How to Foster Collaboration in Remote Teams

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Remote teams are one of the best solutions for growing technical creative businesses. They can enhance time management and increase productivity in the workplace (or out of the workplace as the case may be). In fact, in the UK, more workers are opting for remote work and businesses are also reaping the benefits.

However, managing a remote team and fostering collaboration is essential for it to work. The solutions you choose can determine how effective your remote team setup is at enhancing your business productivity.

Let’s have a quick look at the benefits of a remote team and how to foster and manage collaboration in your remote teams.

Post Title - How to Foster Collaboration in Technical Creative Remote Teams

4 benefits of a remote team

It’s often surprising how much you can accomplish as a company and as a team when you have a remote team.

  • Scalability: You can add members to your team as needed, including through freelancing or outsourcing. You can also more easily scale your access to creative content software based in the cloud.
  • Cost-effectiveness: You can reduce overheads when you don’t need to have all team members housed in a specific location. Moving to cloud-based collaborative tools can also reduce costs.
  • Productivity: Some persons just work best outside an office setting. Being able to work on the go ensures projects can be completed whether or not you’re in the office.
  • Retention: There is a lower employee turnover rate with remote teams.
  • Flexibility: Remote teams offer more flexibility in getting projects completed.

Fostering collaboration in your remote team

Managing a creative team requires effortless collaboration between team members. Finding tools that allow for collaboration helps to increase efficiency, time management, and productivity. For example, your senior architects may each have remote teams reporting directly to them for specific projects. Your senior architects need to be able to keep in touch with their team and manage their projects virtually. You also need to be able to track the progress of each project.

That’s where the various tools you use to manage your remote teams make a difference. There are many cloud-based project management SaaS services. And we’ve covered several in our post on productivity tools and project management software. But here are two of our favourites that increase productivity.

Slack

Slack is a highly scalable virtual office for every size remote teams and locations. It offers an excellent opportunity to collaborate but also keep work streamlined for better monitoring. It’s compatible with Mac users and very versatile. You can brainstorm, coordinate creative ideas, and manage client projects all in the same space.

Support image (man on laptop and phone) depicting remote worker communicating as part of remote teams for technical creatives.
Photo by Bruce Mars on Unsplash

Skype for Business

Skype for business is a versatile communication software-as-a-service tool for remote teams. It’s also handy for alleviating one of the issues with remote teams – a lack of affinity from team members. Text messaging/IMs cannot support collaboration or affinity in a remote team environment. However, with regular video calls, team members feel much more connected and can build a rapport that supports productivity in the virtual workplace.

Accessing Company and Client Information

In addition to collaboration, information access is critical for a remote team’s success. Remote server access is, therefore, necessary where you need to connect users to your company’s internal local area network (LAN). Where team members are not co-located, having reliable and secure information access and collaborative tools ensure they can function.

Just make sure you have a business-appropriate VPN network to guide your remote team and not compromise productivity or time management for your technical creative business.

Ready to set up your remote team the right way?

As a creative enterprise, you should be taking advantage of the benefits of remote teams since it’s use is on the rise. your access to information in a remote team determines how well your business operates. It’s important to ensure that your systems are set up from the start to enable productivity and efficiency.

As Mac specialists based in London, we work on-site and remotely with technical creatives. Our services help to optimise their business processes and structures for optimal productivity. Let’s discuss what you need to get your remote team ready for your creative enterprise.