Cross-functional collaboration is vital for the success of a remote team. Unfortunately, according to a study published in the Harvard Business Review 75% of the time, a cross-functional team is dysfunctional.

Yet, OWL Labs claimed that in 2019, individual contributors in the United States were 20% more likely than average to work remotely full-time.

The rise of remote work has ushered in a new era of team dynamics where geographical distance is no longer a limitation in access to top talent. America is particularly fast-tracking through the curve in remote working. With that in mind, finding ways to improve cross-functional collaboration between the disciplines on your team becomes increasingly important as online workers’ demand and accessibility continue to increase. The ability to collaborate well across departments is now key to ensuring that virtual teams are not only productive but also innovative and adaptable.

Ultimately, strong cross-functional collaboration in remote teams leads to better problem-solving, faster decision-making, and a more cohesive working environment that can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

Importance of cross-functional collaboration

A cross-functional team is a group of team members from various departments that combine diverse skill sets to work on a project or pursue a shared objective.

Being in a cross-functional team has many advantages, but it also has drawbacks for any organization.

A cross-functional team may feature individuals who each bring conflicting work methods and working approaches to the table.

Cross-functional collaboration promotes efficiency within the company, lowers expenses, and fosters adaptability and innovative problem-solving. Most importantly, it keeps everyone focused on the long-term objectives of the business.

Project managers and team leaders must establish ground principles for the group, lay out a precise procedure for making decisions, and promote open communication and flexibility to overcome these obstacles.

However, it’s essentially important and advantageous if executed properly.

A cross-functional team collaboration can help team members achieve the following:

• Teamwork makes the dream work
• Team members are more productive
• Team members learn from each other
• Diverse ideas and skill sets are brought to the table
• Employees can build better leadership skills

Tips on improving cross-functional collaboration

The reality is that an effective cross-functional team necessitates trust.

Building a trusting relationship with someone when you labor in the same space together is challenging enough.

When teams from various departments are working together, this challenge gets progressively harder.

We’ve compiled a list of 5 easy steps that have helped us create a genuinely collaborative environment to give you ideas on how you can improve cross-team collaboration in your company.

Clear task-handling guidelines

Clear guidelines on how to handle project tasks are vital for organizing a cross-discipline team and enabling them to collaborate effectively.

Simple organizational steps such as color-coding tasks in your team app based on ownership, or the skill sets required, and assigning sub-tasks to individual team members, help everyone know which tasks they need to focus on.

Additionally, you should also have a system in place that everyone follows for noting the priority and deadline of each task. This helps the team to work together on the most important tasks to ensure progress isn’t held up.

Similarly, get everyone on your team into the habit of updating tasks with the latest progress and marking tasks as in progress when they get started on them. This helps encourage a more proactive approach to cross-functional collaboration by keeping team members updated on what their colleagues are working on.

Chanty provides each team member with personalized feeds for their messages and tasks, making it easy to prioritize each individual’s workload while keeping them updated on other tasks that might need their skills.

Making sure everyone starts their day with clear tasks and priorities, and an awareness of their colleagues’ progress, enables them to work and collaborate more efficiently. Jumping between tasks can cost as much as 40% of your team’s daily productivity, so clear prioritization can have significant benefits.

Expand your communication methods

Your team can’t collaborate if they can’t communicate effectively. 30% of projects fail due to poor communication. There are a variety of methods remote teams can use to keep in touch. These include:

Team chat apps
Business messaging apps are crucial for the day-to-day discussions and updates that keep a project running smoothly. In addition to private and group messaging functions, team chat apps offer a range of tools and integrations that help you manage tasks and schedule work.

These features can help your team members take the initiative in organizing collaborative work by creating tasks themselves and inviting colleagues to them. For example, Chanty lets users turn any message into a task, making discussions and feedback flow seamlessly into collaborative tasks.

VoIP and video calling
VoIP and video calls can take up too much time as a daily communication channel, however in critical discussions and personal meetings these can enable team members to communicate with more clarity and understand each other better through intonation and facial expressions.

The ability to take screen recordings and share a screen over video calls is a vital collaborative tool, enabling team members to demonstrate features, changes and feedback visually to the rest of the team.

When you are talking and seeing the colleague you are communicating with, it is easier to get your point across. 87% of remote workers feel more connected to their team thanks to video conferencing.

Text messaging
Texting is very useful for sending out critical alerts, updates, and reminders to your team. In a study by West Virginia State University, participants were 4 times as likely to prefer receiving important updates and notices via text.

By scheduling important messages and integrating an SMS app with your other productivity tools, you can ensure team members never miss an important message. To avoid disrupting employees’ private time in a remote team, make sure to use a texting app that automatically takes time zones into account when scheduling messages.

Each communication channel offers unique benefits, so make sure you use each to its strengths.

Create a culture of knowledge sharing

A key component to successful cross-functional working is unobstructed knowledge throughout teams. Having members from each team contribute insight and expertise keeps the departments intertwined and avoids information becoming walled up within itself. This not only enables the information to be more shared, but also creates the team a more effective problem-solver and innovator. Each member brings something unique to the table, and the more that is shared around, the higher the collaborative decision-making.

One of the best ways to facilitate this is by setting up spaces for knowledge sharing. Experiment with establishing channels where people can share valuable articles, tips, or good project experiences. These could be as simple as a Slack channel for best practices or even something more formalized such as a knowledge base accessible to everyone. The idea is to make it easy for people to share and find what they need.

Incentivizing the practice will also increase participation. Recognition and rewarding people who contribute valuable information, either through shout-outs at team meetings or through a more formal reward system, enforces the notion that knowledge sharing is an important aspect of the team culture. When people understand that their contributions are valued, they’re more likely to continue sharing, and therefore it becomes an organic and sustainable aspect of team dynamics.

By building a culture where everyone shares knowledge, you build a better, more robust team that can bounce back from adversity faster and better.

Create teamwork opportunities for cross-functional collaboration

Improving cross-functional collaboration in a remote team requires proactively scheduling meetings and discussions between the different disciplines in your team. In addition to opening group discussions in your chat app to solve specific problems or work on tasks, give weekly updates on project progress.

Encourage team members to do the same, updating the team with their milestones and roadblocks. This makes it easier for employees to see where a colleague needs help and step in before the project falls behind schedule. A brief weekly check-in meeting with your team helps your team stay motivated in addition to avoiding delays.

An off-topic chat channel is also important in a remote team. It enables employees to build relationships with each other, which can impact their willingness to share ideas and feedback. Isolation can be a major communication challenge for remote workers, so encouraging friendly conversation is also important for maintaining a healthy and productive team.

Reward achieved milestones and goals within each project

Rewarding goals and milestones helps foster team spirit by giving the team opportunities to notice and congratulate each other’s work and achievements.

Everyone enjoys getting recognition for their efforts, and in addition to the boost to morale and productivity, this also helps team members see how their work fits into the bigger picture.

Furthermore, individuals will have more confidence to provide their input in group discussions, enabling the team to benefit more from their skills and perspectives. While you can’t always put every suggestion into practice, making it clear you value everyone’s input will lead to team members sharing their ideas more often.

Teams that communicate effectively are 4.5 times as likely to retain their best employees.

Encourage cross-department pairing or mentorship

Pairing team members from various departments is a good method to build a more unified and powerful team. When people of various functions meet and interact with one another, they have a firsthand understanding of the role, problem, and priority of one another. Such interaction not only generates mutual respect but also encourages better communication between departments.

Pairing or mentoring allows employees to leave their usual area of activity and get a broader idea of how the business operates. For example, a marketing individual is able to better understand the technical details of the business through being paired with a developer, and a finance staff member is able to understand more about what customers require through being paired with a sales person. These interactions create a more holistic view of the firm, encouraging workers to think beyond their own functions and collaborate better.

Mentorship initiatives are especially money well spent for establishing long-term relationships between departments. They provide a structured means through which workers can learn from each other, challenge things, and share pointers. Not only can a successful mentor advance the career of his or her mentee, but he or she also helps get his or her mentee oriented with the big picture of the company. This can lead to improved coordination between teams and improved cooperation.

Through buddy pairing or mentorship, the employees will be more at ease requesting help, sharing ideas, and stepping in where others require help. Such a collaboration creates a closer team relationship and eventually delivers better project outcomes.

Scheduling in a remote team

Remote teams give you access to talent across the globe, but you also need to consider time zones. In a small team, having a 10-hour time difference between team members could be a major productivity killer if their work needs lots of feedback or input from other team members.

Wherever your team members are located, try to coordinate at least a few hours of crossover between team members’ working hours. Otherwise, team members could be waiting until their next work day to get a reply to each of their messages.

On a cross-functional task or project, that can make even simple tasks take far longer than they should.

In a global team, holding meetings or group discussions can mean that someone has to get up early or attend the meeting late in the evening. To some extent, this is a necessary sacrifice, but don’t expect your workers in distant time zones to make that sacrifice every time.

This can leave them feeling treated unfairly or a less valuable team member, making them less willing to share ideas and collaborate.

Remote working technology potentially gives you 24/7 access to your team, but it might not be a good idea to use it this way. If your team members feel expected to be online and available to reply at any time, they could find it difficult to relax and recharge.

85% of remote workers chose remote work to have greater flexibility with their time, so avoid encroaching into your team’s offline time outside critical situations. According to a 2019 Buffer survey, unplugging after work is the biggest challenge for remote workers.

Why you should implement cross-functional collaboration

There are plenty of ways to keep a remote team focused and working together on a project. Improving cross-functional collaboration involves providing the tools to communicate effectively in every situation, setting clear expectations and responsibilities, and building an environment that encourages and supports open communication and discussion by recognizing and rewarding achievements.

When used correctly, cross-functional collaboration can significantly increase both productivity and innovation. It combines diverse expertise from multiple departments into cross-functional teams to creatively solve a given problem or project. Innovative ideas would be unlikely to come from a team made up of people from just one functional area. Collaboration makes participants work together for a common interest, which motivates individual employees with a heightened desire to participate in whatever is put forward.

With a global team, you can avoid potential efficiency problems by scheduling your team’s time so they can communicate and making sure everyone feels treated fairly to avoid demotivation. The cross-functional collaboration will also make the team more adaptable and flexible. Exactly for these reasons, cross-functional teams, with their wider access to people’s expertise and knowledge base, have the potential to respond to many different challenges and changes and adjust strategies as they are more resilient in times of change.

Besides, working across functions improves knowledge sharing and encourages continuous learning. When team members from different functions work together, they often get exposure to areas they would not normally be exposed to, thus widening their horizons about the business and developing their professional skills. This does not only benefit the individuals but also the team as a whole, making them more versatile and skilled.

Most importantly, successful cross-functional teams foster closer, less fragmented relationships within an organization, which can lead to a more inclusive and collaborative culture. Cross-departmental collaboration will also boost team morale; people get excited when they can work as part of a diverse mix, where many different kinds of people bring different kinds of strengths to their work.

Final note

Improving cross-functional collaboration between remote teams is the way to ensure productivity, innovation, and team spirit. You can keep your team aligned and motivated by establishing crystal-clear guidelines on each task, extending channels of communication, and holding regular check-ins. Recognizing achievement while respecting time zones further solidifies collaboration, building an effective, cohesive remote team. Armed with the right toolset and methodology, cross-functional collaboration could be your panacea for getting your remote team working at full capacity.

Ready to take your remote team collaboration to the next level? Try these tips today and your team will thrive, no matter where they are.

According to Global Workplace Analytics, the number of people who work from home has grown by more than 173% since 2005. There are now over five million remote employees in the U.S.

The emergence of the coronavirus pandemic prompted stay-at-home orders, and work-related tasks have become challenging for those who struggle with managing remote teams. 

Some employees find it hard to create a work-life balance now that they work from home. For some, productivity has dropped simply because they can’t get motivated in the morning. These considerations are important because your workforce’s performance will impact your company’s overall success.

While the “office feeling” can cause employees to perform better as there’s little room for distractions, the current environment means there’s a need to learn how to manage a remote team for outstanding results.

The challenges of managing remote teams

As common as remote working is nowadays, team managers still face challenges when managing remote teams.

Several companies didn’t have work-from-home plans on their agenda until the global pandemic caused them to adapt to these new ways of managing their employees. 

Here are some of the challenges of managing remote teams: 

• Poor communication
• Ignorance of company culture 
• No progress tracking
• Lack of trust 
• Scheduling difficulties
• Low productivity
• Less work energy
• No live get-togethers

You can solve these problems with the right remote working management practices. 

Below, we’ll describe the best practices on how to manage a remote team.

How to manage a remote team

1. Set expectations
2. Build communication channels
3. Schedule daily check-ins
4. Provide team access to the same collaboration tools
5. Provide resources
6. Encourage social interactions
7. Show flexibility and empathy
8. Be a leader instead of just a boss
9. Advocate for mental health days
10. Organize regular career catch-ups
11. Take breaks
12. Label business information for easy prioritization
13. Track company progress
14. Celebrate success

There are thousands of managers and team leaders who have suddenly found themselves managing remote teams. 

Adapting to this new work style can be scary, especially if there isn’t enough time to prepare for the change. However, if you know how to manage remote teams the right way, you’ll get the best results from your remote workers.

Here are our fourteen best actionable tips for effectively managing remote teams:

1. Set clear expectations 

Learning how to manage a remote team starts with setting boundaries and work rules your employees should adhere to as they work from home. 

Let your team know what you expect from them. These expectations can be in the form of:

• Company culture
• Working procedures
• Project guidelines
• Style guides
• Communication rules
• Relationship building

Just as in a traditional office workspace, managers are expected to keep workers up-to-date on staffing changes and policies. Although it’s essential to see how well team members meet expectations, don’t oversee their actions too closely, as that can breed distrust. Some automatic time tracking apps like Traqq allow for ethical monitoring – captured screenshots and videos are intentionally blurred, so personal and sensitive information cannot be seen.

Another effective practice of managing remote teams is modeling work activities around your employees’ working hours. Keep in mind, team updates may vary based on time zones and preferred work hours, so set expectations for team members in regards to communication. This helps ensure a smooth workflow across different time zones and prevents delays caused by misaligned schedules.

2. Build communication channels

We can’t overemphasize the importance of communication between managers and remote staff when learning how to manage a remote team. 

Create a reliable communication channel for managing remote teams. This will be where you alert your remote workers of important items such as:

• Changes
• New resources 
• Schedules 
• Deadlines 
• Challenges 
• Principles

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Perhaps most importantly, consider which communication tool is suited to your company’s needs. For example, should you do video chats, phone calls, voice messages, or simply texts? 

While managing remote teams, ensure you find that delicate balance between continually pinging employees and delegating workflow by setting up automation. This ensures a streamlined communication process without overwhelming your team members.

The following tips will help you build effective communication channels for managing remote teams successfully:

• Consider your company’s culture
• Use communication channels with good reviews
• Experiment with different channels 
• Evaluate your delivery methods, such as video calls, e-mails, or texts

3. Schedule daily check-ins

Scheduling daily check-ins may seem like overkill, but it is vital to ensure workforce performance. In addition, it improves time management while managing remote teams.

When you schedule check-ins, you give yourself a break from constant overseeing, allow your team to be more accountable, and reduce unattended projects. You can use scheduling software to simplify this task.

Your check-ins don’t necessarily have to be daily — schedule check-ins based on what works best for your team, pending projects, and work hours. Be flexible in your approach, considering how your team adapts to remote work and how often they need updates.

Automate notifications to be sent through emails or instant messaging apps like Skype to each member on the specific days they’re expected to check-in.

4. Give the team access to the same collaboration tools

Collaboration tools are essential for managing remote teams — they help team members communicate, manage tasks, and stay aligned across time zones and work styles.

To keep things running smoothly, make sure everyone is working within the same ecosystem. Whether it’s for messaging, task tracking, or file sharing, tools like Chanty, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello, and Asana offer flexible ways to support collaboration and reduce confusion across your team.

The key here isn’t just about choosing one tool over another — it’s about creating consistency. Don’t have one employee using a completely different platform than their teammate who’s doing the same work. Aligning your tools keeps communication clear, reduces duplication, and saves your team from wasting time juggling different systems.

And once the tools are in place, support your team with the know-how to use them. A little onboarding, a quick walkthrough, or a shared best-practices doc can go a long way in making these tools actually work for your team — not against them.

5. Provide resources

As a business owner or manager looking to learn how to manage a remote team, ensure you provide resources to help your team grow and handle tasks more efficiently. 

Some of the essential resources for managing remote teams include:

• Books and e-books
• Blog posts and articles
• Courses
• Templates
• Webinars
• Tools and software

With several businesses online, equipping your employees with these resources will set them up for success and increase productivity. Investing in their professional development shows that you value their growth, which in turn boosts morale and performance.

6. Encourage social interaction

Regardless of the physical distance between your employees, social interaction is an effective method to manage a remote team.

You can hold virtual parties, online hangouts, joint brainstorming video conferencing, and welcome sessions to build positive intrapersonal and interpersonal workplace relationships. 

Managing remote teams includes creating time for your remote workers to connect and cooperate among themselves. This helps make teamwork effortless and productive, as they build relationships and look out for each other. Fostering this sense of community is crucial for combating isolation and keeping team spirits high.

7. Show flexibility and empathy

You should understand that your team members don’t all have the same working environment. Some may have spouses and children, and others may not. 

Some have standard home offices, and others might work from anywhere — their yard, bedroom, or favorite coffee shop.

Keeping this in mind will help you be more flexible and empathetic in managing remote teams.

If your team members are sick or have a life crisis, you should understand their circumstances. It shows that you’re human and care about them.

Due to business shifting to remote working from the typical office workspace, managers should acknowledge stress, distractions, and rate of adaptability. Then, exercise flexibility in task supervision while managing remote teams. Understanding these individual needs will help you offer the support your team members need to thrive.

8. Be a leader instead of just a boss

The best team managers know how vital it is to coach and mentor their employees rather than just manage them. They know how to lead by example.

While it’s essential to set down rules and uphold discipline, your team members should find you approachable too.

Set yourself as a leader rather than just a boss. Leaders carry their followers every step instead of sending their followers to the forefront without setting the pace. 

Here’s what you should do as a leader:

• Embody your company’s values
• Show integrity
• Ask for team members’ opinions
• Respect your remote workers
• Show your employees that you value their efforts
• Be flexible and empathetic
• Organize seminars to improve team knowledge
• Hold open-ended conversations with your team
• Request employee feedback and adjust accordingly

9. Advocate for mental health days 

The World Health Organization (WHO) found that poor productivity due to anxiety and depression cost the world $1 trillion every year. However, it also found that for every $1 invested in mental health, there’s $4 worth of improvement in health and productivity.

As a team manager, the mental health of your employees should be of utmost concern, especially since they will deliver better results when they have sound health and feel supported.

Our levels of tolerance and adaptability vary, and you should consider these factors when managing remote teams. 

While some workers might find it easy to adapt to remote working, project guidelines, and company regulations, some may need more time to get accustomed to how you handle working from home.

Team members who need more time to adjust to the remote environment might deal with mental health concerns if they continue to work under pressure. 

Some of your employees might be going through a challenging life crisis and become torn between attending to their challenges and keeping their jobs. This could take a mental toll on them if not quickly and adequately addressed.

How to manage a remote team in this regard is to advocate for mental health days — workdays you set aside to help improve your employees’ psychological wellbeing. 

The following are ways you can support your remote team members’ mental health:

• Offer mental health employee benefits
• Encourage open communication and team building
• Have a psychotherapist you can refer employees to
• Use project management tools to simplify tasks
• Share self-care resources
• Socialize virtually
• Send mental health and job stress surveys
• Encourage breaks
• Plan in-person team meetings to catch up (when it’s safe to do so)
• Advocate physical fitness
• Encourage work-life balance
• Be flexible and approachable
• Reward employees’ work

10. Organize regular career catch-ups 

Set up one-on-one weekly or monthly meetings with each virtual team member you manage. Jumping on Zoom calls with your employees for career talks is a great way to manage remote teams.

Set up virtual hangouts to chat about how your team members cope with remote work and project management. Discuss how previous projects went, the blockers they faced, how they found solutions, and how challenging or exciting their tasks have been in general. 

This virtual face-to-face assessment could be the perfect time to ask for project management feedback and suggestions on how to move forward. 

Regular career catch-ups are a results-driven way to manage a remote team as you’re able to build employees’ trust and connect with them on a personal level. Your remote workers, in turn, will be able to share their personal goals and objectives for your brand.

11. Take breaks 

As someone tasked with managing remote teams, you probably understand the need for breaks as working long hours can be stressful. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one out of four employees complains that work is the number one stress factor they deal with.

Some of your team members may not complain about this, but stress will reflect on their work performance.

Encourage your employees to take breaks now and then so they can relax and feel refreshed. Taking breaks is one of the simplest ways to keep mental health in check.

Provide breaks to build a happier working environment and encourage successful performance while managing remote teams.

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Breaks will help your team members:

• Prevent burn-out 
• Improve creativity 
• Maintain a healthy work-life balance

12. Label business information for easy prioritization

You’ll be more successful at managing remote teams if you keep things organized. Task management will be easier, and productivity a lot better.

In your project workflow, label tasks based on their priority so your team knows the level of importance and urgency. Label official information and emails for easy prioritization. 

Here are some of the labels you can create for your workflow and tasks:

• FYI/Informational
• Important
• Planning
• Decision 
• Review/Feedback
• Urgent

Labels serve as necessary guidelines for effectively managing remote teams. They also ensure timeliness, accuracy, and quickness.

13. Track company progress

Before you can effectively track your company’s progress, you must first evaluate workers’ performance, which begins with properly managing remote teams. 

To evaluate your company’s performance to know if you’re successfully managing your remote workers:

• Evaluate your business goals and achievements
• Analyze key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Review customer feedback
• Check your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings
• Check the rate of repeat purchases
• View your financial statements
• Compare with competition
• Identify your strengths and weaknesses
• Develop improvement strategies

Your job as the manager ensures that there is no lapse and that work is progressive while managing remote teams. 

Remote employees’ performance affects your overall business process management. But don’t be too harsh when you identify problems and make corrections.

14. Reward success

When you achieve certain milestones, find a way to celebrate and reward these successes.

Celebrating your successes — both big and small — is a great way to encourage your remote workers. Not only that, but you’ll motivate them to do their best. More so, it gives your team the satisfaction that their efforts get desired results.

There are several ways you can celebrate your company’s success with your remote team for more productive results. You can:

• Host virtual parties
• Reward team members
• Give gifts
• Provide work vacations

Don’t postpone celebrations until you have achieved your big, long-term goals. If your employees strive to deliver good results and don’t get to celebrate the impact their efforts create, they might feel discouraged about their performance.

As a manager who knows how to manage a remote team, always remember to celebrate both individual and collective successes.

Final thoughts:14 tips for successfully managing remote teams

Learning how to manage a remote team shouldn’t be as difficult as it might seem. 

While many challenges might come up while managing team members in different cities or countries, managing remote teams is a breeze with the right actions and tools.

Follow our list of practical tips for managing remote employees and enhancing your business’s performance and productivity.

How do you manage your remote team? Feel free to share your best practices in the comments below.

Working from home is a comparatively new trend that started to gather momentum with the advent of digital technologies. The previous five years saw a 44% surge in remote employment, which is explained by two major factors.

The first is the growing mobility of the workforce, 40% of which are expected to go exceedingly mobile globally by 2022. In the developed countries, this ratio is likely to reach the astounding three-fourths.

No less fundamental is the impact of COVID-19. Many companies in most various industries were simply forced to go remote just to keep their head above the water and continue providing services in the global pandemic conditions.

With the remote format of work becoming even more widespread, it is a must for companies to find their way around remote team management. Let’s dive a bit deeper into the topic and tackle some essential nuances.

Working remotely: a closer view

Yet another reason for remote becoming a common format of work is the employees’ increasing desire for more flexibility. Half of them are ready to flock to the enterprises that offer this perk and 85% of the latter report a productivity boost after the adoption of remote work model.

Some industries are remarkably suitable for this policy, so close to two-thirds of American IT companies have set up remote tech teams. Others are still weighing up the pros and cons of this approach.

The benefits of working in a remote team seem to be obvious. Besides greater productivity mentioned above, working remotely attracts employees with better expertise who tend to spend up to 80% of their working time in this mode.

The focus on workplace flexibility also allows accommodating various working styles and encourages practicing different task-solution approaches than those they would adopt in the office.

And you wouldn’t need an office anyway with its costly equipment, facilities, and rent expenditures – the factor that can be crucial in the cash-strapped times of the all-out belt-tightening. Moreover, working remotely is a chance to hone employees’ collaboration skills and increase their culture fit awareness.

The realization of numerous assets remote work brings has ushered major shifts in the labor organization in many countries. For example, statistics show that 22% of Americans work exclusively from home, and almost half of the workforce participates in remote work projects.

However, being part of a remote team isn’t just cakes and ale. The limited amount of face-to-face communication may result in employees feeling isolated from the rest of the gang, especially if they hail from different time zones. Other potential pitfalls include extensive reliance on the sometimes fickle sense of self-motivation and third-party software that can fail.

As Harvard Business Review argues, 75% of remote teams have problems with keeping to the schedule, conforming to specifications (including corporate goals alignment), staying within the budget, and meeting the expectations of customers. 

These inadequacies typically stem from collaboration issues, which is a cornerstone of any remote team’s successful performance. How come managers miscarry in maintaining collaboration among the staff? The answer is simple: they lack awareness of the big differences between remote and co-located team collaboration.

Ensuring remote team collaboration: aspects to focus on

There are 5 distinctive features that display contrast in collaboration within remote teams and collaboration practiced among co-located staff. 

1. Peremptory over-communication

Remember that your team does not work together in the same office where they can easily share the latest news and stay connected. That’s why the efficiency of the remote team is in your communication efforts. If you succeed, you will guarantee that your personnel is on the same page. How could this be achieved?

• Realize that communication within remote teams can be both synchronous and asynchronous. The former is exercised through phone calls or live chats, and occasionally via video calls or meetings. It is the right option if prompt action is imperative, some questions demand an immediate answer, or an adequate problem solution is expected to be attained by brainstorming.

However, the typical type of communication between people in different countries and time zones is the asynchronous one, when there is a lag between messages sent back and forth. It is effected via email, updates, and project management platforms.

Each of these types should be regulated both in terms of purpose and channels used. The latter are better to be limited in number, otherwise communication becomes chaotic.

• Set communication rules. It can be done in the form of a manual that will inform the employees about the cases when certain communication media are used, as well as offer insight in every team member’s working style and personal preferences.

Remote communication is often devoid of body language and intonation cues, which requires additional efforts on the part of participants to convey or interpret the message correctly. Everybody should try to be clear in the messages they send. Otherwise, their colleagues will waste their time trying to guess what their colleagues may feel, think, and do in routine working situations. This will lead to frustration and unintended downtime.

• Keep the instructions as clear as possible. Brevity isn’t the synonym of clarity. Don’t imagine that by using fewer words you will succeed in getting the message through. This is especially important for newbies on your team. By issuing foolproof and logically arranged directives you will avoid misinterpretation. Visualizing assignments work particularly well, so diagrams and charts should become the staple of your communication style.
• Don’t overdo it with the amount of communication. If you inform your employees about a task by email, then text the same thing, and later call them on the phone to make sure they got your two previous messages, you are definitely abusing access channels and annoying the staff. Approach the volume of communication with caution.
• Provide your employees with a nook for casual talk. Adding some informality is always good for team morale. In a real office, it is the proverbial water cooler where people meet to chat about non-work-related things, which allows them to get to know each other better. Remote teams should have a virtual venue of this kind as a team-building factor.

However, it is important to mind the cultural differences between employees from various countries trying to keep communication informal. People from Asia (especially from the Middle East) are more inclined to maintain a more rigid communication style while employees from Europe and America tend to be quite folksy in such intercommunion.

There are sensitive topics (like politics, religion, human rights, wars) or personal issues (for instance, romances) that should be avoided no matter what region people who work at your virtual office hail from. 

2. Extended use of collaborative software

Whereas in a conventional office environment using collaborative software is important, for remote teams it is vital. In fact, it is these collaborative tools that make remote work possible. Unfortunately, many managers don’t realize it, so more than 40% of all remote teams never get further than Skype and Facebook messenger. 

However, the IT world doesn’t stay put, so there are dozens of tools available in the market. There are collaborative tools like:

• Figma – a highly intuitive solution for collaborative design where teams can throw their ideas together and test them out in one place. Figma offers a number of advanced design tools on top of many common design features – all available both via desktop and mobile.
• Invision – an utterly intuitive, fast, and convenient application for interconnecting a full-on design workflow for the team. It is cloud-based, secure, very diverse in terms of design capabilities for fast and elaborate iterations, tests, and brainstorms.
• Miro – a great popular collaborative platform for whiteboarding that is focused on team brainstorming activities. There are convenient templates, asynchronous teamwork whiteboards, canvases, integrations, and more.
• Mural – a collaborative workspace platform with a large focus on working with visuals. From planning to brainstorming to design and evaluation – the platform can be efficiently used for full-cycle design of projects of any scale and complexity. 

The rapid growth in the number of smartphone users has brought forth mobile apps that serve the same purpose.

3. Utmost flexibility

Having people from different time zones on your team is a real challenge because managers should display ingenuity in trying to bring them together. The minimum overlap in working time between them should be at least one hour.

If that is not doable, you should make sure messages are read and addressed as soon as possible, otherwise overall team productivity will plummet. Software tools will help you track what time it is where a certain employee is located and avoid scheduling projects on a national holiday in that country.

Even if the difference in time is just a couple of hours, schedules still require adjustment. Don’t expect your late evening messages to be responded to instantly: the team members aren’t obliged to be available 24/7. However, it is advisable to make daily check-ins a must.

Thus, you will succeed in creating the feeling of a single unit despite the fact that its participants are physically separated. And it will make it easier to keep track of the progress and detect any problems your employees might encounter.

If you’re trying out a new process or onboarding a new team member, we recommend using training videos. Especially since you’re working remotely. This will help build company culture and communicate concepts clearly.

4. Clear expectations and accountability

Remote work demands a structured approach to responsibilities. Without it, tasks may be misunderstood, delayed, or deprioritized. To prevent this, ensure that every team member knows exactly what is expected of them and how their work contributes to shared goals.

Define objectives, deadlines, and performance indicators upfront. Project management tools like Asana, Trello, or ClickUp help assign tasks, set priorities, and track progress transparently. A structured approach minimizes confusion and keeps everyone aligned.

Regular check-ins ensure accountability without micromanaging. Encourage employees to share updates, ask questions, and highlight challenges. This creates a sense of ownership and keeps projects on course. A well-defined system of expectations makes remote teams more efficient and self-sufficient.

5. Maintaining work-life balance

While remote work offers flexibility, it can also blur the lines between professional and personal life. If left unchecked, this can lead to burnout and declining motivation. A clear structure is essential to avoid these pitfalls.

Encourage employees to set defined working hours and stick to a routine. Managers should lead by example, respecting time boundaries, scheduling meetings thoughtfully, and promoting regular breaks. Providing mental health resources or organizing informal virtual gatherings can also help foster engagement and well-being.

A balanced team is a productive one. By prioritizing well-being, you ensure that employees remain motivated, connected, and capable of delivering their best work.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to remote work, forcing businesses and employees alike to rethink their work habits. Now, as we move into 2025, remote and hybrid work are no longer just a temporary response – they are reshaping the future of work itself.

With 56% of companies adopting hybrid models and 73% of employees preferring remote-first environments, collaboration tools and team rituals have become critical to success. New technologies such as AI-driven project management platforms, asynchronous video updates, and virtual whiteboards are helping bridge time zones and streamline communication.

But as forward-thinking organizations embrace these tools, they also recognize that remote collaboration is not just a technical challenge – it’s a cultural one. Companies are embedding async-first mindsets, reimagining onboarding processes, and investing in digital body language training to strengthen communication and collaboration.

The latest trend includes the introduction of “focus hours” where notifications pause, allowing for deep work and reducing burnout. These steps reflect the evolving needs of remote teams as they strive for balance and efficiency.

While technology plays a significant role in facilitating remote work, creating a strong collaborative culture is equally important. By emphasizing communication, flexibility, and intentional tools, companies can ensure their remote teams stay connected, productive, and engaged in the dynamic future of work.