Whether they’re colleagues within your organization, outsourced or remote talent, customers and clients, or subject experts you’re connecting with, the answer is the same: ownership.

To buy into a project, collaborators need to feel a sense of ownership over the project’s execution and outcomes. But creating a sense of ownership can be hard enough on-site, within a close group. How can we achieve it in a distributed setting, with people we may never meet in person?

1. Ask for ideas, advice or help

Companies routinely ask customers for help and ideas to develop or name products, improve services, and more. Asking colleagues and contacts for their advice will help you to identify those who have experience in similar settings, and have a passion for that type of project.

Using a public forum like social or professional networks to ask a question like, “Have you had this problem?” is frequently the speediest way to find a current solution to technical and other conundrums.

Once they’ve provided their advice, most contributors will be interested in seeing the results of their input. They may also be more inclined to advocate on your behalf, perhaps to secure the assistance of third parties.

2. Invite and reward feedback

Inviting feedback — on ideas, prototypes, and trials — is particularly good for gaining buy-in from customers and suppliers, as well as respected peers.

It may not get a would-be project contributor to the point where they’re willing to commit to your project, but it can make your contacts more amenable to providing insight or advice periodically during development. Reward or recognize the feedback publicly to garner an even stronger sense of involvement, and encourage further contributions.

3. Reveal the process

Making the more innovating, or intriguing aspects of your project publicly available — for instance, through interviews, profiling on social media, or your team blog — can pique the interest of the types of collaborators you want to work with.

If they can see an opportunity to make a valuable contribution to your project, prospective collaborators may contact you primed to get involved. The only hitch is that unless your project is really innovative, you may struggle to achieve impact with this tactic.

4. Make others part of the journey

With this technique, you make the most of others’ desire to build their reputations and demonstrate their experience by inviting them to join you on the project “journey.” You might ask customers to vote on product names, photograph the team at work (or play), and generally open up your project so that peers, customers, clients and others feel they’re part of it.

Generating interest in this way can really help you to build ownership among potential and current contributors. It also provides opportunities to cross-promote or reference those who do contribute.

5. Show yourself

You’ll likely have trouble soliciting buy-in from others if you struggle to communicate that you yourself — and your team members — have already bought into the project.

Whether it’s through social media, an intranet or Yammer, your blog, or the media, make sure your communications illuminate your team’s investments — both personal and professional — in the project. Be as genuine and candid about the project as you can. Would-be contributors will appreciate your clarity, and will be more likely to want to help you out.

Finding collaborators — be they potential employees, or consultant subject experts — can be a challenge, but these five techniques can make the job easier, more natural, and more enjoyable.

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Communication has evolved with technology, but many of those now IMing colleagues cut their teeth writing internal memos on typewriters. Cultural and generational clashes are both common in distributed collaboration, and more damaging than they might be if the working relationships had a face-to-face component.

Many have discussed email etiquette, but for the average web worker, the notion of politesse can seem archaic — or even counterproductive in some circumstances. Here, then, are five golden rules for respectful, productive digital communication, whether you’re using email, IM, video chat, phone, or other communications tools like document sharing and time tracking systems.

1. Have an agenda, and meet it

To keep digital exchanges functional, set an agenda. Whether it’s a one-line email, or a one-hour video conference, your interaction will be more productive if you stay on track. Your colleagues will appreciate it, because it shows respect for their time. And it’ll let you identify any part of the exchange that’s off-topic, and end it — perhaps suggesting an alternative time to address it — before it gets out of hand.

Having an agenda helps cut down on time-wasting, but it also encourages responsiveness, since your collaborators know what you need, and don’t need to wade through the waffle to give it to you.

2. Don’t spam

In this context, spam is any form of unwanted or unnecessary communication. It doesn’t need to involve multiple recipients: leaving your colleague a phone message, then sending a text, and following up with an email, is example of spam. Sharing your new document with a colleague who’s on your team, but doesn’t need to use it, is an example of spam.

Spam overwhelms us. It makes us stressed and cranky, and it makes maintaining focus difficult. Be astute in working out what to share with which team members, and learn to differentiate between information for information’s sake, and necessary communication.

3. Respect time constraints

Having respect for the time constraints of your colleagues governs a range of collaborative behaviors.

Give collaborators time to receive your communication, digest it and formulate a reply around the other work they’re doing before you bug them for their response. Prioritize your communications points so that colleagues know what’s most important, and tell them if something’s urgent. Conversely, don’t earmark a task or communication as urgent if it’s not. As well as indicating the reason for your communication, identify your expectations of a response timeframe, so your colleague can prioritize your request.

Remember: while digital communications tools may seem immediate, we’re only human, and none of us can be in two places at once.

4. Be clear

Clarity and directness underpin digital collaboration. But, particularly in written or very short communications, choose your words carefully. Short can very easily come across as terse. Speak in a way that’s appropriate to your colleague, and your relationship with them, as well as the communications medium your using.

Choosing the right tool for the job can influence your ability to communicate what’s needed. Limits on length, or attachments and other inclusions, can hobble communications, so make sure you choose the medium that suits your needs best. Don’t try to wedge a phone conversation into a voicemail, for example — your garbled, rushed message will just add to the “noise” to your colleague’s day. Instead, just explain why you’re calling and ask them to call you back. Explain the details in person when they do.

Being clear is particularly important in shared, multi-party systems like document sharing and contact management systems. Stick to the guidelines your team has set for aspects like naming and storage conventions — it’ll reduce confusion and communications noise, and generally make life easier for your colleagues.

5. Be open

Digital workers can end up hiding behind a smokescreen of task managers, email autoresponders, and voicemail all too easily if they feel overwhelmed. Lead by example. If you’re asking a team member for something, be available to answer their questions about your request. Be diligent about responding to colleagues in an appropriate way using the foundations outlined here.

Accept that good digital collaboration takes time and mutual understanding — it is, after all, communication between people. Relegating a colleague whose communications approach annoys you to the back of the queue is rarely productive; the best way to encourage others to collaborate with you in the way you want is to take the time to explain your preferences to them.

That conversation could eradicate the kind of uncertainty that undermines good distributed working relationships, and cement the foundations for ongoing productive collaboration.

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How much you feel you should pay remote workers is one thing; what your payment is worth to them — and how its value changes over time — is another.

Recent global financial strife continues to cause some economies to suffer, including that of the U.S. Many digital freelancers earning U.S. dollars are now receiving substantially less for the same work, as their own nations’ currencies gain strength against the U.S. dollar.

The rates that U.S. companies offer to remote workers may no longer compete with firms that are more local to the freelance web worker. For U.S.-based organizations, this may make sourcing good remote workers much more challenging. It may also be a challenge they haven’t had to face before.

Of course, currency fluctuations don’t just affect pay rates. In theory, web workers buying goods from the U.S. should enjoy exchange rate benefits as the U.S. dollar weakens, but this is rarely the case.

Late last year,  for example, I bought a $35 piece of software from the States on a day when the U.S. dollar was worth 1.015 Australian dollars. The software should have cost $35.53 AUD, but my receipt shows that I was actually charged $1.40 AUD more. The effects of a stronger currency aren’t usually reflected across the board.

And of course, your remote freelancer’s local costs don’t fluctuate with your currency’s value. So what could be a great rate for them this month might be a very lackluster rate in a month or two. You may need to consider offering other perks or advantages to procure the remote talent you really want, rather than accepting that which you can get cheaply.

Freedom and fun stuff

If your remote freelancer has some ideas they’d like to trial on your project, or extra suggestions that they feel are worthwhile, can you give them the freedom to implement those ideas?

The extra work may take extra time, but if you can see real value for your project, the extension of scope could be beneficial to the remote worker as well as to your business. It could also ensure you get a top-notch job on the key parts of the project, rather than settling for second-best.

Software and systems

Can you reduce the cost to the freelancer of taking on your project by giving them a license to use necessary software, or providing access to specific systems?

Finding ways to make their lives easier — and more cost-effective — could help you to win the remote worker.

Team involvement

Some remote workers really value the opportunity to work with a team — particularly if they’re solo operators, or work from home. Showing them how you’ll involve them in the project team, making them feel welcome, and communicating their value to their new colleagues are a few ways to help cement good relationships with valuable remote workers.

The promise of close working relationships with like-minded pros is likely to appeal to more than a few web workers — especially those who are interested in collaborative, on-the-job learning, and in building networks.

Credits or kudos

Kudos matters. Can you give credit to the freelancer you’re pursuing, perhaps through social media, LinkedIn references, linking to their site through your organization’s blog, or some other method?

Most freelancers will appreciate being publicly named for their contributions — especially if that recognition can help them win further work, or gain them exposure among peers who matter to them.

These ideas may not win you the remote web worker you want, but they might help sweeten a deal embattled by global financial tumult. Are you finding it harder to land good remote talent in places where your currency has weakened?

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These skilled professionals have decided to decline the nine-to-five regime and fit work in around their other passions, interests, and commitments. You may already unknowingly give freelance or contract work to people who fall into this growing part of the remote web workforce.

The prevalence of technology means that your favorite freelancer could be building a business in a city just like yours, or they could be living in a jungle and tackling your projects between epic surfing expeditions. So long as they have a reliable web connection, you may never know the difference.

Are these “untemplaters” a good skill resource for growing businesses? To many employers, this breed of digital professional might seem flighty and unreliable — after all, they might pick up and vanish into the wild, blue yonder once they finish this job. Where’s the accountability? Can a project as important as yours rest on their contribution?

In most cases, the answer to all these questions is, “yes.” Here are a few of the main reasons why these “rebels” are good for business.

They’re passionate and skilled

The non-conformist freelancer prioritizes things other than work, sure. But they champion quality of life. As such, they may be more likely than your regular business-building freelancer to restrict themselves to projects that really interest them.

Think about it: If you were to restrict the work you did, you’d want the projects you took on to be extra-rewarding. Instead of taking on anything and everything that comes their way, the smarter web workers in this group pick and choose projects they feel will use their skills, ignite their passions, and satisfy their need to contribute.

The idea of the rebel-freelancer being a “drop-out” is no longer current; you’ll likely find your remote resource highly skilled. These individuals are effectively relying on their own, evolving expertise to make a living in less time than it takes the rest of us. To do that, you’ve got to be good.

They can commit

The idea that a freelancer who’s working from a rented room in Salvador to fund their next Amazonian trek won’t be committed or accountable isn’t likely to play out in reality. The days of fly-by-nighters making it online are over. And if your recruitment and screening processes can’t pick them out, then you have bigger problems than working with untethered remote workers.

Solutions to the issues of commitment and accountability are ultimately rooted in the rapport you build with freelancers, regardless of their locations (or how they spend their spare time). If you need a freelancer to be around after they deliver their part of the project, make that clear up-front, just as you would with a local, more traditional freelancer or contractor. If they can’t commit, they’ll be able to tell you so, and you can move on to other candidates.

They are connected

What’s web connectivity like in Salvador? Depending on where you operate, it may be a step up from what you’re used to. Most people who pursue an “untethered” lifestyle know that to support that lifestyle they need to be reliable, and available. And most are extremely tech-savvy — the less technologically capable are less likely to be able to make remote-location freelancing work.

So if your untemplated freelancer comes with good references, work samples, and communicates with you easily through the selection process, you’re unlikely to encounter show-stopping troubles during the project. Again, set your expectations for contactability and availability up-front, and make sure everyone’s comfortable with, and capable of, meeting those needs.

If you’re really concerned — for example, the individual is located in an area where there’s unrest, issues with freedom of information or connectivity, and so on — discuss that with the candidate and develop contingencies that can be implemented if the worst-case scenario turns into a reality.

Are they for you?

Whether the non-traditional freelancer is right for your business will depend as much on your operation as it does on the remote worker.

Your timeframes, project management approach, expectations, and philosophy may all prevent you from working successfully with an “untemplated” freelancer — or any freelancer.

The businesses that are likely to be best suited to collaboration with these individuals will be flexible, technologically adept and versatile, communicative, human, and results-focused. If this sounds like you, “untemplated” workers might be a sensible and flexible asset to your team.

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Despite the proliferation of options for communication, the way workflow, responsibilities, and collaboration are managed in this scenario can be quite different from on-site or partially dispersed teams.

To get it right, team leaders need to consider the interplay of three crucial factors: frequency, transparency, and variability.

Frequency

In an office, communications are incidental, and frequency is high. With dispersed teams, communicating is an effort, and frequency is often much lower.

The concept of frequency affects communication like status updates and meetings, as well as casual team interactions. But it also affects momentum: the timeframes in which outputs are created, and how swiftly they’re taken into the next stage of the project.

Different projects and timeframes require different communications frequencies. You’ll want all the members of your dispersed team to be able to work comfortably to a given level of frequency, or intensity.

So as you’re planning workflow, milestones, and deliverables, consider whether your dispersed team will be working exclusively on this project, or on others at the same time. What does team members’ degree of focus mean for the potential frequency of communications and deliverables? How can you support those needs in order to get the job done?

Transparency

The best dispersed teamwork is supported by strong transparency. Your team members may never meet in person, but they need to get enough of a feel for one another to collaborate closely, and get the work done.

Transparency is important in a number of areas, including availability, progress and outputs, as well as personalities. Setting explicit baseline expectations of transparency — outlining up-front what kinds of project information should be shared, and how, for example — is a good start, but more work may be needed to keep things transparent on a day-to-day basis.

Should all project-related discussions be shared, and is IM therefore a less-than-deal communication tool? Are there times when team members will all be online — and does everyone know what those times are? Are there certain outputs that should not be available to all team members? Will your Yammer steam be strictly business, or will you encourage team members to share more broadly, to make it more fun?

These are the kinds of questions that are easily overlooked, but which can greatly influence the sense of openness and participation of distributed team members.

Variability

It can be easy to see remote team members as resources, or sets of capabilities, rather than real people with real lives. A truly productive, smooth-working dispersed team will flexibly cater to individuals’ needs and differences.

This might mean that you create a rotating schedule for team meetings, so that everyone shares the burden of time zone differences, and the same team member isn’t staying up until midnight every Tuesday to meet with you.

You may encourage team members to share things like personal websites or work histories, so each team member has an idea of others’ experience, capabilities, and areas of interest. You might ask the team to choose the tools you use to share information and communicate about the project.

Promoting the open communication of unexpected hurdles — illnesses and other events that take team members out of the work for a period — may be another way to ensure the smooth running of a team whose members may come online at different times, and at different intervals from the team leader.

Frequency, transparency and variability are critical factors in the smooth running of dispersed teams. Being conscious of them as you establish and support remote team members can have a significant impact on project success.

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It makes sense to focus on project briefs and core competencies — after all, these are what gets the job done. But what gets the job done well? Often, it’s team members’ non-core skills and experience — and their freedom to apply those capabilities to the project — that make the collaboration a real success.

This is especially the case in experimental work, where the path to the desired outcome may be unclear, and work in distributed or completely new teams. If it’s not clear how your team members should make contributions to others’ domains, or whether they’ll be valued, you’ll never get the most out of the project.

What can go wrong

Recently, I worked with a new, distributed team on a fairly experimental project. Team roles, relationships and work patterns hadn’t been clearly defined. While I knew some team members, others were new to me, and I’d never worked closely with any of them before.

As the work began, team members struggled to identify where their contributions should begin and end. We all knew what each others’ core competencies were — it was the extra stuff that got confusing.

There was overlap between team members’ areas of expertise, but the team structure and approach to collaboration — which, while supported by the appropriate tools, was loose and fairly unpredictable — caused blockages. Some team members didn’t want to step on any toes; others wondered why no one was taking responsibility for certain contributions. Few of the team knew what they could expect from their colleagues.

This project didn’t fail, but it took longer than expected, and project overhead expanded, since communication wasn’t smooth-flowing. The usual pitch-in mentality became mired in a subtle kind of confusion. Assumption took the place of inquiry and clarification, so opportunities to capitalize on each team members’ capabilities slipped past.

Welcome more than core skills

Leaders organize people into teams on the basis of their core skills, which is fine. But to really make the most of everything each team member has to offer, you’ll need to go further than simply providing a project brief and setting up a file repository.

• Evidence of a collaborative culture. Culture is particularly important for new teams, or teams that comprise people from several departments, offices or organizations. Give some thought to how you’ll evince that culture — from the way meetings are run, to the way ideas are presented, captured, discussed and actioned. What evidence says to team members that all contributions — not just core-skill offerings — will be welcomed and valued? Does your evidence translate for team members operating from other locations? Keeping that evidence consistent is also critical. It’s all very well to be open, welcoming and responsive in a meeting, but if you neglect to respond to team members’ post-meeting emails or messages for days, you’ll likely erase any goodwill you generated, and engender a culture of flakiness and irresponsibility instead.
• A clear collaboration model. Does all team work involve all team members, or are some working in smaller groups, without the leader’s input? Flat structures and easygoing reporting requirements may seem to encourage the free flow of ideas, but the reality is that groups comprised of team members who haven’t worked together before may need more guidance, encouragement and transparency, especially at first, or if the team is distributed. Leave them to their own devices and silence may well ensue. Discuss up-front the basic expectations you and your team members have for the collaboration, and how extra ideas will be treated and addressed. As you adjust the model to fit the needs and suggestions of your team, make sure everyone’s aware of the model’s evolution. Over time, the team will likely develop its own culture, and you may well be able to take more of a backseat, but be wary of doing this in the initial stages.
• Meet expectations. Once you’ve all agreed on how things will happen, fulfill those expectations for your team, and ensure that your team members do the same. If your team management, or team members, are unpredictable in the way they respond to each other and events, the result is uncertainty. That may translate to team members feeling that the project isn’t important to their colleagues, and deciding to do only what’s required — not to bother making value-add suggestions beyond their core competency. It may reduce team members’ confidence to put themselves — and their “crazy” ideas — out there. Or it may just mean that team members spend more time trying to work out what’s going on than focusing on collaboratively creating the best possible solutions. In any case, unpredictability reduces team members’ ability to focus on the work itself.

A really successful team project is, of course, fulfilling and rewarding for team members. The evolving nature of the digital space may have reduced the likelihood that individuals will be typecast into narrow roles, yet leaders may still struggle to elicit the full breadth and benefits of colleagues’ past experiences if they don’t consciously work at it.

Have you worked with teams that really valued and benefited from the contribution of non-core skills? What aspects of the team management made the project work well?

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The rise of curation

Social recommendation isn’t new; marketers have long known the value of vocal advocacy. The difference is that now, a brand’s audience (or its followers) can register direct and extremely visible benefits from their advocacy.

Thus, curation is a valid, and valued, technique for gaining currency with audiences. We benefit from our own curatorial advocacy (which builds our credibility), and we rely on our favorite brands or businesses to sift through the web and point us to good resources, insights and opinions.

Little wonder, then, that many business brands have built large audiences using the curation approach. These brands are seen as leaders because they have the ability to tell the good from the bad, and they have market-leading contacts who keep them abreast of the latest developments.

In the curatorial approach, the network is critical, along with the brand’s ability to sort the dross from the diamonds.

The role of creation

While curatorial communication dominates some social media right now, it’s important not to forget the valuable potential of creation in audience engagement.

After all, curators curate creations. So when you make, do or say something new and valuable, your online presence will be more likely to be included in the curations of others. It’s the basis of viral marketing, but thanks to the nuances of social media, your creation doesn’t need to go viral to deliver value to your brand, or your team.

If everyone else is funneling or channeling information, those brands that create have a point of difference. When you make ideas, products, or thoughts, the information you deliver to your audience is unique.

Your creative work gives you the scope to engage customers, stakeholders, and other parts of your organization, by inviting them to join the process of creation and development. But more importantly for collaboration, creation allows you to share stories of experimentation, learning and application through social media, the company blog, industry events and so on.

That experiential information can form the glue for engagements with third parties, which, over time, can prove mutually and deeply beneficial. Such benefits could be something as simple as landing a spot in an invite-only beta test, or something as valuable as hearing about a bug that may affect you — in time to preempt disaster.

If you create, you have a lot to gain by sharing your experiences online, and connecting with others doing similar work. If yours is known as a creative brand, you likely already have followers and connections who are craving your creative insights. The question is: are you using that opportunity?

Striking a balance

How can you make the most of the opportunities for curation and creation in your social media activity?

Your team’s online presence may address multiple audiences. But whether you are concerned with engaging with customers, suppliers, or peer organizations, your team has a lot to gain by creating, as well as curating, information. This is particularly the case if your team is an isolated unit of specialists, or has a specific technical focus. It should be imperative for such organizations and teams to be directly engaged in the business of creation.

Connect with the creative leaders in your field. Share product development stories and updates on your blog. Invite creative third parties and peers to contribute their ideas for overcoming challenges, or addressing issues you face in your own creative process — and publish your own thoughts to get the ball rolling.

Traditional businesses may be concerned that asking questions or seeking advice from others, even peers,  online has the potential to damage the brand. Adopting a strategy that encourages individuals in the creative team to seek peer input through their own online activity (as employees of the brand) may be a solution to this impasse.

Do you leverage creation in your online engagements, or do you stick largely to the territory of curation?

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Crowdsourcing startup 99designs recently received $35 million in venture capital and is currently advertising six positions in its Melbourne and San Francisco offices. These hires will see the team grow by about 20 percent and expand management capacity, paving the way for the creation of additional operations roles.

The business has a strong culture and a flat structure. How does 99designs plan to manage its expansion without compromising collaboration or culture?

Collaboration

The tight-knit business was originally run from Melbourne, Australia, and Vancouver, Canada, so communication has always been a focus.

Says CEO Patrick Llewellyn, “We have a long history of collaborating with people all over the world. [Parent company] SitePoint has been connecting [people and contributors] forever and a day from different parts of the world. That’s part of our DNA.”

Indeed, growth has actually boosted collaboration. Since the business moved out of its startup phase, Llewellyn and COO Jason Sew Hoy were given more operational authority. A more formal management structure was put in place in August of last year, and Llewellyn notes, “We’ve been more collaborative than ever.”

Collaboration tools that the team favors include instant messenger, Yammer and Campfire for development problem solving. Email is also essential, as are scheduled and spontaneous video conferences.

But people are crucial to the process: The outcomes of management’s quarterly strategy meetings are fed back to the staff by both team leaders and business leaders. “We get some pretty wild debates, but that’s a good thing,” laughs Sew Hoy. “It’s definitely the variety of the different viewpoints that creates a really robust strategy.

“It’s a pretty open communication model. Everyone’s encouraged to share ideas and make contributions,” he adds. “It’s designed to help everyone have a voice and feel like they’re being heard, but it also helps to guide some of the decisions that we make on a day-to-day basis.”

Culture

The pair see communicating culture as a major challenge as the business grows in the coming months.

“From a cultural and team management point of view,” explains Sew Hoy, “it comes down to having a core group of leaders that represent the business and who we want to be.”

He says that the focus on creating the right management positions and putting the right people in them “will essentially set the foundation for how we communicate and manage the team as it gets bigger.”

As Llewellyn reveals, “The most important thing in our hiring process is making sure that we hire people that we trust. Unless you trust someone, I don’t think you can openly communicate with them.”

The pair also requires staff to have a collaborative philosophy. “It’s got to be a core competency for everyone to be an excellent global communicator,” explains Sew Hoy, “regardless of whether you’re a support person, a developer, a marketer or someone in senior management.”

Recruiting candidates with great communication skills is only part of the equation, he says. “It also comes down to the expectations that you set early on with that person.

“We’ve got two people starting together today, so one of the things we’re doing is getting them to sit down and meet all of the people in San Francisco on video chat.” The team does this, he says, “just to make sure that there’s a little bit more interaction there than seeing that there’s a bunch of people there on our ‘About Us’ page, and to break down those barriers toward getting conversations started.”

Moving team members between offices is also central to ensuring cultural consistency. “We see that as an important investment,” Llewellyn explains. “Even before we raised the money . . . we brought over four people for South by Southwest this year from Melbourne, and a couple of those guys spent another two weeks in our office. We’ll continue to bring some others across to San Francisco and we’ll take people from San Francisco to Melbourne, so that we get that cross-pollination,” he explains.

Competitive advantage

Llewellyn believes that the travel potential within 99designs represents a competitive edge for the business, especially when hiring in the Melbourne market.

“I’m really excited about the opportunities that this will open up over time,” he says. “One of the things about hiring talented Australians is that there’s always a significant wanderlust. And I think that by having offices in two pretty cool cities, we can . . . use that as a competitive advantage in the hiring process.”

The business has already relocated its CTO from Melbourne to San Francisco because, “In terms of new technology, and where things evolve the fastest, San Francisco and the Valley is in the heart of that. So there were definitely going to be advantages to having a technical leader stationed over there,” explains Sew Hoy.

Such relocations — Llewellyn himself was originally hired in Melbourne, Australia — have presented new collaborative challenges. “I don’t want to pretend that we’ve got all the answers,” Llewellyn says. “We’re iterating and learning and finding that there are complexities that we haven’t thought through.” But, he says, open, trusting team communication is key to the business’s future.

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Bad listeners rarely realize they suffer this limitation. But there are some common tip-offs:

• You often find you’re involved in miscommunications
• You find the same colleagues ask you the same questions repeatedly
• You often reply to emails without reading them, or their attachments, in full
• You skip meetings, arguing that the minutes will keep you up-to-date.

As humans, we need to filter and prioritize the information we attend to, but bad listeners can have a detrimental effect on team output, especially if they’re gatekeepers in the production process, or have quality control responsibilities.

Becoming a better listener in the online space isn’t difficult, but it does take discipline. Here are some tactics to help develop better listening skills.

Chunk written comprehension tasks

We’re often more likely to skim-read emails, reports, and other documentation if we’re trying to fit it in around “real work.” Of course, understanding the information we receive is usually critical to that real work. It needs our attention.

Try setting aside chunks of time to do background reading and the communication it prompts. This can help you mentally to validate these comprehension tasks themselves as a priority, and give you a clear space in which to focus. Allot space in your schedule to the tasks you see as distractions, and attend to them in that timeframe. You’ll be more likely to get something useful out of that information in a dedicated space.

Miss a meeting? Ask for details

Competing priorities may necessitate your missing a meeting occasionally. But rather than simply glancing over the minutes when they arrive in your inbox, try speaking to a colleague who did attend about what took place.

Think about which of the attendees will have attended to the information that’s relevant to you; perhaps ask a couple of people to get a composite picture. This way, your understanding of what took place won’t suffer because your colleague answered a call halfway through the meeting and missed ten minutes of discussion.

Also, try to ask specific questions. “Anything happen in the meeting yesterday?” will solicit a shrug of the shoulders more often than not. Unless you indicate to your colleague the general topics or items from the agenda that interest you, they’re unlikely to know what to mention. Their minds will likely drift to the items that were top priorities for them, or the things with which they feel most comfortable, or are most interested in.

Respond in full

Good listening is about good communication. Unless you respond to queries in full, and address all of the concerns your colleagues raise, those issues will just keep hanging around. What you don’t attend to today will be back to haunt you tomorrow — unless your colleague gives up, and makes their own executive decision. And if they’re asking you for direction, they probably don’t feel equipped to make the call themselves.

If you can chunk tasks like email, progress reporting, and status phone calls and conversations, you should find that you have both the time and focus needed to respond to queries in full. As you do so, you may well find that some questions are based on assumptions or misunderstandings that you can clear up on the spot.

Make sure they understand

No matter how clear or succinct your communication, it pays to ask the person you’re speaking to if they understand what you’ve told them. Finish all your emails with the line “Let me know if you have any questions,” and you’ll be surprised how many come back needing clarification — and that goes for video chat, IM, and presentations too.

Asking if your colleagues understand what you’re saying is important not just for getting things done, but also for understanding where and how your communication is missing the mark. What makes sense to one colleague will bewilder another, so asking if they understand will help you tailor your communication to individuals, and avoid time-consuming misunderstandings.

Work to your strengths

Maybe you like to check task status face-to-face with your team members periodically throughout the day. Or maybe you prefer them to update their shared task lists with their tasks’ status at the end of each day. Each of us has our own preferences for the way we receive and respond to information, and of course we all need to adapt to each others’ preferences, at least to some degree.

Take a long, hard look at the ways you prefer to handle communications. Consider everything — from whether you’re a visual or auditory person, to whether you prefer IMing a colleague rather than stopping by their desk and interrupting them.

Understanding your preferences for communication will let you find commonalities with your team members — areas where communication is easy — and identify the points of difference — areas where you’ll know you really need to pay attention if you’re to get and communicate the required information effectively.

These are five easy way to become a better listener in your team. What advice can you add from your own experience?

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While those in traditional fields may pursue study and qualifications in order to advance their careers and earning potential, and see PD as both a reward and a motivator, for those in working in technology and innovation, the pathways for — and value of — professional development aren’t so clear-cut.

And for team leaders seeking to attract and motivate truly innovative staff, the role of PD in employee motivation and satisfaction can be very fuzzy.

In a recent interview, I asked a mobile developer how he keeps his skills at the top of his field. He laughed and said, “Coming to work is a good start!” In this industry, at least, the progress is being made — and knowledge is most quickly gained — in startups and innovative businesses, not in universities.

That explains why younger players entering the industry today face such fierce competition. There are plenty of people already working in innovative technology roles on the strength of experience and talent, rather than qualifications. As the technology sector gains maturity, employers now have the luxury of valuing people with proven experience (with or without formal qualifications) over fresh graduates. And few employers will bother speaking to a candidate who hasn’t learned or created anything new since they finished formal study.

The freshly released Startup Genome Project report corroborates the value of non-school learning. The research found “Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth” than those that don’t. No mention is made of the value of formal qualifications as a basis for startup success.

Your potential team members don’t want to see professional development listed as an employment benefit in their contracts; they choose jobs on the basis of how much the roles themselves will let them learn. The risky thrill of experimenting to create world-first products and take them successfully to market is a core appeal for those who work in innovative technology.

For this reason, proven expertise is usually more respected than qualifications by peers and colleagues. In innovative development, team members expect their peers to be able to walk the talk — for the good of the team, the project itself, and the individual’s own on-the-job PD. That motivates team members to seek productive, challenging, high-profile projects with great teams that they can learn from, rather than formal qualifications. Similarly, successful team leaders know that the bottom line depends entirely on whether team members can deliver, so rewards and respect naturally flow from successful experimentation, not traditional education.

Not surprisingly, the terms on which these types of team members are engaged aren’t those that appeal to those opting to work in more staid, traditional fields. The innovators thrive on possibility, the thrill of pushing boundaries, and the chance to have an impact. Offer to foot the bill for an MBA, and you’ll likely get a lot of blank stares. Employers may expect staff to walk the talk, but team members, too, judge employer credibility in terms of on-the-job projects, tasks, and teams. They want:

• roles that effectively amount to paid experimentation, perhaps through the opportunity to participate in rapid prototyping projects where team members can focus on mastering a new skill or its application in a certain environment
• to attend industry events that combine seminars with networking events — providing access to the “thought leadership” and “mentoring” mentioned in the Startup Genome report
• the ability to contact and engage with other specialists outside the organization, on the organization’s time and, potentially, money.

Rather than being an after-hours, formal, institutionalized proposition, successful PD in innovative teams is holistic and always-on. Instead of tracking the team member’s achievement on the basis of grades, leaders are more likely to assess the ROI on what may be a guesstimated investment in PD by looking at individuals’ influences on company revenues and profits. And team leaders who understand these motivations can consistently attract and manage good innovators.

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Businesses approaching a market will consider the audience’s media usage, and the message they’re communicating, before they choose a communications tool. But in distributed teams, we may choose collaboration tools for their own sake — their features — rather than their suitability to the tasks we actually need them to perform, or the team we need them to support.

The Limits of a Tool-Driven Approach

Tools are not the process, nor are they the work. Tools are there to make complex tasks easier or more efficient for your team. On paper, that differentiation seems clear, but in practice, it can quickly become muddied.

For example, a considerable influence on the way teams choose tools is, often, how they hope those tools may be able to change team members’ behavior or communications, rather than because they suit the team’s current or preferred ways of collaborating. We might also choose tools we feel will alter the actual process we’re using in some crucial way.

The problem with this approach is that it can be difficult to separate the tool’s problems (or benefits) from the process’ problems (or benefits), and that has the potential to mire the team in confusion and error when things go wrong.

Similarly, you may inadvertently diminish the benefits of either the tool or the process by discarding one, but sticking with the other on the misunderstanding that it’s that part of the equation that’s delivering the benefit.

Riskier still, using a tool-driven approach to actually evolve work processes puts the responsibility for the robustness and longevity of your business processes at the feet of third-party software developers who may never have heard of your organization, and — who knows? — may no longer be developing their product in six months’ time.

Taking a Tools-Last Approach

For these reasons, it is more sound to develop processes around your people — who, after all, you need to do the work — and the outcomes you desire. Then, you can identify the formats in which you need those outcomes, and finally, search for tools that will deliver outcomes in those formats.

In finding starting points for the tools you want to consider, why not look at the tools your team’s already using, and balance those against the project’s individual requirements and characteristics? Looking at what’s working now, and how your team functions now, can give you clear ideas about what your people need to get their jobs done well and happily.

In particular, consider:

• The learning curve and usability of a tool. Choosing tools that are already used by some team members, and have good usability in and of themselves, will reduce the cost to the business of the tool’s adoption. That cost isn’t only apparent in the days following the tools’ inception within a team, and it doesn’t always relate directly to a time-cost. Errors relating to tool adoption can damage everything from data to brand, and may arise months after the tool’s adoption.
• The re-usability of the information you put into it. Getting team members to put information into the tool you’ve chosen is only one part of the equation; the other is getting that information out. Consider the possible scenarios in which you might need to do this — for reporting purposes, if you switched to use a different tool or changed the process in future, to create a project output, and so on — and assess how manageable the job would be. The trend toward smaller, lighter solutions that produce output quickly may not be right for you, if your requirements are demanding, so it’s important to consider the realities of your needs, rather than simply getting caught up in the latest-tool hype.
• Its cost versus its adaptability to other projects or teams. The adoption cost of a tool — in terms of subscription fees as well as the time-cost of its uptake by your team members — would, ideally, be offset by its adaptability to other projects your team might be working on, or to other teams within your organization. Be careful when you’re making this assessment, though: it can be a fast-track to misappropriation if you don’t consider for each possibility of adaptation the points we’ve discussed above.

How do you go about choosing tools for your team? Do you select tools in the hopes that they’ll benefit your process, or do you build your process first, and choose tools to suit it?

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What does remote work mean for creative collaboration?

The Old Model

While technology may have made many aspects of business easier and simpler, the traditional model of creative collaboration has a lot going for it.

Two minds (or three, or more) are better than one. To come up with ideas — or solutions — is difficult, which is why creative collaboration in teams is so valuable. This model allows us to gain the advantages of different viewpoints, skill sets, and values in concocting solutions that exceed the requirements of the project brief.

The creative process is a particularly human endeavor. When they’re working in teams, creatives rely on mood, inflection, body language, gestures, and eye contact to gauge responses to ideas, and clarify their understanding of what’s been communicated verbally. Often, it’s the use of these non-verbal cues that separates the great creative teams from the less-than-great.

If a creative collaboration endeavor will continue for some time, keeping those creatives in the same physical space can also be helpful. The walls become populated with idea drafts, notecards and images. The team reorganizes the space to reflect their working relationships, and make themselves as comfortable as possible.

The physical space speaks loudly to each team member about what they’re doing, what they’re part of, and where it’s at. Those spatial reminders may help them recall a conversation they had with a team member, an idea they’d forgotten, or a thought they’d had that they want to take back to the team tomorrow.

New Challenges

The use of dispersed creative teams presents some challenges, especially for those who previously worked with the “agency” model of creativity: a bunch of people in a room with a whiteboard.

In a distributed creative effort, team members may be more likely to work on the creative task independently. First of all, they’re not physically surrounded by their colleagues, so if they want even to do so much as run an idea past someone, it takes effort — and may therefore be avoided.

Also, more effort may be needed to integrate the independent inputs or ideas that your dispersed team members have come up with. Three creatives working independently will come up with different angles and ideas than three creatives working together. That doesn’t mean the ideas aren’t as good, but it often means that more work is required to integrate them into a coherent whole.

In some ways, the challenges inherent in working from different locations, under the burdens of technology and time, preclude some aspects of the very concept of “working together.” It’s much harder to work together when you’re not together. And this is especially true for creative work.

The Distributed Creative Process

The creative process differs for each individual, but in an on-site creative team effort, it can be molded to suit the requirements of the team members, tasks and workplace situations fairly easily.

Throw distance into the equation, and the creative process can be more difficult to get — and keep — a handle on. Also, the naturally disjointed nature of remote collaboration can mean that the already-slippery creative process is more easily derailed: it’s more difficult to keep everyone on the same page, in the same frame of mind, and working at the same level of momentum when they’re in different locations.

There are ways to minimize the negative potential of the distance separating your creatives. Making it easy for each person to record, store and share their ideas in whatever format suits them is critical. Don’t delete evidence of old ideas, though: keep them on file in a logical, searchable order so that, if needed, they can be accessed by the team — as idea-triggers for future projects, or the enrichment of the current one.

Keeping the output or product separate from creatives’ work in progress and from their raw ideas is also a good idea. Wherever possible, keep a clear delineation between idea that have been developed and discarded, and what has been developed and produced.

Contact is, of course, crucial. Consider its regularity, depth and frequency, and make sure that your team members can embrace the approach you choose. Don’t be afraid to try new ideas — video chats every couple of hours during intense collaboration phases, for example — or to change your approach if it doesn’t seem to be working as you’d hoped. Alleviating blockages and ensuring smooth, clear communication is often the most important thing a manager can do to support a creative team.

Transparency during the assembly of the creative product is also a necessity. To get the greatest value from your creatives, you’ll want to give them the ability to adjust or amend the product as it’s created. Do this in a way that ensures their accountability to the rest of the team, and so that each team member is aware of the impacts the others are having, and you should avoid nasty surprises.

How do you manage the creative process in your dispersed team? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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The reality is that truly productive teams tend to be close-knit. There’s a strong sense of rapport between the team members. Let’s face it: In a productive team, it’s the teamwork — willingness to try to problem-solve together — that often ensures the productivity. And teamwork depends, above all else, on rapport.

What makes for good rapport? Skill levels matter, as do personalities, but rapport is a trickier equation than just putting capable, fun people together. We’ve all seen individuals who’d make great friends on paper struggle to work productively in a team.

Communication, and the willingness of team members to take the trouble to find and inhabit common ground, are often crucially important factors in rapport building. Yet current workplace and technology trends can make these ideals difficult to reach.

The proliferation of dispersed teams, and teams that combine full-time, part-time and contract staff, can fall prey to various communications pitfalls: colloquialisms and language barriers, time zones, and cultural differences in work style and expectations, for example. These external factors can make it difficult for even the best-suited colleagues to develop a strong sense of one another, and build a productive working relationship.

Tools can present additional hurdles. Each of us has our favorite tools, and preferred ways to use them, and those preferences can cause teamwork hiccups. But the varying experiences and values of team members can also mean that we find some tools more difficult or time-consuming to use, and that can restrict our usage of those tools — and the development of working relationships — accordingly.

Finally, the ongoing focus on brevity — of emails, meetings, documentation, social network updates, phone messages, and so on — can undermine the kind of self-expression that usually forms the basis for understanding and rapport.

Being aware of the factors that can limit the development of productive working relationships is the first step in remedying a rapport deficit within your team. Beyond that, there are many ways we can consciously work to build rapport with our colleagues.

Be Available

We can’t all be available 100 percent of the time, but availability is a big hurdle to developing rapport. If you can’t communicate with a colleague in the timeframe they expect, you need to explain why, and tell them when you’ll get back to them.

This can be an important step in educating your colleagues — particularly remote, contract or new team members — about your work habits and style. It can also reduce frustration on their end, and help them to develop appropriate expectations about working with you — both important factors in building rapport.

Take Time

If you’re addressing a colleague, take the time to give them your full attention and a complete response.

That hastily-dashed-off email sent from your phone that addressed only one point in your workmate’s message may wind up being more confusing than illuminating. But, more than that, if it makes you come across as careless, inarticulate, ignorant, cranky or demanding, it could retard the development of the rapport that’ll make for smoother working relationships in future.

Find Common Ground

Rapport depends on some sort of common understanding. Whether it’s about professional or personal interests, seek to find common ground with your teammate, and try to spend some time in that space.

Ask them questions. Seek their opinions or views. Take what you know of their personalities and interests on board as you work with them. A few genuinely personal lines in an otherwise dry email or IM can make a world of difference to your colleagues’ motivation to help you out on this task, and those ahead.

Share

Your willingness to share information about your own interests is just as important as theirs — perhaps more so if you’re the one consciously trying to build rapport.

Don’t let your chances of developing a strong working relationship be curtailed by a shy colleague’s apparent distance. Make the effort to share something about yourself and you might just encourage them to be more candid with you — a positive first step on the road to better rapport.

How important is rapport in the way your team works? What helps you build rapport with your colleagues?

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The problem with this purely quantitative approach is that it misses the great potential of collaboration: innovation.

Using a team, rather than an individual, isn’t just a way to get things done faster, it’s also a way to do things better, and do better things. Gone are the days when innovation was handled by management. Smart businesses know that idea generation, prototyping and testing happens on the ground, on the frontline, at the coalface — whatever cliche you prefer.

When viewed in this context, the shorter timeframes implied by the increased capacity in a team must necessarily expand. Why? Because innovation takes time.

Research

You don’t know what you don’t know. Innovators understand the value of research, through resources, other people, practical experimentation, and so on. And good research — the kind that’s thorough, creative, collaborative, and gives the innovator time to build prototypes and test cases to reduce the risk of innovation to the business — takes time.

An iterative philosophy of innovation might shorten the time it takes to get your innovative idea up and running, but it still takes time, as do subsequent iterations of the idea.

Discussion

We can’t innovate in a vacuum. Team-based innovators need opportunities to speak with other team members, to debate, contribute, conduct more research and report back on their findings.

They need to understand how the innovation they’re proposing will impact others’ work. What parts of their idea can others piggyback onto? What parts present potential risks or dependencies for others’ inputs?

Reflection and Planning

Most team leaders love a good plan, but we can easily underestimate the value of reflection.

Once a team member has conduced research, and discussed it with others, that person will need time to reflect on all that information if they’re to formulate a solid working plan to implement the innovation. Multiply that work by the number of people collaborating within your team, and it’s easy to see that reflection is both important and potentially time-consuming.

It’s true that reflective time isn’t bounded by the restrictions of the working day, but that doesn’t mean we can avoid allocating time for reflection at work.

Through reflection, the team can anticipate problems, mitigate risks, and pull together the strands of teamwork to make the implementation proceed smoothly. Skimp on reflective time — or ignore it altogether — and your increase the risk of having good innovations fail.

Managing Multiple Inputs

Innovating solo avoids many of the hassles of effectively integrating multiple inputs — inputs that may themselves be innovative (and therefore behave unpredictably), or may need to be integrated within an unprecedented system or framework (which in itself is unpredictable).

In the one-man-band, you know what you’ve created, and you know how it all needs to fit together. But innovative teams must manage the unpredictability of their individual innovations (and the processes by which they are developed), the unpredictability of the innovative system into which they fit, and the unpredictability of their colleagues’ innovations.

Communication is never perfect: a team member may believe they understand how something will work, but be surprised when they finally see the finished component. Using a transparent approach to innovation is a common way to lessen the likelihood of this eventuality, but it also takes time.

Making Collaborative Innovation Efficient

Plenty of techniques and tools have been developed to help us innovate more efficiently and more successfully. But it’s important that we understand the nature of team innovation if we’re to get the most out of the models we choose.

People are central to this equation. Smaller, more tightly-knit teams may be less likely to see each other as “human resources”, but it’s still important to understand how team members develop ideas individually and together, and to allow sufficient time for the less-visible aspects of those processes to take place.

How do you manage the time your team takes to innovate? Are you using a specific model for innovative collaboration, or are you winging it?

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Social media needn’t be an end in itself. It’s one thing to “engage” and “lead thinking” in your social network. But social media really starts having a direct benefit when you can tap into the information it’s providing you and feed it back into your business, and your team.

One way to look at the social media picture is to ask the team members who use and manage your social media presence two basic questions.

What Are Our Contacts Saying?

The ongoing review of what contacts are saying — an essential part of engaging with social media — reveals trends that can be invaluable to your team.

What are contacts are saying about your organization, product quality, service levels, team members, marketing approaches and public presence? Are they happy to engage with you? Are they telling their contacts about you?

This kind of information can be fed directly back into strategy (for example, if customers are complaining about your phone support, perhaps you need to review call center opening hours) and your team’s task lists (if clients have identified a bug that’s not yet documented on your product site, that can be added to a team member’s priority list).

What Aren’t Our Contacts Saying?

This may seem a silly question, but with a little effort, you can identify gaps in your strategy, and opportunities to improve both your offering and your contact relationships.

How do you work out what people aren’t saying about you? Look at your competitors’ engagement with their audiences. What are customers, suppliers and industry players saying to or about peer organizations that they’re not saying about yours — and what does that mean?

Also compare the information you obtained from investigating the first question (what your contacts are saying about you) against your social media goals. If you’re meeting those goals, there won’t be any gaps between what you expect to see in your social media engagements, and what’s actually happening. If there are gaps, you’ll know something’s missing, and further research and discussion are necessary if you’re to lift your game.

Identifying what customers aren’t saying is only half the problem. The other half is your team’s interpretation of what those gaps mean, and the practical approaches you devise to address them.

Making It Work

In large teams, teams where the social media effort involves multiple parties, or teams where the person who looks after social media isn’t a leader or manager, scheduling a regular, focused discussion of these questions is probably ideal.

This kind of semi-formalized approach to feeding the knowledge obtained though social media back into business strategy allows you to understand the value your social media contacts can add to your business. It may also give you the objectivity to consider those findings — and possible responses to them — from a strategic viewpoint.

For example, if a customer complained about product quality, how does this information compare with the broader research you’ve done into customer satisfaction? What processes do you — or could you — have in place to respond to these comments? The same questions could be asked about your most loyal advocates, assuming you want to maintain that position in their minds.

How does your team understand and interpret the qualitative information that social media provides to you? What techniques are you using to feed this information back into business strategy, and/or team member to-do lists?

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Project momentum is what makes it easy for team members to get things done even when they have bigger challenges to tackle; it’s what keeps the project’s wheels oiled and spinning, even when team members take time out.

While team motivation might be highest at the beginning and end of a project, momentum will, ideally, be consistent or growing throughout. This means when motivation levels dip, momentum can carry the team through, keeping individuals productive, and your project on track. Momentum can be especially valuable when your team members are spread across multiple locations.

Once you kick off a project, how can you ensure all the collaborators in your team will maintain the momentum to get the job done easily and well? Can you build the project’s momentum, so progress and productivity actually become easier as time passes?

Action Pathways

Making sure everyone knows where the project is heading, and what they and their colleagues need to do to get there, is a critical first step in maintaining momentum.

Be aware that while shared project management tools are great for keeping everyone informed about project direction and progress, if a team member falls behind schedule, the constant visibility of that lagging performance can reduce the team’s momentum — even for those whose tasks don’t directly depend upon the work of that team member.

Shared task lists, where team members have the ability to add tasks to others’ lists, can also help maintain momentum, as long as the tasks are managed by the team leader, and the lists don’t get too long.

Time Allocation

Time is important in maintaining momentum, and building it. Provide too little time per task, and team members can feel overwhelmed — a huge drain on momentum. Equally, allocate too much time, and the team’s momentum may dissolve as days or weeks pass with little progress.

Ask team members how much time they expect they’ll need to complete a task, then balance that estimate against the business requirements and how you think it’ll impact the team’s momentum. Gut feel; your team’s composition and the organization’s culture will all impact what sorts of timeframes are appropriate.

Don’t miss the opportunity to use the extra momentum generated when a task is completed ahead of time. Consider if other project tasks can be started early or moved forward as a result of this gain — keeping things moving is important if you’re to make the most of the momentum you’ve achieved.

Task Management

The types of tasks a team member has to do can affect momentum just as timeframes can. Too much of one task type, and even star performers can get bogged down, losing momentum as well as motivation. But if they need to switch tasks too often, they may lack the sense of challenge that can help to build momentum.

Even if you can’t control a team member’s whole schedule, do your best to gauge how easy or hard they’re finding the tasks they’ve been allocated, and consider reordering task progression if they seem overwhelmed or mired in a particular task. Making logical, practical revisions on the fly can have a noticeable impact on the overall team’s momentum.

Reporting

Reporting requirements can be good motivators, but they may also provide boundaries for the project, and give it the shape and intensity needed to keep things turning over. Feed the reported information back into shared project blueprints so that everyone on the job can see the progress that’s being made, and share the sense of momentum.

Asking for regular reports from team members — no matter how casual that reporting process might be — can give a valuable sense of flow to the project for each of the individuals involved. Reporting can be one way to help team members get a sense of their own momentum, and use it to work through their own motivational peaks and troughs.

The other benefit of reporting is that it will give you a valuable chance to communicate with the team member, provide feedback, and gauge their motivation and momentum levels, as well as their progress. Ultimately, the interpersonal benefits of reporting can also support and build momentum.

How does momentum play out in your project teams? Let us know in the comments.

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