5 Awesome Ways to Turn Your Virtual Team Meeting Into Success
Tags: Remote Working, Employee Engagement, Employee Experience, Work, Leadership

If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the pandemic that rocked the year 2020, it’s the fact that people can work safely from the corner of their homes and be effective. Remote working isn’t limited to working alone. People can work in a group from their different locations — remote/virtual teams.

Remote working isn’t limited to working alone.

Virtual teams are referred to as a group of people that work in collaboration from different places and time zones and communicate via virtual communication tools.

For many businesses, remote teams are now a matter of necessity beyond just setting up virtual team meetings. Something tangible must come out of it. This is what defines the success of your virtual team. How do you ensure that your virtual team meetings succeed? Here are five incredible ways:

Set up a good communication strategy

Communication is the soul of any growing business. Having a good strategy in place to ensure effective communication among team members is fundamental to success. Without this, there will be a clear lack of coordination and the absence of transparency in your virtual team members. The only thing that this can lead to is consistent failure to bring in successful outcomes. This is detrimental to the growth and success of the company.

There are four essential things that a working communication strategy would focus on. These are:

Only information that is relevant and factually correct is shared.

Everyone that needs to get the information gets it in due time.

The data or information is easy to understand for the recipient.

The recipients of the information are encouraged to show some communication skills to a reasonable level.

Choose the right technology.

Your communication strategy is only as good as the technology you choose to execute it. If you aren’t a virtual team member, you might not know how important communication is for engagement and team building.

The fact that you can’t just walk into the other person’s cubicle, space, or office to discuss little things will make you quickly appreciate how communication helps a team function properly.

Ordinarily, you will expect the team performance to suffer without the usual face-to-face or one-on-one interactions. This is why you need to have a practical communication toolbox that helps remote team members continue to communicate effectively.

A good communication toolbox should contain the following essential communication technologies:

Video conference tools to conduct virtual meetings. Typical examples are Zoom, Google Hangouts, or Google Meet. Chat tool to build relationships across the teams, such as Slack or Skype. Scheduling app to keep team members informed about each other’s schedules, e.g. Google Calendar. File sharing tools such as Dropbox and Google Drive. An agile project management tool to help the team be on track with future projects and ensuring accountability for tasks and goals. Tools for sharing recognition and motivation, like Hi5.

Track commitments and goals

According to a study involving 70 virtual teams, 33% think they are mostly unsuccessful, and 82% didn’t achieve their goal.

The primary reason for this is the absence of productivity measures. Having a remote team calls for more accountability than an excuse to throw it out the window.

Accountability is vital to business success.

Managers, therefore, have to set clear goals and commitments for their remote working employees. Setting SMART goals is a must. Employees need to know what the company’s expectations are.

It’s also necessary to have a precise system that you can use to assess employees’ performance. Tracking employee performance will make it easy to hold them accountable for their work and help gather the information to maximize productivity.

Micromanaging is something that managers have to avoid.

It is a part of the manager’s work to encourage virtual team members to stick to their commitments. This helps them build trust and relationships among team members.

Appreciate your virtual team members

Virtual team members often deserve much more recognition than they usually get. Although they tend to balance their work and life better than others, remote workers need that appreciation and connection from their co-workers and management. It’s much harder for a remote employee with flexible working hours to understand how significant they are to the team’s success compared to their 9–5 office counterparts who get recognised on-the-job.

With the current pandemic we are going through, we have to pay more attention to the positives. Employees who have to work through these times while continuing to deliver good results deserve appreciation as frequently as possible.

This appreciation will go beyond making their day to helping them understand that you care about them.

Be the right leader

It is common now that managers who have previous experience of heading a remote team will have more success the second time than the first. However, even if you have never managed a virtual team before, you must have the necessary leadership qualities to see you through:

Trust building

As a virtual team leader, you will not be able to control your team members or their circumstances. You have to show respect to all of them, and empathy will always come in handy, too.

Practice open communication

Once you can establish trust among members of the remote team, open communications become a thing. One way to do this is to ask an open ice-breaking question before your virtual meeting starts. It can be as simple as asking how their day is going so far.

Be present

This is the most important. It is essential for your team members and the company that you are present. You will be able to guide them through the difficulties they may face. You might be by yourself working remotely, but you have a responsibility to be there for your team.

Conclusion

Now, more than ever before, remote teams are essential to the success of a company. So, you need to ensure their success in their work. What we’ve discussed in this article are some of the best ways to ensure the success of a remote team. All in all, communication is a significant factor, and it’s vital that you also use the right technology.