3 Tips to Improve Remote Team Communication

Managing a project team comes with plenty of challenges. When your project team is remote, you have additional hurdles with productivity, time zone differences, and communication breakdowns. Here are three easy ways to improve remote team communication.

Keep Everyone in the Loop

In a remote team you can’t just yell over the cubicle wall when you’ve finished your part of a project. You need another way to coordinate efforts with your team. According to research by Capterra, project management software increases workplace communication by 52%. Leverage tools like automatic notifications to make sure that everyone knows about status changes and updates.

Establish Times That Work For Everyone

When you’re working across global time zones, getting the team together can be hard. As part of your project team formation, you should identify times that work for everyone’s schedules, and set those times aside for those project meetings. Even if you don’t have a team meeting scheduled, your team can use that time to collaborate on project tasks in a time that works for everyone.

Avoid Tool Overload

The marketplace is full of tools to help remote team communication. It’s easy for project managers to add all the new tools to try to support their team. But between trying to keep up with emails, Slack, Skype, Hipchat, WhatsApp, Lync (and the list goes on), your team spends more time checking apps than communicating. Instead, focus on one or two tools that integrate with your project management system to keep your team aligned.

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Your whole team needs access to your project plans and communication tools to keep your project moving along effectively. This means getting your projects out of spreadsheets and local solutions, and into an application that they can access anytime they’re working. All of these work together to help imrove remote team communication.