Top Collaboration Skills Your Remote Design Team Should Have
If you have a remote design team, you know that managing it and keeping its productivity high is easier said than done. Remote employees are more difficult to manage because of their limited workplace engagement and poor communication with co-workers.
A simple question that could be asked and answered conveniently in a physical environment should now be sent via messages and emails and would probably be left unanswered for a while. Or the answer might not be well understood through text.
In this article, I’ll explain four collaboration skills your remote design team should have in order to increase engagement, improve communication efficiency and produce better results.
1. Objectives and milestones
The first set of skills I’m going to explain is related to understanding project objectives and milestones. These skills are necessary for increasing the productivity of your team.
In project management, objectives are the end goals a project is trying to achieve. These are the results the whole team is responsible for. Milestones are the places in a project’s timeline that mark the end of a phase or achievement. And deliverables are what you expect individual team members to complete and deliver in a period of time. Regardless of the project management tools you use, you should have all this data integrated into the system for current and later use.
Before your team starts a project, it’s necessary for them to understand project objectives, milestones, and deliverables so that they can do their best to achieve them.
Research shows that “knowing what’s expected” from employees is probably the most basic employee need and very important for their performance. To make sure your team has a good understanding of your objectives and goals, you can use the SMART framework to convey them in the best possible way. SMART stands for:
S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Achievable (or attainable, actionable, appropriate)
R = Realistic
T = Time-bound (or timely, traceable)
2. Your team’s understanding skills: the 3 R’s
A great deal of your team members’ understanding of a project’s objectives and milestones is dependent on their own understanding skills, the skills that could be referred to as the “three R’s”: reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Can your team members read proposals, PDF documents, graphs, charts, or any other documents and understand them well? Can they prepare these documents if they’re asked to report? Can they do the math when you present them with budget and expense numbers or do any kind of calculation if they need to?
It’s extremely important that your remote team members are competent in these skills if you want to avoid hopping on calls and explaining every project detail in person all the time. Your team should be able to understand expectations explained in the project proposals.
Collaborating learning is a good solution. An employee development plan (EDP) can help a lot here especially for bigger teams. Here’s a blueprint for a suitable EDP:
1- Identify your business goals: what’s your business planning to achieve in the long run? This will help you determine what skills your employees should have to achieve your goals.
2- Conduct a skill gap analysis: determine the skills your employees should have for achieving business goals and analyze the current state of your employees’ skill set by giving them tests, surveying them, etc. You can take your performance appraisal to the next level and use some tools designed for this.
3- Talk to employees: apart from the objective tests and analyses, you need to talk to your employees and see what they think of their skill set and its gaps, and how they think they can improve them. This will equip you to help them achieve their personal goals as well. 4- Deciding on training: based on your findings from the previous steps, you must be able to devise a tailored training program for your employees. Giving employees special assignments and projects, working with a subject matter expert through one-on-one coaching or online courses, and creating local networking groups are some suggestions. Your training program should have five components:
5- create a written plan and revise if necessary: writing down your plan makes it possible for your employees to know the objectives and milestones, their performance during the plan, and their shortcomings. A written plan helps you to track your progress and make necessary changes based on the results you’ve got.
3. Communication skills:
Successful teams know how to communicate their expectations and issues effectively. As a manager, it is your responsibility to communicate what you expect from each member of your team and give them feedback on their work.
The first step is to develop communication rules. Dmytro Okunyev, the founder of Chanty, explains, “there’s no agreed-upon etiquette in the teams which were forced to go remote and this is something that should be addressed. If you have driving rules, why not develop a set of rules for remote team communication? These rules will add clarity to any team.”
Expert project managers use a communication plan to set the communication rules and expectations.
A communication plan is where you can define what should be communicated and to who, when it should be communicated, what goals a successful communication should achieve, etc.
- Include a list of people involved in the project alongside their roles and responsibilities, and provide their contact information.
- Define a main communication channel (such as email or Slack) and designate a time frame in which team members should be available through that channel.
- Schedule occasional meetings with team members and discuss progress and provide feedback on their current work.
4. Time management:
Every project has a deadline you don’t want to miss. So it’s very important that your team members know the deadline and can manage their time to deliver the project before that. For a remote team, time management could be difficult because team members are working from home and are more prone to distractions. Here are some time-management tips for your remote team:
Limit multitasking: multitasking is demanding both at personal and team level. That’s why you need to limit multitasking. Prioritize the tasks that should be done and assign them to team members in a way that reduces burn-out. Limiting multitasking is a top time-saving technique.
Don’t micromanage: as much as we like to take control of every task we assign to people and encourage perfection, it only frustrates team members. Believe in your team members and let them complete tasks the way they feel comfortable. You’d be amazed at how efficiently and timely the task is completed.
Do planning right: the goal of planning before execution is to reduce possible errors, define roles and assign tasks, determine objectives and milestones, all of which help reduce the time spent on completing the project.
Use the right tools: the right time tracking tools could make it easy for your team to deliver projects on-time. Project management tools are also necessary. It’s nearly impossible to use the phone or email all the time for managing projects and completing tasks.
If you’re new to project management, you can definitely take advantage of PM tools for small businesses. The possibilities for file sharing, planning, project boards, task allocation and management, and most importantly efficient communication make these tools ideal for time management. They give you more insight and more structure, and reduce repetition and guessing according to Process.st.
To wrap it up:
Your remote design team can function better if the team members have the right collaboration skills. These skills include understanding project objectives and milestones, having good reading, writing, and arithmetic to make sense of your project proposals better, being great communicators, and time management. Make it clear to your team members that they need to improve these skills, and invest in the right training programs and courses to improve these skills in your team members.
