Remote work has settled in the post-covid world for good and has changed the reality of the labour market. It brings many benefits, but employees must communicate effectively to use its potential fully. Find out what communication difficulties remote work brings and how to ensure communication in your organization to ensure its efficiency.
Effective communication is critical to the operation of any organization. The more people participate in the information exchange more communication errors can delay the progress of work and translate into losses. In the case of remote communication, efficient exchange of information is even more important.
In this article, you will find out the following:
Due to the asynchrony of long-distance communication, it brings a number of challenges. In addition, the limited ability to read emotions, especially in written communication, can cause difficulties reading the message's intention and, thus, correctly understanding the information conveyed.
Being aware of the difficulties associated with communication in remote and hybrid work, you can take care of them properly at the planning stage of remote work to save your company problems.
Asynchronous communication is one where, after sending a message, we don't expect an immediate response. This way of communication is slower, but if well organized, it can bring many benefits. However, you must establish appropriate rules for asynchronous communication to make it happen.
Asynchronous communication isn't for everyone. Remote workers should have relevant remote work competencies. Otherwise, asynchronous work may fail.
In dynamic organizations, where key decisions are made quickly, this work mode may not work. When one of the people responsible for the implementation of a part of the project works too slowly or slacks off, it blocks the work of others, which extends the time of project implementation. In the worst case, it leads to the company losses.
Working remotely and communicating via text messages or videoconferencing, we miss a lot of nuances related to non-verbal speech. While spoken words account for only 7% of the communication process, non-verbal speech accounts for 93% of this process – body language 55%, timbre and tone of voice 38%.
No wonder we can misunderstand each other by limiting ourselves to written messages. The lack of emotional context not only means that we can misunderstand the intentions of the message's author, but we can't understand him.
Employees who have a problem with writing communication: punctuation, grammar, the meaning of words and choosing the right words for the emotional message they're trying to express, may not find themselves in remote work. Their lack of communication skills can cause significant problems in understanding the message, which makes it difficult for the rest of the team to do the job correctly.
The social aspect of remote work shouldn't also be forgotten. In everyday office life, informal conversations over coffee, during lunch, or in the corridor come out spontaneously and contribute to getting to know people from the team better. Not only does it allow us to get to know the co-worker better as a person, but it also allows us to understand their non-verbal speech, which later results in better communication.
In remote work, these types of conversations don't come out spontaneously because people need a place or space to conduct them. Working from home is, therefore, work in solitude, which for some people – especially extroverts who love contact with others – can cause a lower mood or a sense of alienation.
When working in the office, it's easy to verify someone's presence – we see co-workers in the office, and we know that they are there and perform their duties. In the case of remote work, suitable employee time tracking tools are needed to be able to track the presence of employees when they perform duties from home.
Despite various ways of controlling an employee, it may happen that some of them will not perform their work properly and will have their communicator turned on, but instead of working, they will be doing something else. In remote work, trust plays a very important role. When it's missing, excessive control and stress will result in a deterioration of the quality of work.
Working from home, employees often have trouble separating work from their free time. This can cause them to work longer hours, and while this may seem like a good thing, it's an easy way to overwork and burn out.
Not only does burnout make an employee tired and less productive, but their mental state also hurts all areas of their life, which in turn causes additional stress and lowered mood that can lead to depression.
Despite all the difficulties associated with communication while working outside the office, if it's well organized and the difficulties mentioned above are addressed, remote work in the company can bring great results - saving money, creating a good work-life balance for employees, and creating high work efficiency. Check how to organize effective communication in remote work.
The first step to prepare for long-distance communication is setting up communication channels and rules for using them. Among the most commonly used remote communication channels are:
Each channel should be described so that employees know what kind of information they should pass on. Chat is a good place for asynchronous discussion, and ideas exchange on various topics, but it is not suitable as a place to store documents or important files.
To ensure good organization in the company, it's necessary to keep the communication channels in order. Every employee should have access to a document in which they can check at any time what kind of information they should provide through which channel if they have any doubts.
Once you have developed the communication channels, you also need to organize the tools that will allow you to use them. You can find many different proposals for chats, email clients or video messengers on the market. You probably already use some of them in your organization.
Nothing stands in the way of using them also for remote work, but you should remember to specify the rules for using them. When deciding on new tools, it's worth paying attention to integration with the programs already used in the company. This will allow you to build a tech stack that will ensure the flow of information, automate processes and increase the productivity of teams.
Each employee should be able to use the tools necessary for their work, but not everyone has the ability to use a computer at a high level. So you need to train your employees on how to use the tools to ensure that they are able to make the most of them.
When working remotely, the role of the manager changes. The ability to manage a distributed team becomes an extremely important skill on which the success of running a remote team depends. Managers, therefore, have even more responsibility than before.
The manager's tasks will include setting the schedule of meetings, checking the employee's presence and progress, and above all, supporting communication between team members and providing emotional support.
Managers should therefore undergo training that will allow them to acquire the skills necessary to lead a distributed team effectively. In case of problems, a manager is the first person an employee will ask for help. That's why they should be able to solve the problem.
Their responsibilities include issues such as:
Due to the asynchronous nature of remote work, organizing and scheduling video meetings is very important to ensure smooth work.
It's a good practice to establish cyclical (e.g. weekly or bi-weekly) meetings summarizing the work done so far – sprints. During them, employees talk about what has been done and plan tasks for the next sprint. They can exchange comments and jointly determine the direction of work. Meetings like this make sure everyone is up to date. They're also an excellent way to motivate employees.
Working remotely can have a positive or negative impact on employees. For this reason, regular 1:1 meetings with the manager, during which the employee has a chance to share his joys, sorrows, and fears about work, play a significant role. They allow the manager to control the work-life balance, well-being and emotional state of the employee. This information helps to reorganize the work or help the employee in other ways to ensure a comfortable working environment.
The Daily Status is another video meeting that helps ensure team progress. First of all, it allows employees to plan their working day, exchange necessary information and ask a team member for support. Such meetings don't have to be long – depending on the size of the team, 10-15 minutes should be enough. It's good to organize the meeting in the morning; it can also be carried out in the form of short written statuses on a selected communication channel.
Due to the limited opportunities for informal conversations between employees when working remotely, integration plays an extremely important role – it allows employees to get to know each other better and understand how they communicate. Thanks to this, employees will better understand their non-verbal messages.
As part of the integration, you can:
People are different, and therefore their preferences and habits regarding remote work are also different. Due to limited non-verbal speech, some messages may be misread, so it's good if employees get to know each other's preferences.
Starting from information such as preferred form of contact or weaknesses, which we don't talk about with everyone on a daily basis, to information about employment time. In such a place, employees can write down information on the preferred method of contact, meeting times, as well as any other information that will facilitate cooperation with others.
How to arrange it? For this purpose, it's best to use the Core HR Calamari module and its latest functionality – [Work with me] (https://calamari.io/blog/core-hr--work-with-me). Thanks to it, your employees can enter information about how they like to work, who they are, and what their preferences are in one convenient place and get to know each other, thanks to which they will be even more productive and better understand their colleagues.
Here is a list of some popular tools that make remote work communication easier and more effective.
Non-verbal speech is not only facial expressions and gestures. Remote communication, it takes on an entirely new dimension. All subtle signals we send to recipients, who – more or less consciously – receive them and, on their basis, assimilate the entire message, we include non-verbal speech.
In the case of distance communication, the first look at the profile picture, the way of filling the profile with content, a properly matched emoticon or the use of capital letters when addressing someone as "you" give the recipient many additional signals.
The challenge is both learning to read elements of non-verbal speech in the digital space and skilful use of these signals to match them to the message in accordance with our intentions. Both require work and experience. Until employees reach a certain level of competence on this basis, there will be difficulties in their online communication – but with time and with the help of supervisors aware of these difficulties, they will learn to find themselves in this reality.
For this reason, among others, providing employees with a place where they can tell something about themselves and write instructions for working with each other is a good practice that will shorten the time needed to learn about each other.
Using a camera during a videoconference is another good practice that allows you to maintain good relations and understanding between meeting participants. Eye contact is of great importance to us, and although many people do not feel comfortable in this way, in some situations, it is worth turning on the camera and focusing the gaze objectively – especially in the case of recruiting new employees, this form of the online meeting will be very beneficial.
Adding emoticons to statements is a well-known way to express emotions in online communication. Initially, they were used sparingly in business communication, but over time and with increasing digitization, they came into use for good.
They play a significant role in online communication – they allow the recipient of the message to easily add an emotional context to the statement, make it easier to emphasize jokes, irony and, improve our mood and make conversations seem closer, less formal – and therefore they help build relationships with co-workers and defuse the atmosphere.
Of course, not everyone perceives emoticons in the same way, so you should choose them carefully and not overuse those that – instead of complementing the message – can be misleading. If we have our favourite set of emojis, it is worth – as part of the place where we can write something about ourselves – to add a bunch of the most frequently used faces and describe what they mean to us. This will make it even easier to understand us and thus have a positive impact on team communication and work productivity.
Proper behaviour in a place and situation such as an online meeting is the same good manners that we require from each other during face-to-face meetings. Therefore it's worth learning a few simple rules that will ensure a good atmosphere and respect between the participants of the remote meeting.
Despite the many challenges posed by communication in remote work, good organization and establishing appropriate channels and rules for the exchange of information will make the organization work productively, and employees will be able to get along and work together even from two different ends of the world.
If you want to ensure good communication regarding employee attendance and holidays, try Calamari for 14 days for free and see how much it will help you manage your remote team.
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