25 Agile Team Collaboration Tools For Working Remotely

However, it’s a mistake to assume that a remote employee is the same as one working in the same office as you. Remote management can feel like a totally different challenge than managing people you work side by side with. Things that work in an office don’t always translate exactly to remote employees.

• The steps to setting up an online meeting will vary depending on the length of the call, the number of attendees, the number of speakers, and the types of visuals or presentations you need to show.
• In other words, when they were separated from their social structure, their brain cells started dying off.
• Whether in-person or virtual, make sure you have your materials and team updates in advance so the meeting can go according to plan.
• Word association takes a bit more mental acuity, but it’s a great way to get people playing off of one another in a pre-agreed upon order.
• Like the water cooler or casual check-in, these Slack channels provide critical opportunities for team members to share personal passions, allowing them to feel engaged and connected.

Staff Soundbite is a chance to hear those office sounds you never thought you’d miss, but have been strangely yearning for ever since you started working from home. Before the meeting, ask your Teammates to provide the team leader with a photo they have taken recently . Thankfully, you don’t even need a pen and paper to play this classic. We can shine a light on the illustration skills of your whole team using just your web browser. Interviews are used for a company to evaluate a candidate looking for a new and exciting role and for a candidate to learn more about the company. A brainstorming session requires a group of people to put their heads together.

The Challenges Of Managing Remote Employees

The Range team uses it, and it sparks a lot of interesting insights — everything from how you set up your workspace to why certain art catches your eye. Follow our list of practical tips for managing remote employees and enhancing your business’s performance and productivity. Some great apps allow participants to vote, an easy way to determine if the group has reached a consensus.

Make this a regular icebreaker before your weekly meetings by picking a new topic each week. The Great Place to Work “Fun Committee” doesn’t let our happy pill supply run dry with events that include everyone in our distributed team. Start a gratitude activity, inviting all employees to send one-to-one e-cards of appreciation to colleagues.

Use a meeting management tool to take notes and establish tasks, action points, and meeting outcomes. If your remote meeting involves multiple speakers and topics, it’s a good idea to assign jobs before the call starts. Hash these details out beforehand to ensure a smooth meeting. They will need to present the agenda, stick to the allocated time frame, and drive the discussion forward.

Tools To Facilitate Meetings And Retrospectives

They can reveal exciting details about how your teammates think and view the world. The possession could be a family heirloom, an odd utensil, some impractical souvenir from a far-off land, or a mysterious pebble with a long and sordid history. Have the presenter voice why they like the object, what it means, and where it was acquired. Remote employees’ performance affects your overall business growth.

Social loafing increases the more anonymous one feels, akin to hiding in a crowd, and can increase during remote meetings due to the virtual barrier between team members. Using video, along with inviting as few people as possible, helps counter that sense of anonymity. Two common types of tools used for remote team communication are conferencing technology and meeting management tools. Want help managing remote employees on your team effectively? There’s a lot about managing remote employees that’s exactly the same as managing those on-location.

Trivia Game Icebreaker

As product manager, I tried to schedule some of my calls with our designer for late at night. It had the desired effect of making calls easier to schedule and I know he appreciated not getting asked to wake up early for another call. However, if that’s How to run a successful remote meeting all you do, you’re really missing out on a critical part of management. MIT’s Dr. Peter Hirst of the same department used those findings as inspiration to pilot a flexible work program, with the goal of changing the way his team perceived remote work.

They can help create the emotional connection that’s missing in a remote environment or improve the way the team works. Managing a remote team can be challenging, but investing in technology can make it easier to collaborate, communicate, and track productivity. Adding a few of these tools will help streamline your business operations, and turn your remote team into a more collaborative and productive workforce. While not distinctly related to work, providing your employees with tools that help them establish a healthy work/life balance can help your bottom line.

This virtual face-to-face assessment could be the perfect time to ask for project management feedback and suggestions on how to move forward. While some workers might find it easy to adapt to remote working, project guidelines, and company regulations, some may need more time to get accustomed to how you handle working from home. With several businesses online, equipping your employees with these resources will set them up for success and increase productivity. According to Global Workplace Analytics, the number of people who work from home has grown by more than 173% since 2005.

In general, hybrid meetings will work best if the organizers focus on the needs of the remote participants equally to the needs of those attending in-person. Hybrid meetings are not new; many organizations have been holding them for the past two decades. But few can say they have figured out how to do them well, even though best practices do exist. Team meetings are prescheduled and everyone’s briefed on the topics in advance. They improve collaboration and productivity so each project runs smoothly and on time. Making space in meetings for employees to clear their minds is an effective way to show that you care and create social support.

Effective Team Collaboration

Virtual meetings have taken the magic away from their teams. And while a traditional work environment helps employees make the distinction between when it’s time to focus and when it’s not, being at home removes that. If you or your employees know that they struggle keeping track of time or spending enough of it on specific tasks, here’s a tool that might help. Honestly, there are plenty of viable chat tools available, Zoom, Skype even Slack has a video chat feature. But for the most part, as our teams have adjusted to remote work, we’ve typically used Google Hangouts. It’s free, allows for a vast amount of participants at one time, and connects directly to your Google Calendar.

We use them to brainstorm ideas and build our version of an editorial calendar. 10 Minutes — Lesley shares customer feedback from the week, both good and bad. We’ve worked hard to improve our asynchronous collaboration⁠—more on that below⁠—and it’s paid off big time for us. The better you work to live and exemplify this culture of ownership, the more accountable your team members will be as well. Experiment with what you think fits your culture and engage your team for ideas and feedback on what they like and don’t like. If you’re new to 1 on 1s entirely, check out our comprehensive guide to 1 on 1 meetings here, and a step by step guide for starting 1 on 1s here.

Remote meetings are more popular than ever before and will continue to grow in demand. After the COVID19 crisis, workers were forced to pivot their working style, adjusting from in-person meetings to working collaboratively behind a screen. Personally, I have been on Skype calls where the interviewer had the noisiest background imaginable.

They are also a perfect time to break out a fun zoom background. Learn about our company and people who are dedicated to making businesses more successful. Resources to help you manage your team or run your business. Adopt an easy-to-manage operating https://globalcloudteam.com/ framework for your managers built around transparent metrics. Develop ownership and trust with teams to be sure work gets done. Our employee engagement features provide invaluable insight into the heartbeat of the organization—its people.

They are not the cure to all remote problems, but definitely should be part of your playbook. To help you find options for your team to get the most of remote work, here are our top 10 favorite digital collaboration tools. Have someone in the role of “producer” in the physical room, and for larger meetings, another that is remote. Ensure that these two producers are aligned on all expectations and individual responsibilities for how the meeting will run.

Transform Your Remote Design Thinking Sessions With Conceptboard

Because of the unique challenges that remote employees face, it’s important to have questions on hand that help dive into those issues they uniquely deal with. I was recently interviewed by Jevin Maltais of the Building Remote Teams podcast, where we talked about the value of one on ones for remote teams and how to make the most of them. As you build comfort and trust, and for meetings where you’re all looking at a document together anyways, you can always cut back on video there. But when you’re trying to build bonds, and especially in your 1 on 1s, video is a valuable tool for you as a manager. Most importantly, trust your instincts when you see something might be wrong. Those non-verbal clues you see on video are your opportunity to fix problems when they’re small for your remote employees.

To hasten that day, educate remote employees about using headsets, earbuds, etc., and not relying on the built-in microphones and speakers on their laptops. But just because some people are in the same building doesn’t mean they have to gather in-person in a conference room or for a town-hall style large meeting that also involves remote workers. Simply stated, it’s optional to have everyone present in a room. This is a virtual team meeting game that requires very little effort and runs behind the scenes throughout the meeting. If you’ve got a smaller team, you can loop back around and get everyone to submit another sentence.

It’s a fine line between being a micromanager and keeping the team on track. But project management software can help you avoid being overbearing. Rather than firing out random status updates , set up automatic notifications so the PM software can give you updates as work is completed. From putting off zoom chats to postponing meetings to another day — we’re all guilty of dodging a catch-up from time-to-time. Missing the odd one isn’t the end of the world, but regularly skipping opportunities to talk about goals can leave workers feeling left out. However your team stays connected during these times, it’s important to remember that things are far from normal.

Don’t equip one team member with something different if they perform similar tasks to another employee. Create an agenda in advance of the meeting with input from attendees, if necessary. It can be easy for a remote meeting to slide off-topic, so having a clear set of conversation topics and action points will ensure waffle is kept to a minimum.

Adopt A Stewardship Mindset When Managing Remote Meetings

Adapting to this new work style can be scary, especially if there isn’t enough time to prepare for the change. However, if you know how to manage remote teams the right way, you’ll get the best results from your remote workers. How can we expect our remote meetings to be effective if we never talk about what makes for a good one and what we should avoid? With your attendees, periodically create mutual expectations about what makes for a good remote meeting. Surface expectations, like “let’s keep all contributions to no more than 60 seconds so everyone has a chance to speak,” and give colleagues a chance to reply.

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Traffic, dog barking, and doors banging made it extraordinarily difficult to make out what she was saying. So I just said ‘Yes’ to everything, which caused some unfortunate problems down the road. – A fitting option for chatting with people all around the world, although connectivity can be a bit buggy at times. 2) Zoom.us – Zoom allows up to 100 participants or devices to have a video conference, share screens, and even record the meeting or presentation. – Great to use if you are looking for fast and easy meetings using screen-share capabilities. Ind one that everyone is comfortable using and stick with it, don’t chop and change.

Since every team is so unique, leaders and managers are tasked with finding the best options for creating the custom toolkit. Slack is an instant messaging tool that allows teams to organize their conversations into specific topics or team channels for more effective communication. Users can easily find information within the searchable archive, and file sharing allows teammates to actively collaborate in real-time to reduce response times.

It ensures they’re getting enough rest, exercise, social interaction, and turning off their brains from work to relax and recoup. It also shows that you and your business care about their well-being, making them more likely to actively participate and stay satisfied with their job and employer. Being out of the office can make things like communication and collaboration a bit trickier. You no longer have face-to-face meetings or those quick conversations by the water cooler. Basically, less information is being shared and you need to establish different communication channels to encourage more collaboration. Possibly even more so than when your team was in the office.