It used to be that telecommuting was a novelty concept that stood as the exception to the norm for most employees. Now remote working is a way of life to the point where there's even been a backlash by companies like Yahoo that had so many employees working from home they decided to push them back toward working in the office. Even for those of us who don't really consider ourselves telecommuters, less and less of our teamwork involves face to face contact with coworkers. A recent study showed that half of US managers spend about half of their time on the road. And the phenomenon is not special to the US, in an era of globalization, where many of us might be working closely with people in different countries, who we rarely or never see in person. These remote teams amplify the challenges around good communication that even teams based in the same work space can already face. When you have to work with people who you mainly know as a voice on a conference line, it’s easier to miscommunicate and it’s much harder to build trust. On remote teams or on any team where communication is the biggest barrier, there’s some special strategies you can use to improve performance. The first strategy is to have a face to face meeting as soon as possible, and to schedule them regularly. This is the approach taken by businesses like GitHub, which is a tech company that offers customers a software development platform. Now GitHub is headquartered in San Francisco, but that almost seems like a technicality for a business where most of its 600 employees are spread all over the world. To keep teams in tact even when they're thousands of miles apart, GitHub has events like an annual in person meeting and a requirement that all new employees spend a week at the company headquarters before heading out. Getting teams together for a face to face meeting early on helps them establish a rapport and adjust to each others communication styles. That way when they have to communicate remotely and can't read each others body language or hear their tone, they still have a pretty good sense of each others attitudes and feelings. They can read them a little better and that’s really crucial for keeping team members aligned. In general, the more remote team members understand each others preferred communication styles, the less opportunity there is going to be for misunderstandings over email or phone. Another strategy to use is to create time for discussion where you have each person talk openly about their styles. To understand why this is important take an example of a more aggressive communicator interacting with a more passive communicator. Now to the passive person the really aggressive communicator can come off as hostile, where the aggressive communicator might think that they're just acting normally. In fact, they might even interpret the other person's passiveness as an unwillingness to be honest and upfront about their opinions. If these two team members just sit down and have a discussion about their preferred styles, they'll know in the future that these reactions might just be misjudgments of the other person's intentions. It's best to have these discussions during team chartering when your group is really first coming together. As a conversation starter you might use a communication styles assessment like the DISC Survey or the Persuasion Styles Assessment created by my colleagues Richard Shell and Mario Moussa in their book the Art of Woo. This will help each person reflect on their own style, so that they can have a better group discussion. A third strategy is to find creative ways to do what I call building the water cooler. Now, many of those are familiar with the concept of the office water cooler as a place where people informally gather to take a break, make small talk and share ideas. It might seem like unproductive time, but the water cooler serves an important social function. The informal rapport building team members engage in here helps them communicate more effectively in more formal work settings. The challenge with a remote team is that there may be no natural spontaneous place for them to gather. That means that you have to be proactive about creating what you can think of as a digital water cooler, where you recreate that space in a virtual setting. If your team uses a chat application like Gchat or Facebook Chat, you might create a separate section or thread where team members can post about their families or sports or the last movie they saw. You can also create this space by unofficially dedicating the first few minutes of meetings for social time. With any of these strategies the goal is to be even more intentional about creating an environment of good communication, because remote teams have fewer natural opportunities to do this. Having face time and water cooler discussions might seem like an unnecessary by-product of office life, but they're essential to getting the most out of your team, especially when they're scattered around the country or the globe. The more you can recreate that social function on a remote team, the more unified they'll be.
