Council Post: Building Effective Remote Teams In The New Normal

By Salvador Ordorica, CEO of The Spanish Group LLC, a first-class international translation service that translates over 90 languages.

While we debate new workplace rules regarding masks and vaccines and new pandemic variants appear, something that is becoming increasingly clear is that building a resilient company structure for the years to come should include some form of remote work options. Remote work options will allow businesses to stay productive as shutdowns and lockdowns occur, minimize the impact of various mandates on your operations and help you better retain workers in this chaotic economy.

However, many businesses have learned in recent months that building an effective remote workplace is not as easy as it may initially seem. Keeping employees productive, motivated and accountable when working from home can become impossible if not managed correctly.

I want to share some of the top tips I have learned while running my business for setting up and running remote teams. When done correctly, you will gain several benefits and will be able to stay operating at some level no matter what happens in the coming months.

The Challenge Of Creating An Effective Remote Team

The biggest challenge, and the one that lies at the root of nearly all other issues when it comes to digital collaboration, is communication. Effective communication is incredibly hard with remote work, and the breakdown of communication inevitably leads to the plethora of other issues common to remote teams.

No matter how many texts or emails you send, you can never truly replace the ease and clarity that comes from a face-to-face conversation and all the body language that entails. Digital communications are often more open to interpretation and more likely to cause confusion, which is more likely to negatively affect everything from productivity to morale. The delay between digital communications can also lead to issues of frustration and miscommunications.

So it stands to reason that the first steps toward establishing an effective team center around creating an effective communication apparatus that all members can intuitively participate in.

Once you can create a single effective remote team, you can begin to scale the concept up to a broader percentage of your business or create company-wide remote options for workers who are unable to come into the office.

More Talent From More Places

Another benefit of including remote team members is that you can draw in talent from a much more comprehensive geographical range. However, doing so also comes with a series of challenges all its own. For companies with multilingual capabilities, remote work allows you to seek out the best talent across the globe and seamlessly integrate them into your workflow. Running a translation company, I have firsthand seen the massive uptick in job requests related to intra-company communications as more businesses transition to borderless remote workplaces and integrate employees from various backgrounds.

How To Build Effect Remote Teams

Here are my suggestions for building effective remote teams in the new normal:

1. Establish communication standards. The first step in creating the foundation of any remote team is establishing a firm set of standards and expectations regarding communication regularity, clarity and timeliness. Letting employees know when and how they are supposed to be in touch with the broader team will reduce confusion and frustration and help create an atmosphere of accountability.

Keep in mind that although you should expect employees to do their best to meet your initial standards, you will likely need to adjust these expectations to meet the reality of your workplace and workforce. Each team will probably adapt its own quirks and standard operating procedures over time. This does not necessarily need to be discouraged, as long as it does not interfere with various teams communicating among one another and the broader company.

Many businesses create a company dictionary or “common language sheet” that easily keeps the teams up to date with standards and procedures for saving, naming and sharing files within the company.

2. Give your teams the right collaborative tools. Along with establishing standards for communication, you want to establish a set of standard apps, tools, file-sharing cloud services and file-naming conventions for your teams. This way, your teams can effectively communicate within themselves and among each other.

You want to select effective, intuitive tools that fit your goals and workflow. Experiment a bit with various communication and collaboration tools before deciding on a one-size-fits-all solution.

3. Promote efficient communication and accountability. This concept is another aspect of the previous two steps but is worth intellectualizing slightly separately. While you should have already established general standards around team roles, timelines and deliverables, it is the overall quality of the day-to-day communications within the teams that will dictate their eventual success.

Promote a more effective use of language. Clarity and mindfulness are essential. You want your teams articulating their thoughts in short, clear and concise messages between one another. You don’t want to bombard remote workers with tons of useless information as this will add to possible confusion and waste the readers’ and the writers’ time. You don’t benefit from body language, so clarity should be emphasized above all — and clarity is not the same as over-describing.

Many companies have replaced the typical status emails with short daily meetings that help them have a little “face-to-face” or voice-to-voice time each day.

Make sure you create adaptable schedules that work with the time zones of your team members. What point do all the time zones for the members of a team overlap at? What should the standard reply-by time be for a particular time zone? These are questions you should begin to figure out.

Remote Work Offers New Opportunities

While remote work presents several challenges, it provides enough advantages (especially given the current climate for the foreseeable future) that the challenges are well worth undertaking. There are also some hidden benefits that may not be readily apparent. Very often, some introverted employees will have increased confidence levels and will be less inhibited to contribute without the need for face-to-face interactions.

As you develop and create remote work options in your company, do your best to take advantage of the unique benefits they provide.