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Brainstorming from a Distance: How Distributed Teams Collaborate
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Structure For Success
Remote work days need to have a specific routine in place, which has structure, clarity and consistency.
Each team member needs to be provided with a daily block of time to be heard, maybe in a 15-minute morning team video check-in. This makes the team connected and accountable. Also, the team members should be encouraged to share concerns, challenges and successes.
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A Clear Briefing
Creativity thrives in limitations, and little check-in meetings with a specific agenda and a clear briefing to brainstorm can provide excellent results, as they have built-in time constraints.
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Collaboration Time
Online collaborative tools let us literally be on the same page, editing a document together, collaborating using the phone or the built-in chat.
Remote working makes the participants prioritize time, effort and activities. There are less wasted minutes as the participants are prepared and on time.
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Psychological Shortcuts
While working from home, it is hard to not be distracted, as, after all, one is in their home environment in the physical sense.
You can use the wallpapers, posters, props and even music and snacks from your office for your mind to be tricked into being in ‘work-mode’.
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The Quiet Times
Most people are so used to noise and the buzz of workplaces or even cafes that they find silence a bit tough to embrace. In truth, silence can be a great way to understand ones internal creative rhythm, if we learn to harness its power.
Better thinking can emerge out of silence, leading to creative ideas due to the natural clarity of thoughts.
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Edit Yourself
Roleplaying always makes you learn, and looking at your own ideas with a critical perspective and finding flaws with it will develop confidence, independence, and supercharge your creative instincts.
Be critical and objective, walking away from your own idea and then coming back with fresh eyes.
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Make It Social
Providing a sense of community when teams are collaborating remotely is not easy, but is crucial.
By asking relaxing and accommodating questions, the remote team feels taken care of, and relaxed. It is a good idea to make virtual collaborative sessions to be chatty, informal and digressive. Talking about shared interests and even recipes, while sharing food selfies, for instance, will calm everyone down and the topic at hand can be dealt with smoothly.
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Embrace Familiarity
Working remotely from home, one has more time to reflect, ponder and dig into their unexplored side, and unseen creativity.
There is no commute and no hassle to dress up and rush, so one can relax and be real, getting inspired by the extra time, breathing space, or the view outside your window.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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22% of Americans work from home
.... while nearly 50% are involved with remote or virtual team work.
This continuing shift calls for a new range of behaviors and skills.
Communication challenges for remote teams
- Body language. Even when we share the same space, the tone of a text or of an email is left wide open to interpretation and can generate anxiety.
- The delay between our messages can often postpone or hide emotional reactions to our comments. Lacking an immediate response, we can become distracted, second-guess ourselves, or even grow frustrated with our teams.
3 types of distance in remote teams
- Physical (place and time)
- Operational (team size, bandwidth and skill levels)
- Affinity (values, trust, and interdependency).
The best way for managers to drive team performance is by focusing on reducing affinity distance.
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The challenges of hybrid teams
Most companies embracing remote work also have dedicated headquarters. But remote-ish teams have even more communication and collaboration challenges than fully remote teams.
...Remote-friendly vs remote-first
The single biggest mistake companies can make is to opt to be remote-friendly instead of remote-first. Companies often accept the idea that remote is the future of work without creating an inclusive culture to ensure it works for everyone.
- Remote-friendly environment: Employees are allowed to work remotely, but work is not optimized for it. There is a disconnect between office and remote employees and team meetings exclusively occur in a co-located time zone. Water cooler chat is a space for key decisions and presence is correlated with meaningful work. Communication is synchronous-first. Managers must work in the office.
- Remote-first companies: Employees are empowered to adopt remote work. Real-time meetings are kept to a minimum and recorded. Decisions are made online and performance is measured by output, not by hours worked. Communication is asynchronous-first. Managers are encouraged to work from home.
Connecting a remote-ish team
Hybrid companies function best when the entire company is optimized for remote work. Successful hybrid teams set up processes to help their remote workers thrive alongside their office teammates.
Leadership must acknowledge the various challenges remote workers face and create solutions. Create a remote work policy that keeps remote workers and contractors from feeling like second class team members. Remote workers should feel fully connected and not missing a thing.
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A Central Management Tool
Physical presence does play a large part in moving our projects forward. Managing a project remotely requires a diligent and transparent approach to keep track and maintain the various tasks, deadl...
Keep teammates accountable
Creating accountability is a great way to manage the work remotely. Accountability is shifted to the teammates, who are now supposed to be responsible for their own work and decisions.
One way to build accountability in remote teams is to assign groups and let teammates hold each other responsible. Also make teammates share their work experience and any issues they face, publicly (within the team) so that it acts as a ready solution for others, reducing repeat work.
Document Everything
Even if the team is small, document, formalize and map each process, making it scalable and automatic.
Standard Operating Procedures, if used correctly in a remote setting, can act like a central nervous system.