Encourage productive conversations

• Consider each employee's ideas as valuable.
• Be clear when communicating. 
• Encourage trust and cooperation among employees on your team. 
• Encourage team members to share information, to listen and to brainstorm.
• Let the team work on creative solutions together.
• Set ground rules for the team. 
• Establish the parameters of consensus-building sessions.

Voice and video calls can help you feel more in touch with your team and avoid the issues of asynchronous communication like time lags or misunderstandings.

However, you'll likely spend a lot of your day communicating via text as it’s a good way to interact without interrupting their work. So you need to be able to get your point across clearly and simply, show empathy and understanding, and be efficient to avoid wasted time.

Remote workers can feel overwhelmed by the amount of text they have to process. So finding ways to keep on top of what's going on is imperative for communicating efficiently with others.

Create archive lists and CC irrelevant emails to them, so you can save and share them without flooding non-involved people. 

Every team has rules, but few are intentionally crafted. This could have a negative impact. For example:

• In a team of two, it's easy to create short back-and-forth emails. As more team members join, it becomes more complex keeping everyone in the loop. Emails may include reply-alls about weekend plans and real-time decision-making, leading to unread emails and lost information.
• A single individual dictates the rules for the group. He may inadvertently communicate late at night that can affect an entire company.

Setting up norms is easiest when the team is first created. It may take a special meeting at the start, but it saves time and diminish problems down the road.

Shifting group norms in an established team is possible, too. Cultivate positive behavioral expectations on high-functioning teams.

• Loneliness was reported as the biggest downside for 21% of remote employees, and one of the reasons that makes them more likely to quit.
• Most remote managers say they’d be more inclined to stay if they had more friends at work.
• Individuals who have 15 minutes to socialize with colleagues have a 20% increase in performance over their peers who don't.
• Positive social relationships are correlated with better life expectancy.

If your icebreaker questions are intriguing, cheeky, humorous – the answers you receive will be, too.

Many remote teams will kick off their weekly meeting with an icebreaker question or insert it during their morning stand-up meeting. Even more popular is asking a series of icebreaker questions during the onboarding process when hiring someone.

When designing your ice breaker, think about the "ice" that needs to be broken.

• If you are bringing together like-minded people, the "ice" may simply reflect the fact that people have not yet met.
• If you are bringing together people of different backgrounds, cultures, and outlooks for work within your community, then the "ice" may come from people's perceptions of each other.

• Make sure that the activity is specifically focused on meeting your objectives and appropriate to the group of people involved.
• Clarify the specific objectives for your session.
• Ask yourself questions about how you will meet your objectives. 
• These questions can be used as a checklist once you have designed the session
• As a further check, ask yourself how each person is likely to react to the session.

Influence is most often and most easily carried through trust: only when a co-worker trusts you will he or she be open to your influence.

The easiest way to do that is to be honest, no matter what. State your opinions, disclose your apprehensions, and don't keep secrets. 

Inconsistency is the fastest way to ruin your reputation. Consistency, on the other hand, is slow but sure: if you execute your tasks effectively and on time, day after day, eventually people will come to rely on you.

Ensure your team knows through your actions and words that you have their backs. 

Whether it's ensuring resources or acknowledgment for their efforts, standing up for your employees shows them that you are focused on their well-being and recognize their value. This builds loyalty and trust, and it certainly improves morale on your team and contributes to a more positive working environment, especially in periods of crisis.

When a team is experiencing adversity, unify them around common objectives and show their effort’s impact on the organization and the lives of others to revive their sense of purpose.

Find ways to remind your team of what they enjoy about their jobs and the value they add to others' lives. When people are inspired, they will look beyond themselves and work with passion to pursue the goals set before them, and both the individual and the organization will be better for it.

• Hackathons generate actionable ideas, strategic product concepts and process improvements.
• Internal hackathons –organized within a company — provide a great way to inspire teams and promote creativity, collaboration, and innovative thinking.
• If run properly, hackathons can establish a stream of valuable ideas.
• The gamification layer on top of hackathons can further motivate and reward employees for being innovative while staying aligned with the strategy of the corporation.

The most important though from a developer’s point of view is resources and sponsorship to drive the product/idea to the next stage. This could be the most inspiring award of all — the winners ability to use specialized resources (developers, equipment, software, services) — according to a suitable plan — and get prepared for a formal presentation of the outcome to the senior stakeholders, leaders and decision makers. 

It provides a framework for a group to arrive at a shared decision around one direction. 

While many resources offer frameworks for brainstorming, divergence of thinking, and effectively whiteboarding, this is a framework and a method to make decision-making, and tough choices with a team, so that convergence happens.

The surveys provide the input you need to plan and manage your change initiatives, your cultural transformation programs, your diversity interventions, your talent management and leadership development initiatives, and your customer feedback. 

• Instead of looking for solutions, we waste time checking communication tools.
• We don't talk about our expectations.
• Communication bleeds into our out-of-work time, instead of leaving it at work.

It doesn’t mean just telling people to share their thoughts, but actually doing it yourself and setting clear rules and guidelines about how to share.

It isn’t just about how you share information but also what gets shared.