As the world braces for the coronavirus epidemic, businesses looking to protect the health of their employees are taking steps to support staff working from home. Most companies have canceled their annual events and have declared work from home.
The prospect of canceled events and the need to keep workers productive is pushing companies to revisit collaboration tools and work-from-home policies. The coronavirus outbreak will lead IT organizations to look at how they are supporting remote work, as it already has resulted in organizations canceling attendance to industry events
Remote working is not a new concept, with research from Merchant Savvy showing that 69% of businesses in the U.S. already have a remote working policy in place — 7% higher than the global average and a three-fold increase from 1996.
One of the biggest issues stemming from working at home for long periods is that employees will need technology that allows them to collaborate remotely and keep everybody on the same page. We would like to provide some tips on the technology tools needed and how to effectively manage the remote teams.
Essential Collaboration Tools
One of the biggest challenges in working remotely is imitating the back and forth of real-life collaboration. This is particularly true for creative work where any lag in conversations can impact the exchange of ideas.
The only solution to this problem is to invest in better collaboration tools. Ideally, you should have three separate tools:
- Domain-specific tools: These are tools to facilitate collaboration over a specific activity or domain, such as wireframing, coding, or drafting. Google Docs (writing), Balsamiq (UI prototyping), Onshape (CAD) are examples of such tools. If you’re a non-technical company, you might not need this type of tool. Technical companies, on the other hand, might use different domain-specific tools for different departments.
- Task management tools: These are tools that help everyone keep track of all the tasks associated with it. Your team members will use it to share important documents, log time, and manage work.
- Communication tools: Tools to help your team communicate better. These can be in the form of chat or video conferencing. Instead of picking multiple communication tools, understand your team’s habits and pick a tool that works well with them. For instance, if your team prefers short, casual chats, and ad-hoc video calls you can prioritize Mongrov Teamwork
The task management and communication tools keep everyone on the same page. People from a particular department (such as design) will turn to domain-specific tools to collaborate on specific activities.
Managing Remote Teams
Minor managerial lapses can blow up into major issues in a remote environment. The only solution is to be proactive. You have to constantly take steps to get the best out of your team. Here are a few things you can do:
- Check-in frequently: In one survey, 46% of remote workers said that effective managers checked-in frequently and at regular intervals. Create a regular schedule for asking team members about a task or even about non-work topics.
- Understand your team members: Try to understand how each one of your team members works. What kind of schedule do they like to follow? Do they work best alone or in a group? Build a work structure around each member’s likes and dislikes.
- Offer communication training: Most problems in remote work can often be traced to poor communication. Improve this vital skill by holding training sessions and developing best practices for communication.
- Keep everyone on the same page: Ensure that everyone on the team has access to the same information. Proactively ask people if they have the same data and insight as the rest of the team. Create a central repository of all documents associated with a project to help information exchange.
Mongrov on these tough times will like to extend its hand to people who love to work remotely with secure collaboration. Mongrov secure collaboration tool is built with messaging, taskboard and video conferencing as its core features. Send an mail to us on sales@mongrov.com to create a free instance for your team until this chaos settles.
