Communicating when Working Remotely

Strategies for Creating Timely and Effective Communication

Communication can be difficult under the best of circumstances, and when working remotely, it is even more critical for a business to ensure lines of communication are in place.   To maintain timely and effective communication, leadership must create virtual spaces – formally and informally – for their teams to work resourcefully, even when work space and scheduling are at variance.  Space is not the only priority.   A lot of the nuance of face to face conversations can be lost over email and messaging.

How do you as an entrepreneur build or maintain an office culture when you have remote workers? If you work remotely how is it best to communicate and what would you like your manager to do so that you feel that you are an integral part of the team, supported and trusted?  

• Leadership should consider more asynchronous communication. Given the disruption to the 9-to-5 workday, employers should decrease “synchronous” work that employees perform simultaneously and increase “asynchronous work” that workers can do on their own time.  :
  • Encourage managers to focus on outcomes rather than on monitoring activities. 
  • Even though management may not be able to dictate specific start and end times they can encourage employees to make their most productive hours work for them, as long as they are clearly communicating what they are doing and the progress they are making.
• Leadership should not skimp on technology, or security.
• One of the best solutions to communication difficulties is for management to set up communication guidelines, clear expectations, reasonable deadlines, and a code of behavior for all types of communication.  Establishing consistency creates more certainty.   Any policies or guidelines should take into account that:
  • It can feel awkward to participate in meetings when team members are talking over one another or spending an undue amount of time on social matters rather than business.  It’s critical to set consistent boundaries to minimize disruptions during all meetings, regularly scheduled, impromptu, or sporadic.  Each manager and employee will need to establish norms about the appropriate use and amount of information shared via each communication channel.   Dedicated time for employees to engage with each other socially can also be scheduled.
  • Certain types of information require confidentiality and must be shared more discretely.
  • Setting up protocols are important because everyone on a team needs to be able to reach people when something urgent arises.
  • Having a deadline allow for autonomy and flexibility as well as accountability.
  • With the abundance of alerts, notifications, and chats from various teammates, it would be difficult to prioritize work and time consuming to monitor different channels.  There must be agreement and consistency on what channel to use for time sensitive online meetings and which is better for status updates or reporting. 
  • Impromptu meeting or ones schedule sporadically can be difficult to organize when the team is spread across different time zones or has already set a different agenda.
  • What is the ideal frequency for communication? It’s hard to find the balance of just the right amount of communication—not too little, not too much.
  • Policies and procedure should include how leadership should be ready to adapt quickly in response to difficulties.
• Over-communication turns out to be a problem too when it is viewed as micromanagement.  Managers who have gotten into the habit of micromanagement and control by closely observing employees on the job and offering reminders in the course of a day, end up craving the comfort of knowing.  They cannot see people at work, so checking in too often for constant status updates, asking unnecessary questions, throwing reminders and advice.  Over-communication interrupts work flow and also feels like distrust to the employee.
• Employees require social time to maintain meaningful connection for both team work and individual well-being.
• What are the ideal communication tools to use? There’s an abundance of choices and each person may have a different communication preference – email, phone calls, instant messaging, etc.   The manager might learn what works best for each employee and then figure out what can be done to communicate in the way that meets that person’s needs.  
  • Scheduling regular weekly or daily conferences with the team, allows manager or team leaders to coordinate daily priorities and resolve any items needing urgent attention.
  • Daily status updates from employees can show their progress on a particular project.   When employees can do this diligently it alleviate the need for leadership to micromanage.
  • Time blocking allows each person to notify management and team members about their status of availability.