COVID-19 has caused chaos throughout the global economy. Many people are working from home for the first time and companies are trying to adjust their strategy on the fly.
However, we are in a place to positively respond to the challenges that COVID-19 has forced upon us. But it doesn’t end with enabling remote work. It goes far beyond that.
The effects of COVID-19 will not go away suddenly in a few weeks. Therefore, a complete digital workplace strategy needs to be in place to not only survive the pandemic but adjust to the new permanent changes it will bring.
A digital workplace platform that can engage employees and help them collaborate better by allowing them to work closely with their team members, irrespective of their location, is a strong start. But beyond the tools, teams need to develop a new set of skills around how we collaborate.
Why do remote teams need new collaboration skills?
The collaboration skills needed by remote teams are a lot different from the skills required by traditional teams that work from the same office space. When teams go remote, employees can no longer walk to each other’s desks to discuss or clarify issues in real-time.
There are three kinds of distances that need to be considered in remote collaboration:
- Physical (location and time difference of the employees)
- Operational (skill levels, team size, and individual work bandwidth)
- Affinity (trust, interdependency, and values of the team)
The best way for team leaders to improve collaboration is by focusing on decreasing the overall affinity distance between the team members. Lacking close collaboration and understanding can make employees second guess themselves and even grow frustrated with their team members.
Adding more tools to your team’s arsenal might seem like the easiest solution, but if these tools increase more confusion instead of helping employees collaborate and work together, then it will only worsen the team’s overall productivity.
Every tool that remote teams use should have a specific purpose and functionality. For instance, if you use a project management tool with a chat feature and a separate application for chatting and communicating with everyone, then employees should know whether they need to directly ask any queries within the project management app itself or the chat application.
More importantly, while the focus on individual productivity is needed, team productivity is just as important. Even if remote workers are able to work on their own efficiently, if it doesn’t translate into combined team productivity then it won’t lead to any visible results.
How digital workplaces help remote teams work together
To get remote employees to collaborate effectively with their team and other departments as well, it is important to establish strong relationships and create a more transparent work environment regardless of the location limitations. A digital workplace platform can help with that by giving employees a central space to access all the work related data, tools, and applications.
A digital workplace helps in digitally transforming all the internal business processes of a company into robust and streamlined workflows. It acts as a replacement of the traditional office space and allows employees to work remotely from different physical locations.
Whether your team is forced to go remote due to a sudden worldwide pandemic, or you are strategically trying to turn your company fully remote, you can make sure your employees are working with the same productivity and efficiency regardless of their location.
With a digital workplace, employees get access to all the digital tools they need to manage their work responsibilities. Team leaders can assign work, guide discussions, monitor project progress, and automate repetitive processes.
A digital workplace helps remote teams collaborate in a better way by:
Giving clarity about work requirements
A digital workplace helps manage projects and milestones in a more seamless way by giving department heads a comprehensive dashboard that allows them to manage projects with more visibility and control.
Digitising and streamlining internal workflows also creates transparency across the organization. It allows employees to get clarity over the tasks assigned to them and understand how their work affects the entire workflow within the company.
Improving communication
With a digital workplace, you can create dedicated communication channels for remote teams to work closely together. More importantly, employees don’t have to send excessive emails to each other just to discuss a quick work matter which directly improves efficiency and productivity.
Helping team members bond
By allowing both formal and informal communication, a digital workplace platform helps team members bond and build trust. Constant communication through chats and regular video meetings are a great way of establishing rapport and developing empathy among the team.
Collaboration is a necessity for remote teams
The coronavirus pandemic is already forcing companies to go remote and it is expected that the post-pandemic world will see a rapid increase in the global remote workforce.
As more and more employees go remote, they will continue to face new forms of misunderstandings and miscommunication. The solution lies in implementing digital workplaces and technologies that can help you build a culture of collaboration in your organisation that reflects the demands of the new digitally driven world.
Guest Blog by Suresh Sambandam, CEO of Kissflow
Kissflow is the first unified digital workplace for organizations to manage all of their work on a single, unified platform. Kissflow is used by over 10,000 customers across 160 countries, including more than fifty Fortune 500 companies. Suresh is an expert and renowned entrepreneur on a mission to democratize cutting-edge technologies and help enterprises seamlessly orchestrate their work through an intuitive blend of collaboration, coordination and control. He has three US patents to his credit.
