How to nail remote collaboration

The great work-from-home exper­i­ment has now been run­ning for sev­er­al months. We may have been phys­i­cal­ly work­ing apart from our peers, but this hasn’t stopped us from need­ing to col­lab­o­rate. Water­cool­er chats, stand-up meet­ings and quick catch-ups have been replaced by Zoom calls and Slack mes­sages.

Has this lack of prox­im­i­ty made work­ing togeth­er hard­er? Or has time away from our col­leagues made our inter­ac­tions more fruit­ful? 

How tech can facilitate remote collaboration

Collinson Group, a glob­al loy­al­ty and ben­e­fits com­pa­ny, has seen lit­tle drop off in employ­ee sat­is­fac­tion or pro­duc­tiv­i­ty since the break­out of coro­n­avirus. In July, 79 per cent of its 2,100-plus employ­ees report­ed they were work­ing effi­cient­ly with their col­leagues, a 12 per cent increase since the pre­vi­ous sur­vey in April.

“We have found we are just as effec­tive and just as pro­duc­tive with 80 per cent of our peo­ple agree­ing they have been per­form­ing as or more effec­tive­ly than pre-COVID,” says Corey Archard, Collinson’s head of tal­ent acqui­si­tion. “Col­lab­o­ra­tion across our glob­al offices has become slight­ly eas­i­er with an increased num­ber of meet­ings tak­ing place between dif­fer­ent office loca­tions.”

Archard cites Collinson’s speed in imple­ment­ing new tech­nolo­gies as being cru­cial in their pos­i­tive results. Dig­i­tal col­lab­o­ra­tion tools have become ubiq­ui­tous in our work­ing lives. Zoom saw its glob­al dai­ly users spike from 10 mil­lion to 200 mil­lion dur­ing the first month of lock­down, while Microsoft Teams, Slack and TeamView­er have also seen a sharp increase in demand.

“Any tool that organ­i­sa­tions choose to encour­age col­lab­o­ra­tion and shar­ing must be sim­ple to use and inte­grate seam­less­ly into exist­ing IT set-ups,” says Andy Wil­son, glob­al head of media tech­nolo­gies at Drop­box. “New tech should work as intu­itive­ly in the office as it does at home. Put sim­ply, these tools need to be able to meet the demands and pref­er­ences of every­one that uses them.”

A culture of collaboration is the first step

While tech­nol­o­gy has obvi­ous­ly been cru­cial in facil­i­tat­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion, the first step is fos­ter­ing a cul­ture that pro­motes effec­tive team­work.

“It is not dif­fi­cult to spec­i­fy the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a high-per­form­ing team,” says Adri­an Furn­ham, occu­pa­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist for finan­cial advi­so­ry firm Stam­ford Asso­ciates. “They devel­op clear goals and plans; they com­mu­ni­cate clear­ly, hon­est­ly and reg­u­lar­ly with each oth­er; they solve prob­lems and make deci­sions on a time­ly basis; they man­age con­flict well.”

At the law firm DLA Piper, col­lab­o­ra­tion has been a focus for the past two years, fol­low­ing a reset of the practice’s val­ues.

“Ensur­ing people’s emo­tion­al well­be­ing and work­ing sup­por­t­ive­ly were already embed­ded in the busi­ness,” says the glob­al law firm’s inter­na­tion­al head of tal­ent devel­op­ment Liza Strong. “It hasn’t been a leap. Allo­cat­ing work and tasks has always been done in a col­lab­o­ra­tive way, with a clear set of shared objec­tives.”

Wide­spread remote work­ing has accel­er­at­ed the tran­si­tion from com­mand-and-con­trol lead­er­ship to focus­ing more on out­put. This trend is set to snow­ball fur­ther, as polling by the glob­al research firm Gart­ner found that just under half (48 per cent) of employ­ees expect to be work­ing from home fol­low­ing the pan­dem­ic.

Man­agers will need to allow time and space for their staff, ear­mark­ing peri­ods when soli­tary work is encour­aged. The aver­age UK work­er has 4.4 meet­ings a week, half of which they deem to be unnec­es­sary, accord­ing to a 2018 report by the meet­ing tech firm eShare.

Dropbox’s engi­neer­ing team have imple­ment­ed a “No meet­ing Wednes­day” pol­i­cy to allow staff to work through com­plex pro­gram­ming chal­lenges and facil­i­tate bet­ter inter­ac­tions dur­ing the rest of the week.

“Teams may need to be able to set aside ‘focus time’ as a result of work­ing from home where dis­trac­tion is aplen­ty,” says Wil­son. “Not every com­pa­ny update needs a team meet­ing and not every piece of feed­back needs to be con­veyed instant­ly.”

The pros and cons of virtual communication

Despite the desire to work from home and the capa­bil­i­ty of dig­i­tal tools, there are still draw­backs to the lack of face-to-face con­tact with our col­leagues.

“There are all sorts of con­straints when it comes to vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” says Furn­ham. “Peo­ple need to get to know each oth­er well so they can trust and like them. It is the ‘water­cool­er moments’ that make all the dif­fer­ence in get­ting to know people’s pref­er­ences.”

He sug­gests that video calls are often too for­mal, restrict­ing par­tic­i­pants from speak­ing their mind or shar­ing ideas. Furn­ham also points out the impor­tance of visu­al cues and body lan­guage in under­stand­ing the per­spec­tives of work­mates.

Research by Adec­co Group found 77 per cent of British work­ers would pre­fer to adopt a hybrid mod­el, split­ting their time between office and home. As we move back into the shared work­space, how should lead­ers han­dle the need for face-to-face inter­ac­tions, while still includ­ing staff who work remote­ly?

Strong says all DLA Piper meet­ings involv­ing remote work­ers take place via video con­fer­enc­ing to avoid exclud­ing peo­ple from key deci­sions.

“It’s often at the start or the end of the meet­ing where incred­i­bly valu­able infor­mal con­ver­sa­tions are had,” she says. “Even if some­one is quar­an­tine or shield­ing, we want every­one to be involved in those moments and to start from the same base.”

This desire to keep peo­ple involved touch­es again on the need for a com­mit­ment to col­lab­o­ra­tion through­out an organ­i­sa­tion. A sup­port­ive and trust­ing cul­ture goes a long way to keep­ing teams per­form­ing at a high lev­el, whether the con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen over Zoom or by the water­cool­er.