>\n The core success of your team’s communication toolkit is made of a single element: how well your software can fulfill your communication goals. This makes fleshing out your true partner in a sea of productivity tools relatively simple. All you have to do is look for tools to solve or simplify your core communication challenges and tasks.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Following the same core principle, we have hand-curated a list of top five tips and strategies to bring you closer to your ideal tools. As a bonus, we have shared our best market picks with you so that you can achieve this even faster. Let’s dive in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One of the key indicators of an agile, high-performance remote team is robust and neat communications. This makes documenting your communication style and processes indispensable for maximum productivity. More so, it declutters your workspace and reduces communication gaps and redundancy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A knowledge base software can do wonders here. But how do you ensure you are making the most of your knowledge base software?<\/span><\/p>\n The following two elements will set you up for your desired destination. However, if you want to dive deeper, here’s <\/span>Slite’s knowledge base software guide<\/span><\/a> at your assistance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Putting down your goals of communication on paper for all your team members, existing and new, creates a more cohesive and unified vision towards interactions in your remote workspace. It enables you to have a high-level expectation and lays out your complete communication navigation system for your team.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Having documented a writing style helps to navigate your whole team to adhere to your company communication style and choice of words. More so, your remote employees can feel more connected to your core brand values.<\/span><\/p>\n Also Read: Problem solving activities | Everything you must know<\/a><\/p>\n Having a core communication toolkit is essential for ensuring uninterrupted communications, whether real-time or scheduled. More so, adhering to a single communication system ensures your whole team is aware of the communication drill of your organization. Explaining and categorizing messages and communications based on priority and communication channels will ensure there is no delay or redundancy in your message flow.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For instance, a Whatsapp group might look like a great way to do a quick group chat between team members, but if you are trying to collaborate over a common file that you would like to revisit at a later stage, Slack is a way better option.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Selecting your core communication channel is key to consistent, redundancy-free information transfer within your team members. Deciding a primary communication channel ensures your daily communication needs are fulfilled from a centralized system. This creates a clutter-free workspace where your productivity can thrive. This means whatever tool you settle for needs to be feature-heavy to qualify as your communication channel. <\/span>Basecamp<\/span> is a powerful tool to consider in this regard.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n With a core communication tool, creating a list of your go-to collaboration tool is immensely critical. No matter if your operations just involve your in-house remote team members or external partners, real-time collaboration applications ensure you can get your work done at the fastest possible speed. <\/span>Google Workspace<\/span><\/a> is unbeatable in this regard.<\/span><\/p>\n Also Read: How to fix voice echoing?| A complete guide<\/a><\/p>\n Only creating core communication tools is not enough for reaching maximum productivity. You need to ensure that you plan your communications regularly. This can be achieved by understanding the core goal behind your meetings and conversations and allot a dedicated time slot monthly or weekly basis. <\/span><\/p>\n This will create simplified, clean, and efficient communications between your team members. The best part? <\/span>It will successfully take out the unimportant chats that your teams have in an entire month. There is no point in having endless discussions over a topic that you might not even deploy in your organization. <\/span><\/p>\n This means whatever chats you have must be prioritized to take them to a discussion level at first. <\/span>Following are a few ways you can navigate this to the right destination.<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n There is no use of a live discussion when most of your team members are not active or the least focused during the day. This makes early planning of your discussion hours a key ingredient to have a successful discussion. Planning your team discussions needs to have two key considerations. All your team members are available and at their peak performance for the day.<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n Create a culture of pre-planning and prioritizing discussion calls and avoiding meetings whenever you can. This will create so much room for productivity and automate your team management. <\/span>The best part? You can get rid of micro-management and let your team fly solo yet tied together. You can use a free Google calendar to do this easily.<\/span><\/p>\n Also Read: Synchronus & asynchronus communication | A complete guide<\/a><\/p>\n If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. This makes regular audits of your communication activities, both scheduled and impromptu critical for optimizing productive work. <\/span>A typical communication audit does not only help you find faults and gaps in your communication styles and spans but also reveals vulnerabilities of your choice of tools. <\/span><\/p>\n This means no matter where the fault is, be it in your operation process or the tools supporting it, you can always get your way around it. <\/span>More than often, a productive auditing task starts with finding patterns in the past communications that boosted and dampened productivity and efficiency, respectively. <\/span><\/p>\n This can then be categorically divided into subtasks performed in different channels to develop creative ideas to improve the current situation. <\/span>The following methods are a few ideas that you can readily implement to achieve your desired productivity goals.<\/span><\/p>\n A recent survey revealed that meeting hours alone in the US cost a whopping <\/span>$399 billion in 2019<\/span>. This makes optimizing meetings and communications between team members crucial for maximum ROI (return on investment) and productivity.<\/span><\/p>\n Setting meeting goals and pre-planning your meeting durations can lay out a great start to optimize your current situation. But, a word of caution. You need to create the design as per your business’s unique needs. There is a \u2018no size that fits all\u2019 rule. Your business might work the best with long but low-frequency discussions. Or you might end up finding that short, high-frequency discussion sprints are the best way to scale.<\/span><\/p>\n If there is one communication category that consumes valuable time after meetings, it is real-time team collaborations. This means tracking the daily activity of your team members for consecutive months can give you rich insights into the kind of conversations they are spending their time on.<\/span><\/p>\n Are the conversations concise and to the point, or are they deviating from the core message frequently? Answering these vital questions can give you room to improve with time. <\/span>Toggl<\/span> is a great tool to analyze your team’s interaction with different communication channels.<\/span><\/p>\nRight communication tool<\/strong><\/h2>\n
1. Document your communication methodology<\/strong><\/h2>\n
a. Set your communication goals<\/strong><\/h3>\n
b. Document writing style\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n
2. Create a core communication toolkit<\/strong><\/h2>\n
a. Decide core communication channel<\/strong><\/h3>\n
b. Decide on the collaboration tools<\/strong><\/h3>\n
3. Adhere to guidelines<\/strong><\/h2>\n
a. Create official communication hours<\/strong><\/h3>\n
b. Schedule meetings and calls<\/strong><\/h3>\n
4. Audit your past communications<\/strong><\/h2>\n
a. Mention meeting goals<\/strong><\/h3>\n
b. Track inter-team communication hours<\/strong><\/h3>\n