18 min 
Why is communication important in remote teams?
From a performance management standpoint, authentic communication between managers and their employees is imperative to enhance productivity, boost morale, and improve employee engagement. When members are not working in co-located spaces, communication is the only means to stay connected and keep the work culture alive. Besides, a manager would not know what the employees are up to there is no clear communication. At the same time, employees will suffer from a lack of clarity about their goals and targets if not conveyed with transparency. Communication, therefore, is the critical key to keep the team connected and make remote work seamless.
However, as we already know, remote communication is not always easy. One might face these potential communication challenges within remote team management:
Communication challenges: remote team management
- Misjudged availability
- Timezone meeting
- Technical glitches
- Communication redundancy
- Employee monitoring and surveillance
- Feelings of alienation
Misjudged availability
What is the challenge?
When you are working from home, one dons multiple hats at the same time. For one, you are an employee, and for two, you are a parent or a spouse trying to balance your family time and work time. So maybe when you think your teammate is available to brainstorm on a project’s task or to collaborate, it cannot be the case. It can be the other way round too, maybe you are stuck with a household chore when your manager or teammate wants to discuss a particular project with you. These misjudged availabilities create confusion and can restrict your work’s progress. The concern is, how to get this right?How to tackle the challenge?
To avoid ambiguity and chaos, the first thing team members can do is set their availability hours straight. Once your team members know your availability, they would only schedule a call around those hours given they have a bandwidth too. In short, everyone has to clarify their availability well in advance, so meeting hours can be juggled around and adjusted accordingly. Another way to combat this is by updating your status on your collaborative tools. Nowadays, collaborative tools like Fleep provide you with a feature to update your presence on your profile. When one knows you aren’t present to take a call, they won't waste time dialling up. Moreover, certain tools also update your ‘last seen’ which makes it easy for others to judge your availability.Timezone meetings
What is the challenge?
Now that remote work has given the liberty to employers to hire across borders, it brings its own set of remote work challenges. Even though it's great to foster a diverse work culture, build hybrid teams, and onboard the best talent from across the globe, it’s extremely difficult to manage meetings adjusting to every time zone. These decentralized organizational structures can create major communication gaps if not catered to. Talking from personal experience, half of my team was dispersed across borders. We didn’t know how to get everyone on call at the same time. Different time zones created silos in communication and we saw delays in deadlines, and ultimately a fall in team productivity. However, with time, we were able to fight this as well. What did we do to combat this?How to tackle the challenge?
The first thing you can do to get your team on the same page is to set some guidelines. Of course, I do not mean that you should infringe on the benefits of work flexibility. However, some discipline has to be harnessed to achieve productivity and long-term targets. Thus, even when your employees are in different time zones, you will know what their standard working hours are and you will meet that middle ground where you can collaborate without any hurdles. The second thing I did was set working hours in a way where we had enough overlapping periods to avoid collaboration delays and always feel like a team. This took some time, but we came around and it worked wonders for us.Technical glitches
What is the challenge?
Nothing is more frustrating than abrupt internet outages, especially during ongoing meetings. The problem can be a bad internet connection, lack of reliability of video conferencing tools or even issues of power outages. (this mostly happens in developing countries). These technical glitches cause annoyance and disturbances that are uncalled for. An employee can miss out on critical pieces of information or his/her productivity goes down due to a poor network. The solution is simple,How to tackle the challenge?
One simple solution is to make a wise decision with the bandwidth and network you select for your wi-fi connection. Of course, it does not mean that it completely eliminates the chances of network disruptions; but it definitely minimizes them. Second is to keep a back-up ready. If your connection goes out, you can have a mobile hot-spot or a network plan that allows tethering. This will save you from missing out on essential details and keep the communication seamless. In addition, before you decide on a collaborating software or video conferencing software, you should take a free trial to see if it has some bugs that can cause technical hiccups and slow down the collaboration. It will keep you from selecting the wrong tool for the team and smoothen the collaboration or communication.Communication redundancy
What is the challenge?
How often does it happen that our words are misinterpreted by our colleagues due to lack of communication, cultural barriers or technological hurdles? I think most of us have faced it after we started working remotely. Learning English and mastering the language can play a pivotal role in corporate communication. In-person communication changes the way our message is conveyed. It has more clarity and we are present to explain our side of the story in case of any misunderstanding. However, the same is not the case when you are working remotely. What you say asynchronously can be misunderstood synchronously leading to an endless loop of Chinese whispers. This can create communication gaps and sometimes even lead to team conflicts. It is, therefore, imperative to create communication redundancy to bridge the communication gap and avoid discrepancies.How to tackle the challenge?
First things first, make a habit of documenting agendas before you begin a meeting. When you know the purpose and the important details, you automatically eliminate the chances of miscommunication. Besides, it also ensures none of the critical points is missed or overlooked. Next best thing to do is use multiple channels of communication when you're communicating asynchronously. For instance, there is an important piece of information that needs your colleague’s attention. So instead of just dropping in a message, you can also call him/her according to their availability to convey the message with utmost clarity. After all, seamless and uninterrupted communication is the bread and butter for remote working employees.Employee monitoring and surveillance
What is the challenge?
Teleworking gives accountability and responsibility to every employee. When you are not being supervised by your manager at all times like in co-located offices, it definitely holds you accountable for your project tasks. However, this process can lead to lowered productivity and missed deadlines if regular check-ins with managers are missing. Moreover, if you do not have a designated tool to track an employee’s attendance and logged hours, performance management can suffer and compromise work accountability. Not just that, if managers cannot monitor their employees, they will not know their strengths and weaknesses, which will not give you a chance to conduct the right training sessions for the right employee. However, this can be a slippery slope and needs to be tread carefully based on your company culture. Excessive surveillance can often demotivate your staff and create feelings of contempt from your team. So, how do we ensure regular employee monitoring and surveillance?How to tackle the challenge?
With an abundance of advanced tools at our disposal, managers should equip the right resource management tool to monitor their employees’ performance and progress. A right tool will help you schedule the right resources to the right job and will also let you track the time spent on each task. Examples of such tools are Saviom, Mindful, and Weekdone, where Saviom has an easy drag and drop features for effortless scheduling, and, Mindful and Weekdone are performance tracking apps that help the managers track the remote team’s progress and goal completion keeping everyone on the same page. Regular or weekly check-ins are a must when managers need to keep a tab on employees’ performance, address their concerns, and keep a track of the project's progress. Thus, managers should conduct one on ones with their employees to keep and address their concerns. More importantly, they should convey their expectations with clarity to ensure employees’ goals align with the firm’s vision and motive. These practices will tackle the challenge of a lack of surveillance and monitoring.Feelings of alienation
What is the challenge?
Employee engagement and team-building are an integral part of work culture. It’s easy to maintain your workplace culture in co-located offices. However, the real communication challenge is to sustain this culture in a virtual office set-up. If there are silos in communication, employees often feel disengaged and alienated from the team. These feelings of alienation are a major setback for the team and can be a major cause of declined performance and productivity. Furthermore, when communication is compromised, remote workers miss out on important details as they are not kept in the loop. It can also lead to trust issues amongst team members and the overall project’s success suffers. It happened with our team when we had just begun working remotely. Often, during one on ones, employees complained of feeling disconnected from the team. It became a serious concern when I see the work rate getting hampered. Here are some tips to foster team engagement,How to tackle the communication challenge?
The most important thing to keep the team connected and keep the work culture alive is to imitate your office perks virtually. For instance, we organized a team lunch every month to a place of our choice. To imitate this, we started organizing a virtual team lunch. This gave us a breather from the never-ending deadlines and also gave us a chance to know each other better. Similarly, you can have virtual team games from time to time, weekly huddles to add some fun to the mundane routines, and conduct similar water cooler meetings to keep the engagement alive. Tools like Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and so on can help you stay connected. In addition to these, you can also share a joke at the end of the day on your collaboration platform to end the day on a happy note. All these practices help a great deal to keep the team together in a distributed set-up. These remote work communication challenges can put your teamwork in jeopardy if not taken care of. Managers, however, suffer the most as they are the sole point of contact during tough times. Employees look upon their managers to complete the work and keep the team intact. One hitch and the employees easily lose trust in their leaders. Here is an excerpt on how leadership suffers in a virtual team,Challenges to leadership in remote teams
Managing virtual teams puts leaders in the testing zone and all their management skills are under scrutiny. Yes, remote work offers a myriad of benefits to employers and employees both. But it’s not so rosy to implement.
To quote Julie Wilson, the founder of the Institute for Future Learning and instructor at Harvard University, "Managing a virtual team requires managers to double down on the fundamentals of good management, including establishing clear goals, running great meetings, communicating clearly, and leveraging team members' individual and collective strengths.”
During this curse of establishing an effective remote team, these are the challenges to leadership in virtual teams:
