You’re struggling to build a cohesive team in a remote work environment. What are your options?

To foster a cohesive remote team, prioritize communication with regular video meetings, fostering open dialogue. Implement collaborative tools for seamless information sharing and project tracking. Establish clear expectations and goals, ensuring each team member understands their role. Encourage team-building activities, such as virtual social events or casual check-ins. Invest in professional development opportunities to boost individual and team skills. Promote a positive work culture that values diversity and inclusivity. Recognize and reward achievements to motivate and create a sense of accomplishment. Finally, solicit feedback regularly to address concerns and continually improve the remote work experience for everyone.

Consider also implementing a communication agreement that sets the groundwork for the open flow of feedback and communication through open and direct communication. Rumors and talking behind peoples back can spread like wild fire; especially when their is a mix of in person in office teams and remote individual contributors. Commitment to open dialog to put out these fires can be an important remedy.

The biggest thing to consider is that not everyone is like you. You will probably have a range of experiences and preferences in the team and your culture should reflect that. A big thing I’ve always stuck to is regular calls with an agenda and an opportunity to follow up on, before any minutes or ‘to-do’s are agreed. Not everyone likes to talk in meetings and others hate using Slack etc. You need to cover all bases and all media to keep communication fresh. I’d also recommend a quarterly (if budget allows) or at least an annual meet up. Remote teams lose the unstructured interactions which build social groups. Experiment with different types of meetings, e.g. get outdoors and walk while you talk or take turns chairing weekly calls.

In my experience very few leaders know how to effectively give and receive feedback or mediate conflict effectively. Consider getting trading on these important communication cornerstones for your leadership team rather than instilling bad habits in your people.

Consider asking people what they want. So much team building can be really cringy – if you have remote workers part of their drive for working remote is that they may find these sort of trust fall, hand holding, “we are a family” type activities demotivating. Start by asking!

Important point! It’s so critical that you build time in to your teams schedule to share ideas and innovate. These are often the water cooler conversations that get lost in the remote work world. It’s easy to get super task focused when managing remote teams so consider building this time in to schedule’s proactively.

As frivolous as it sounds. Having people get to know each other better is a turbocharger to foster a more cohesive remote team. I have a team across time zones and will always dedicate a small portion meetings to share a little bit about ourselves using virtual flashcards.

Self–managed, self motivated people do better in remote work situations than others so consider this in your selection process. Implement processes and selection tools that help identify self managers to save you headaches later. Don’t hire candidates that prioritize a close not team environment if they are going to be working in isolation.