How to communicate and collaborate better with your team remotely

By Zoe Schulz and Adrien Gaubert, myGwork

We are told too often that effective communication is key, key to healthy relationships, key to thriving teams and the difference between mediocracy and brilliance. However, how we communicate is rapidly changing. With COVID-19 putting us all on house arrest, our way of working has been drastically changed, leaving many scrambling to adapt. As 2020 has unfolded, we have all witnessed the world as we know it almost capsize and we are now somehow left to find normalcy and keep powering through. Yet, with our teams stuck in confinement, how do we ensure that creative collaboration and communication still thrives?

Mention of effective communication and team leadership can be found as far as 2,500 years ago, with Sun Tsu ‘The Art of War’. Sun Tsu says “If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame”, he continues, “but if his orders are clear and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers.” It is crucial team leaders set clear goals for their team and put in place a review system that will allow managers to monitor the work that has been done, reward productive people, help colleagues that are stuck with their task and ultimately be able to track who has not been performing well for a long time and needs to leave the organisation. Working remotely offers a great opportunity to use technology to better improve collaboration and communication practices as well as management systems.

What does the science say?

The origins of theories of communication date back to the 1920s and as it evolved it was thought to be influenced by statistical theories from Alan Turing, a gay scientist and hero. This then grew with the development of Psychology and Sociology in the late 90’s, where scientist Robert Craig described communication as “a process of expression, interaction, and influence.” Theories then became more specific and niche as occupational psychology emerged to explore the science of behaviour in the workplace and this has been a field that has fascinated scientists and business leaders alike, ever-since. This is an area that has used concrete scientific methods and measures to analyse business performance, motivation, job satisfaction, health and safety and overall employee wellbeing – factors that any successful professional knows can make or break a business. As the way we do business has evolved and rapidly changed, so has the field of research. So, when it comes to effective communication and collaboration, what do the scientists say?

Motivation-opportunity-ability model

Like any scientific topic, there are many differing theories and opinions, however there are major common themes that emerge among the top of these theories. Our actions within the workplace are almost always thought to be a combination of ability, motivation and situational opportunities. There is also a fundamental assumption that the goals of a business are most likely to prevail when they are closely linked to the individual; each person needs be committed to these goals. This can be improved in many ways, including matching individuals to their roles and tasks, changing the culture and offering training and upskilling. When it comes to remote working, studies from as early as 2009, have shown that adopting flexible practices can result in high job satisfaction and organisational commitment. This sentiment has since been confirmed by many scientists, including a recent 2-year research project by Stanford University, which involved 500 employees being divided into two groups for analysis. The researchers had hypothesised that both positives and negatives would emerge in the results, yet were shocked to see that productivity overwhelmingly increased, adding up to a full extra day work per employee. They also found an increase in employee retention and that the company saved $(US) 2,000 per employee, the results were so revolutionary that the lead scientist, Bloom, has even given a TEDx Talk on the study. A survey by CAPITA showed that there is also a hunger for a flexible work lifestyle from employees, with 71% of people who can do their jobs from a computer saying they would prefer to do so remotely, with benefits of work-life balance (60%), reduced transport cost (47%) and lower carbon footprint (35%) as the biggest deciding factors. With major benefits to both the organisation and employee, what’s not to like?

However, it is not as simple as offering remote working and enjoying a happily-ever-after digital-nomadic business. A recent study brought attention to the paradox of remote working, where high job satisfaction and commitment to an organisation came at the price of being unable to switch-off and set boundaries between your personal life and work – which any smart professional can agree is a recipe for disaster. This theory suggests that it can cause your work role to become embedded with your personal life, both physically and psychologically. It also suggested that working solely from home can encourage workers to overwork and allow boundaries to cross over into their family life in a sense that is unique from traditional office environments. Nigel Davies, digital workplace entrepreneur and journalist for Forbes argues that “remote working fails everyone when communication isn’t cultural.” This is partially because in a remote team you miss the context and situational circumstances of conversations. For example, in an office it is easy to pick up on a teammate that is especially quiet or withdrawn and then take into account that they may need a bit of space or may be under too much stress, allowing you to change your behaviour with them accordingly. As explained by journalist Belle Cooper “As humans, we're great at picking up on signals. We practice this every day in our interactions and use people's body language and tone of voice to inform the way we communicate with them.” Yet, in a remote office you lose majority of the non-verbal communication, so more effort needs to go into building strong communication channels. Robin Dreeke, an expert behaviour analysist has studied interpersonal relationships in the workplace for 30 years and advises that the basic necessities of building rapport include smiling, tilting your chin lower so you're not looking down on them, matching their handshake strength, and slowing down your speech so you come across as being more credible, almost all of which is impossible or diluted via a zoom call or slack thread. On top of this, even in the aforementioned revolutionary Stanford study, when the participants were asked if they would choose to only work from home, over half said they would not want to, citing isolation and loneliness as the reason. It doesn’t take an expert to conclude that feeling of isolation and a lack of balance or boundaries to your personal life does not sound like a formula for creativity and inspiring collaboration.

These two sides of the research may seem to directly contradict one another, yet we know the real world is more complicated than a research experiment and therefore the truth is likely to be more complicated too. In reality, improved job satisfaction and employee commitment is likely to be the ideal outcome, whereas a lack of personal boundaries and increased loneliness is the other extreme. The difference in outcome depends widely on how you communicate and collaborate as a team. Davies suggests that there are two key points in successful remote working, both of which revolve around communication. The first of which is efficient technology, without this you are set to fail. The second is the strong organisational-wide understanding that effective communication is critical, they explain this involves “being explicit about it, teaching how it's done, and making sure that talking–between teams, departments, branches and offices–is part of the culture.” This means that a proactive approach to continuously improving and evaluating communication could be key to keeping your teams afloat through the current pandemic.

Best practices applied to remote working

Research show that virtual teams have an increased risk of miscommunication and breakdown, “Further, geographic and mental distance amongst participants often lead to simplified views of the work situation” say Pernille Bjørn and Ojelanki Ngwenyama, they add “Important aspects of collaborative practice become invisible at a distance and the boundaries shadowing the work increases. Hence, achieving and maintaining visibility is essential to collaborative practices within virtual teams”.

It is vital for successful team leaders to spend time perfecting effective communication. The intention of coming across ultra-clear is vital, no matter the medium. “Indeed, you can never be too clear, but it is too easy to be less clear than you should” says Erica Dhawan. Tametoday shared 11 ways to Improve Communication & Collaboration, some of which can be applied successfully on remote working teams, such as setting clear goals and giving regular individual feedback using video conference and sharing files with your team. According to Tame Today It is also important you do not settle for one software and try several until you find the best way to collaborate with your team. Certain software, such as Salesforce will be better adapted for managing a sales team, while other will be better for creative groups. You can find a list here of software myGwork has find useful.

Although Whatsapp groups and other chat apps can feel a bit too personal for some people, it is nevertheless a great way to communicate with your team, encourage them and make everyone aware of what others are working on. Plus, they can aid managers in communicating more efficiently, as they won’t have to repeat common goals to individuals. However, one has to be careful while communicate via electronic media as “conflict may escalate and people be less critical in message framing and focus less on social norms for behaviour and social interaction”, as suggested by Leif Jarle Gressgård in his paper on virtual team communication and innovation.

Many team members are under large amounts of pressure at the moment, this can be even more so for those that are parents. Listening is one of the most important elements of communication and needs special attention. Managers should to be flexible on their teams working hours and discuss with their colleagues how they feel, remembering to ask if they need extra support. Isolation can also cause a lot of distress and increase mental health issues for the most vulnerable members of our community. A report this week shows LGBT+ helpline calls double as people are trapped with abusive families. “Teams do well when executives invest in supporting social relationship” says Linda Gratton for Lynda Gratton in the Harvard Business Review. Michael Jones from the SR Group advises “Working from home can be lonely and feel isolating (unless, like me, you have a furry friend to keep you company), and it's easy for out of sight to feel like out of mind. During this time, it's really important that, as a manager, you keep in touch with all of your team members and communicate more often than you might usually

Leif Jarle explains that the creation of a common social platform to interact with your team for the construction of a shared understanding among team members. Through open communication team members will be able to identify and praise people for certain skills. Make them inspire others! Collaborative team management softwares, such as Monday, are fantastic tools to achieve this. Instead of giving them more work and relying only on them, it is preferable you set their work as standard for theorganisation and enhance their managerial skills. They need to use their knowledge to help their colleagues reach their goals, but not do their job.

If COVID-19 teaches us anything positive, it is that teams can work remotely, and people can be more flexible with their daily schedules. Many of myGwork’s partners, such as Willis Towers Watson and PPDI already had a large number of home-based roles. Organisations are starting to understand they can dive into a pool that is bigger and of higher quality, if they are open to more virtual collaborations. Sending people every week to the other side of the planet for meetings, is not sustainable in terms of pressure, stress and fatigue imposed to workers, but also in terms of ecology. The Nordics are often pioneering social and environmental rights and have popularised home based and flexible work, now they’re taking this even further and pushing for ‘Flygskam’ or flight shaming. It may be a time for us to all reflect and look at our way of living through a new prism, one that is perhaps more respectful than traditional ones.