Successful collaboration stems from trust and positive relationships between employees. Taking steps to build that trust between employees will ultimately improve your team’s efficiency when working together on tasks or projects. Although our work environments have drastically changed, it is still very possible to boost collaboration among your team in a remote setting.
Encourage the sharing of helpful tips or wins and shoutouts through a company knowledge base or live stream.
Make sure that everyone on your team has access to a common platform for conversation for quick and easy communication. One great communication platform we recommend for your workplace is Slack. Channels like this are a great place to congratulate your employees or shout them out, and encourage team members to join in and do so as well.
Schedule standing check-up meetings with the team.
Take some time every week to periodically review with your team what has been working well, and challenges being experienced. Use this time to brainstorm together how to solve new challenges and leverage what is working well. Discussing the team’s progress through video chat or on the phone will help so that everyone receives useful feedback from each other.
Schedulenoncheck-up meetings with the team.
Meetings don’t always have to be discussing only work-related topics! For example, team lunches over video chat could occur on Thursday afternoons at 12:00. The idea is that you want to maintain social interaction and encourage “break” time with co-workers, just as you would be doing in a physical workplace. We also recommend trying thesevirtual team-building activities:
- 2 Truths and a Lie: each person shares three “facts” about them, one being a lie. Have the rest of the participants guess which is the lie.
- Fun Fact Guessing Game: have every employee submit a fun fact about themselves anonymously, and then have everyone guess who’s fact is who’s.
- Virtual Happy Hour: everyone grab a drink and chat about their week!
- Show and Tell: each employee chooses an interesting or meaningful object in their home and talk about why they have it.
- Virtual Book Club: choose a book with a small group and schedule a time to discuss it!
Here are some more virtual team-building activities that every remote leader can utilize.
Set up reciprocal mentoring relationships, buddy systems, and accountability partnerships etc.
Activities like these will help people develop a vested interest in each other’s success. Sometimes, it can be much more meaningful for employees when they learn from their peers. Oftentimes, success is best reached when combining ideas with someone else and receiving their input and feedback.
Create Team Lead rotations.
By switching up team leaders, different supervisors and employees can get to know one another better and thus encourage cross-departmental interaction. If you feel like the separate teams or departments within your workplace have too little positive interaction, this could be a great way to improve relationships between employees and collaborative efforts.
What tips do you have to keep employees engaged and collaborating with one another? Let us know!For more tips on all things staffing and hiring, check out ourEmployer Tipsor contact us at mglenny@franklinprofessionals.com.
