Keeping virtual teams together

Remote Working Practices:

In addition, Strong management practices and routines that may have been neglected in an office setting must now come to the fore. A key part of this is how we continue to drive performance with readjusted capacity levels.

• Plan your own day to take control, establish a clear working pattern for the team each week / month. Ensure you have daily touchpoints with the team. Being connected holds a different meaning now.
• Encourage personal accountability by co-creating goals and expectations in the team each week and each month. Allocate work with clear time expectations and give purpose to every task.
• Delegate appropriately within teams, provide visibility of all work happening and empower team members to take accountability.
• Sustain normalcy and camaraderie in unconventional ways. Make time for casual conversations, set up virtual coffee-breaks or team games, keep a virtual chat room mirroring office settings.

Enabling tools:

More than ever, employees must maintain self-discipline and self-motivation, deriving satisfaction from the work process and their output. Clear effective communication is key for team morale, especially for those who may feel disconnected.

Providing teams, the resources they need to be high functioning, promoting transparency and efficiently identifying risks, gaps, and opportunities in delivering business outcomes should form the baseline of any remote-working protocol. Operating on standard events and cadence creates regularity, enforces process, and allows teams and entire programs to focus on prioritized work while enabling transparency. And while we’re at it, try to keep it light to help with well-being.

Lastly, selecting the tools that will best enable us to be effective in this new environment will be important - both leveraging what’s available and selecting additional tools where needed.look at your policies that impact remote working. Set clear guidelines on what is encouraged and the boundaries to operate in, to maintain privacy and confidentiality. Leveraging existing technology to rapidly resolve staff queries and other problems will enable better adoption of the new ways of working.

• Leverage enterprise-grade platforms to enable communication and collaboration across the globe. Use productivity tools to set daily/weekly targets and track progress. Lead by example to encourage usage amongst team members. It may not come naturally to some of them to shift to different tools.
• Use engagement tools to brainstorm, co-create and share information. 1-2-minute video blogs instead of emails to communicate key actions or knowledge sharing can help combat email fatigue.