♌️ 👵🏼 🖐🏼 How “remote" improves collaboration 🍦 👪 🕎

If you try to make a list of everything that can be said “better, less is better”, it is unlikely that it will include working communication live: in many companies, it is considered a key component in organizing the exchange of ideas, solving problems and group analysis.

But what if properly applied remote communication makes the exchange of ideas, problem solving and group analysis more fruitful?

In the 2019 Buffer report, 99% of nearly 2,500 respondents said they would like to be able to work remotely at least from time to time, and this is no longer synonymous with working alone - thanks to the rapid spread of digital collaboration tools.

By learning to use such tools, you can actually remove some of the obstacles in communication (and, therefore, productivity) that you have to deal with in your usual office environment.

Translated to Alconost

How Remote Communication Helps Collaboration

The incentive to gossip and unite in “gangs” is reduced

Closed social groups in the office — let's call them “gangs” - often repeat an unhealthy social structure familiar to many from school life. In a CareerBuilder survey, 43% of respondents indicated that they had a lot of such vicious opposing groups in their office or workplace.

Some noted that because of such office social dynamics, they experience a sense of fear; many admitted that they adapt to unusual behavior to meet the expectations of the “gang”. And the point is not only to pretend that you like golf or reality shows: 19% said that they ridiculed others or pretended that they did not like someone - in order to fit in better.

Such groups do not promote inclusion and prosocial behavior. On the contrary: they make you feel out of place, and often even cause paranoia. “Gangs” incite resentment, their participants do not think that personal hostility in any way does not help at meetings, in the assessment of colleagues, work processes, teamwork and overall productivity.

When working remotely, you don’t see who goes to dinner with someone and who is going to go out together to chat somewhere informally. In addition, you have no reason to think about why Volodya and Katya spend so much time alone or why Dasha has a needle-like puncture on her forearm, which means there is no way to share her false conclusions with others and watch how rumors fly around.

Yes, technically, in the conditions of remote work, it is possible to get involved in gangs and gossip, but the basic elements motivating such behavior are, in fact, absent. And without the hostility that gossip and grouping lead to, you can focus more on important collaboration.

Easier to prioritize communication

The Udemy platform published in 2018 a report on distractions in the workplace , which showed that chatty colleagues are the biggest obstacle to improving productivity at work. And this is not surprising - given that 70% of offices use open-plan without separate offices. Moreover, the researchers showed that there is no empirical evidence that patterns of interaction between people can change as a result of changes in office architecture. The boss comes and says: “This is fashionable - we will do it this way” - but, unfortunately, such unreasonable authoritarian decisions not only lead to impressive costs - due to the lack of confidentiality and personal boundaries, employees also have to pay.

Let's say we have no talkers. But at the same time, even talking about work can become less effective if employees do not have the resources to establish personal boundaries. When others constantly interrupt our high-priority tasks and conversations, this allows lower-priority tasks to intervene in the workflow. Indeed, often it is a colleague who inadvertently felt our favor, comes without warning and expects that he will immediately receive undivided attention.

As a result, the more important and urgent discussions that need to be held are postponed or even canceled.

In an effort to be polite and responsive, we prefer to pay attention to the person who requires him here and now, rather than the task that should be addressed.

Remote work makes it possible to prioritize and separate urgent and non-urgent, important and unimportant discussions. A letter can wait a couple of hours. No need to answer every call - you can write in response: “I can’t speak now. Let's call at two o’clock? ” Even group chats, such as Slack and MS Teams, provide an opportunity to evaluate the priority of various group discussions and participate in them accordingly. In addition, if you are discussing a topic with a high priority, and this requires focus, you can set yourself the status of "busy" or "at a meeting."

Less workplace intrigue

Often you met people who just could not wait to roll up their sleeves and roll up their pants to climb into the swamp of office intrigues? Hardly. Most of them do their best to get rid of this fuss, although often it seems inevitable.

Creation of a tense atmosphere in the office is facilitated by such factors as the struggle for respect and power, the need to curry favor to get a raise or an increase, theft of ideas, betrayal of colleagues, behavior on the basis of “service for service” and “eye for eye”.

As a rule, competition is a key incentive for office intrigues. As Professor Kathleen Reardon wrote in Harvard Business Review , “Where there is competition, especially for limited resources, intrigue is bound to arise.”

Remote work is by no means without competition, but under such conditions, harmful behavior and intrigue cannot be stimulated as it happens in an office environment.

For example, work with digital material is by its nature well-documented and traceable to a specific person - which cannot be said, for example, about work, part of which will be personal interaction. This makes it easier to determine your own contribution to the project and to confirm your authorship in cases where colleagues can exaggerate their participation or directly take your well-deserved recognition.

In the conditions of remote work, it’s not easy to pretend that you “work hard and make endless sacrifices for the good of the team” - such a feint is much easier to crank when there are spectators. But if you are sitting in your room yourself, then your efforts and contributions naturally become more attached to merit than to the ability to put yourself in a better light.

Communication becomes more focused

On Monday morning, the usual thing is to ask everyone who meets in the office how the weekend went. Some have something to tell, and for half an hour they pour out revelations to everyone who asked. When working remotely, the same question can be asked by phone or via Skype, but in this case you will most likely be answered much more concisely.

I don’t want to downplay the need for a spirit of camaraderie, understanding the intricacies of communication or to say that you don’t need to delve into the lives of people with whom you work closely every day - I believe that the better we get to know our colleagues, the greater is our participation and trust.

However, I want to emphasize the importance of choosing the right time and place. We try to concentrate and spend the morning to good use, but each time on the way to the toilet, for coffee, just by chance meeting a chat lover, we find ourselves drawn into a conversation “for life”, and we are completely unable to determine what kind of communication serves best our current goal.

If the goal is to get to know each other better, then everything is fine. But often the real goal is to take another look at the design, check some numbers, prepare for the meeting, or something like that.

It becomes easier to control yourself

Communication through, for example, e-mail, allows you to pause and think, and only then respond. It happens, of course, that we press the “send” button before we have time to cool down and re-read what was written in a rage, and then we regret it. But when emotions get an opportunity to be realized instantly, we have less chance to think and calm down.

Even in personal and group chats, you can manage to ponder and correct what is written - and in the end, soften your statement and show sympathy. In addition, chats give you the opportunity to think about the reasons for your own reaction to some statements or to one of your colleagues.
For example, if someone makes a comment that seems aggressive, you instinctively want to go on the defensive. But upon reflection, sympathy may wake up in you, because you will see that this aggression is only a manifestation of a colleague’s self-doubt.

If everyone is in the same room and begins to pour emotions on each other, tension can build up very quickly. But in fact, most likely, all this will happen at one table or there will simply be no opportunity to change seats. In such a situation, it will look strange if you close your eyes to regain composure, or do a couple of push-ups to let off steam - and it is completely impossible to go outside to breathe fresh air and continue the conversation when everyone else joins. However, all these methods of pacifying your emotions can be used when the means of communication is the telephone.

Often, private conversations (including video chat) can be the most effective way to resolve complex contradictions. But remote communication provides a unique opportunity to carefully select words and deliberately apply methods of self-control.

Remote work is not a panacea for communication problems. And if you do not approach her organization thoughtfully and consciously, everything will become even worse.

When managers hire remote teams or provide office workers with the opportunity to work from home, the responsibility falls on all team members: they should strive to organize teamwork and work around well-known pitfalls.

Frequent pain points are related to conferencing, which cannot effectively prevent the desire to do something else in parallel. If someone does not stay focused during the conversation, but instead decides to check their email or prepare for the next meeting, this will lead to confusion, misunderstanding, prolongation of the conversation and a feeling of optionality.

For remote collaboration, it is important to have good written and verbal communication skills. In the office, you can often not try to express yourself in digital communication, because others will see and hear you directly. But if you have to talk in chats, by phone and e-mail, you need to be able to effectively express your emotions and various shades of meaning through these channels. If you have not achieved mastery in this, this is normal - but you must definitely develop these skills and become better.

Speaking of communication channels. Many remote teams overdo it: if a person is constantly bombarded with messages in e-mail, chat rooms and other means of communication, then his working day can turn into an endless stream of ill-conceived reactions, in which there is no place for thoughtful communication.

Moreover, when working remotely, colleagues need to make extra efforts to better know and understand each other. And if someone lacks the motivation or ability to do this, the team will not feel united.

Here are a few methods that can help you work together and avoid the above errors:

Set up basic rules for conference calls (and come up with measures for those who won't follow them).
Define a communication strategy and choose which tools will be used for what purposes (for example, email - for communication between teams, with clients and contractors, Slack - for communication within a team and in person, phone - for weekly phone calls, etc.).
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About the translator

Translation of the article was done in Alconost.

Alconost localizes games , applications and sites in 70 languages. Native translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, project managers 24/7, any format of string resources.

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