Office workspaces of today are very different from how office setup has traditionally been known to be. For starters, modern offices are designed with creativity and collaboration in mind. Employees have to work in a tranquil and comfortable space so that they can be innovative and creative, and the office setup needs to encourage free flow of knowledge and information between employees. Those two factors combined enhance workplace collaboration and employee productivity.
Remote working is the other key change that modern employees have to adapt to. Modern top talents are looking for companies that not only allow remote working but that also encourages and facilitates it. This is primarily because remote working has been proven to lower stress levels and enhance better work-life balance within today’s working population. Companies also benefit from remote working by getting more production while incurring fewer expenses.
Now this is where the rubber meets the road: Employers have to encourage remote working and at the same time facilitate cross collaboration. How is that manageable? How can employers ensure that employees don’t feel alone or disconnected when working remotely? Here are 4 tips for employees to increase cross-collaboration with their teammates while working remotely.
1. Foster a culture of shared knowledge
Sharing knowledge amongst your teammates for cross-functional projects success is of key importance. In the daily meetings employees can encourage and guide each other on matters related to their tasks. If needed, employees can consult high-authority sources for statistics and expert studies in the industry. This means that to better collaborate, employees can also seek advice from top-quality experts which can help employees make better decisions and also build, strengthen, and tap into their professional networks. It also means providing teams with modern communication and collaboration tools so that they can quickly bring together their diverse expertise and knowledge to solve pertinent challenges.
2. Use right collaboration technology
For starters, remote workers need computers, stable internet connections, and working smartphones for them to be effective at a personal level. Poor Wi-Fi won’t make the cut no matter how dedicated you are as an employee. At the team level, cross collaboration will be more effective if you as an employee use the following tools, some of which are free.
· Dropbox for secure storage and sharing amongst team members.
· RAR extractor for mac, a tool that you will need when opening RAR files on Mac.
· Zoom, a platform that enables you to have conference calls.
· Funretro, a tool that will facilitate retrospectives between you are other teammates.
· Xtensio in case the team members need to create top-shelf documents and presentations.
3. Centralize the communications
Remote teams are very dynamic. Team members could be working from different countries and time zones, which means that there needs to be a centralized point where all the knowledge shared across the team can be accessed. You can use project management apps such as Asana, Trello, and Teamwork as a central access point. Such apps will also help you keep track of what every team member is up to, so you are aware of what is going on in the company.
4. Abide to the task-handling guidelines
Clear guidelines on who handles which tasks, who answers to whom, and what needs to be done when will go a long way in enhancing cross collaboration between teammates. Make sure you know what tasks you are handed and what skills are required from you so that you use them to make the team stronger. While at it, let every team member know your strengths and also learn others strong points, so that whenever they need particular skill sets they can contact you. Learn the priorities and deadlines of each task assigned to you and keep track of your time management. Lastly, update your tasks with the latest progress so that the other team members can keep track of what their colleagues are working on.
Conclusion
The trend for remote working has been boosted by the coronavirus pandemic. Even companies that were reluctant to adapt flexible working, ignoring expert predictions that 2019 and 2020 would be transitional years for the global job market, have been forced to rethink their strategies by the deadly pandemic. The narrative has changed from why you need remote workers to how you can make remote working work for your company. The 4 points above will get you started.
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