GigaOM » Collaboration

Elance adds video chat to its virtual workrooms

Ryan Lawler — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:07:32 +0000

Video chat is changing the way people communicate, which is becoming increasingly evident in the way it’s being used for virtual work. Remote teams are turning to video communications to provide more face-to-face contact between team members. That’s why Elance recently introduced video chat to its users, as a new feature embedded directly into the site.

Elance has grown pretty dramatically over the past few years, as more and more jobs move online and work becomes more virtual. To provide more value to its users, the company wants to do more than just connect employers and contractors. That’s why it has a virtual workroom that enables collaborative work and communications tools between them.

In their virtual workrooms, contractors can send messages, submit invoices, respond to to-do lists and other features. And now, Elance has added a new video chat feature to enable more “face-to-face” contact between collaborators, without users having to enter a whole different application to connect.

According to Elance VP of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Ved Sinha, the addition of video chat to the virtual workroom will reduce the friction that comes when employers and contractors work together. While many had previously interfaced through other applications, building the chat window directly into a contractor’s dashboard enables instant communication with the click of a button.

To do this, Elance uses Tokbox’s OpenTok video chat client, which enables businesses to embed video chat into their websites. While there are plenty of video chat offerings available on the market today, Sinha told me by phone that OpenTok was the only solution that allowed Elance to build video chat directly and seamlessly into the virtual workroom.

That was a big advantage for Elance, which wanted to ensure its users didn’t have to open a different client or application to get in touch with one another. And for its clients, the feature should enable better coordination and more productivity.

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10 tools to improve communication

Amber Singleton Riviere — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:04:43 +0000

If you’re working remotely, finding ways to improve and streamline communications with your clients and team might seem like a never-ending chore, but with the right mix of tools, it’s possible to keep projects moving forward with ease. Here are ten tools that will help improve your communication.

Shared to-do lists

Wunderlist. Wunderlist is a simple task manager that works on the web or your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android phone. Your list follows you and stays synced across all your devices, and you can even share your to-do list with the Wunderlist via URL or Twitter.

Project management

Reverb. Reverb is a project and task manager that allows you to collaborate with your team and stay organized. Similar to Basecamp and other popular project management solutions, Reverb offers the ability to upload files, host discussions, and manage tasks within one interface.
Splendid Bacon. Splendid Bacon is a stripped-down version of project management that lets you see, at a glance, what’s going on with your projects. Don’t expect elaborate functionality or a complex interface; Splendid Bacon is straightforward and concentrates on one main area of project management, status updates. Post short, Twitter-style status reports to let team members and clients know where you are with a project, and use the simple dashboard and timeline to see which projects are moving forward and which are on hold.
Client Stat.us. If you like Splendid Bacon’s Twitter-style approach to project communication, another option is Client Stat.us, and this one doesn’t even require log-ins or passwords. Just share a link to the project status page, and your clients stay in the loop. I love the simplicity of this interface that takes the intimidation factor out of client updates; just post what task is in progress and brief (140 characters or less) updates as you move the task forward.

Online meetings and conferencing

Vyew. Vyew is an online meeting room application that allows you to collaborate with your team visually and in real time. You can upload images, files, and videos into your meeting room, and up to ten participants can access the room and contribute. Conferencing features include a whiteboard, video conferencing, screen sharing, and VoIP. You can even add text or voice comments to the pages of your room, so the interactive features make for truly dynamic presentations and meetings.

Collaborative social media

CoTweet. CoTweet allows business teams to engage in social media as a group in a unified way. Team members can publish updates to Twitter (and Facebook with an Enterprise account), collaborate on responses, track engagement, and analyze campaigns. All conversations are combined into a single, unified inbox. Work groups can be formed in order to focus on a specific brand or product within the company. Plus, there’s the ability to create and control roles and permissions within the company so that team members are allowed specific access within social media accounts.

Mobile communication

Mobiola Headset. Mobiola Headset is an iPhone/iPod/iPad app that both records calls and also acts as a headset for your PC or Mac. It works with a variety of VoIP applications, including MSN/Windows Live, Google Talk, AOL IM, and Skype, and you simply use the screen to control recording or playing back conversations.
IM+ Talk. IM+ Talk allows you to make Skype calls from your smartphone. Depending on your phone, you can receive calls to your SkypeIn number, see who is online and chat with other Skype users, and make free VoIP calls in half-duplex mode (similar to a walkie-talkie).
Smart Scanner. Smart Scanner is an iPhone app that captures and recognizes scanned information, such as articles from magazines, notes, or other printed information. Once you scan it, you can copy and edit the text, access email or make a call, and open URLs within the text. The application recognizes phone numbers, email addresses, web addresses and QR codes, and it works in five languages.

As tools and technology evolve, communication among distributed teams is becoming easier and easier, making it possible to work from anywhere, literally from the touch of a button.

What online tools and applications have most helped with your communications?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Pixel Addict

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Talkwheel wants to reinvent the way we communicate online

Aliza Sherman — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:05:08 +0000

We have email, we have message boards, we have IM, but if they aren’t integrated with one another, our collaborative communications often fall short. Andy McLoughlin, cofounder of Huddle, recently discussed the limitations of email as a collaboration tool. Virtual teams are finding email streams hard to track and harder to scale. IM conversations, while great in the moment, often disappear into the ether, not archived for future reference. And message boards are barely a step up from the Usenet Newsgroups of the early Internet.

So where do we go from here? Many of us who work with virtual teams have tried adopting collaboration and communication systems that are more fully integrated and where the conversations are archived and searchable. These tools combine email capabilities (receiving and sending emails that post into the system), message boards or forums where topic-specific conversations can take place, and in some cases, IM-like, or even Twitter-like, functions. These systems also often include document uploading, sharing and collaboration, task management, and project management tools. But none of the tools I’ve experimented with try to re-imagine the way we communicate online. Enter Talkwheel, which positions itself as an integrated communications tool for enterprises and offers a novel way to capture, visualize and follow conversations.

Rethink our collaborative communications

I have to be honest; it has taken me a long time to “get” Talkwheel, and even though now I “get it,” it still doesn’t appeal to me. But it does present an interesting way of rethinking how we communicate and collaborate and what happens to our conversations in different places that are inter-related but not inter-linked.

Talkwheel’s premise is that if you install and use the platform with your team, all of the conversations you have — both in real-time and asynchronously — will be captured and organized in a way that lets you visualize them. You can form Talkwheel Groups to bring together specific groupings of people with whom you are communicating, such as a group for a specific project or a group for a particular department. When you bring people into a group, they are set up with Talkwheel accounts (you can also use Facebook to bring in your Facebook friends) and any subsequent messaging amongst group members will show up in several ways: as threaded and nested messages on the right side of the interface, and around the “talkwheel” on the left.

The wheel is meant to represent a round table, while the people in the group are represented by their icons around the wheel. Each person’s comments are symbolized by color-colored dots and the connections between the comments are illustrated as lines connecting those dots. As a very visual thinker, I want to fall in love with that wheel, but it really falls flat for me and feels unnecessary. Part of this feeling may be coming from the fairly primitive interface; it feels like somebody’s hand-drawn image of what they’d like this platform to become, rather than an elegant user interface that illustrates the idea of a “conversation wheel.”

Harness disparate conversations

Despite the shortcomings in user experience, the premise of Talkwheel is an interesting one: Bringing the different ways we are communicating into a single platform so conversations aren’t lost, and connections between conversations are made and are more explicit. But, despite its novel visual interface, Talkwheel isn’t the first to tackle this communications challenge and is up against social business tools Yammer, Salesforce Chatter and Socialtext, collaboration platforms like Glasscubes and Huddle, and perhaps even the new “Circles” feature in Google+.

What is more exciting about Talkwheel, however, are the analytical tools the company is rolling out. Right now, you can measure Sentiment of conversations. In the same way that you might want to know the positive, negative and neutral sentiments of conversations taking place on blogs, social networks and the like, Talkwheel lets you measure the sentiment of your internal and external team conversations. As more and more virtual teams form and subtle cues of in-person conversation are lost, being able to “take the emotional temperature” of a group conversation will have a lot of value for the manager of virtual teams.

Even though we are all in the habit of flitting between our emails, which may or may not e integrated with our collaboration tools and then our IMs and then message boards, we probably know deep down inside that this isn’t efficient; we’re just used to doing it. Talkwheel offers a solution, but it’s only a matter of time before we know if any of us are willing to break our bad communications habit and get a better grip on our collaborative conversations.

How are you harnessing your emails, IMs and message board posts as you collaborate with your team?

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3 skills that enable remote work success

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 12:05:08 +0000

When you’re evaluating potential hires for a remote work position, or accessing whether or not an existing office-based team member can make the jump to working from home, what skill or skills do you hold most important? It’s a tough question, because what makes someone good at any given position normally doesn’t necessarily make them best suited for a remote work environment.

Here are the skills that I think, irrespective of specific industry, provide the best ground upon which to build remote work success. It’s a short list, and obviously the more of these a candidate has, the better, but there’s one in particular I think stands out above all the rest.

Wide-ranging technical knowledge and experience. Someone who works remotely will be doing much of their job online, and just as the best photographer has used a variety of cameras and equipment, the best remote worker will have used many platforms, operating systems and devices. Remote workers don’t need to be experts in many fields, it’s more important that they have experimented early and often with a range of technological areas. The key is that they understand fundamentals well enough that if they are thrown into a brand new computing environment with unfamiliar hardware or software, they can hit the ground running and quickly get up to speed. The best tool is the one you have with you, and the best handyman is the one who can wield any tool.
Independently motivated. If you want to work remotely, you had better be able to provide our own motivation to get things done. Many people perceive that there’s a considerable chance that if they worked from home, they’d have a hard time getting anything done, and that can definitely be true if you are used to strong external guidance at a traditional workplace. In many remote work situations, the only taskmaster you’ll have will be yourself, so if you’re good at digging in and getting stuff done, it’s your time to shine.
Excellent communication skills. If you have an employee in-house and you don’t hear from them for three months, they’re probably either on vacation or playing some serious hooky. With remote workers, large gaps in communication can be all too common. That’s why you should focus on finding remote work assets that put considerable stock in talking to and being talked to by home base. But just finding a chatterbox isn’t enough. You need to find employees that can communicate effectively in a variety of electronic media without becoming a productivity drag by unnecessarily requesting too much attention. It’s a surprisingly thin line to tread.

For me, the most important asset to have is no. 3. Breakdowns in communication result in the biggest mistakes, and lead to productivity-killing mop up. What’s at the top of your list?

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Get more done by being a better listener

Georgina Laidlaw — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:02:47 +0000

Are you a poor listener? In the context of distributed teams, “listening” needn’t be restricted to an auditory process; it includes your ability to take in information through all communications channels.

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?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user borissey.

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Workers Increasingly Accept Vacation Interruptions, Study Says

Charles Hamilton — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:51:09 +0000

The sort of “Let’s Get Away From It All” vacation immortalized in the popular song may be a thing of the past, as Jessica suggested in her recent post on how to “switch off [on vacation] without appearing to slack off.” A new study commissioned by business communications provider Intermedia, and conducted by Harris Interactive, confirms that workers are increasingly accepting of being contacted for work while on vacation.

A total of 71 percent of those responding to the survey said that they are OK with being interrupted while on their summer vacations. That percentage included:

32 percent who said that email is the best way to reach them,
20 percent preferred to be contacted by phone, and
18 percent preferred text messages.

Interestingly, of the 29 percent who said it is never appropriate to contact them while on vacation, more than 7 out of 10 are over the age of 45.

Eighty-seven percent of those responding to the survey also preferred email for communicating with coworkers and business contacts while in the office. Of those responding, 31 percent said that voicemail is their least favorite mode of communication, followed by instant messaging (29 percent), and texting (26 percent).

The survey was conducted online from May 12-16, 2011 among 2,398 U.S. adults. Respondents were full- and part-time employed adults in the U.S. who have colleagues.

How accessible will you be on your next vacation?

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Pick the Right Collaboration Tools for Your Business

Georgina Laidlaw — Tue, 24 May 2011 21:04:31 +0000

“If you’re bolding the bullet points in your email” said a friend of mine recently, “your email’s too long.” Few web workers would disagree. But all the same, as a blanket statement, that comment made me wonder whether the tools we’re using to communicate are becoming more important than the communications we’re having.

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?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user csotelo.

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Binfire: Team Collaboration and Project Management

Amber Singleton Riviere — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:05:33 +0000

The first step toward successful remote working is communication. Binfire offers distributed teams a free solution for online collaboration that makes it simple to stay on track.

As with most online collaboration tools, Binfire offers the ability to manage projects by adding members, creating tasks and milestones, and assigning responsibility, but there are several useful features I haven’t seen in other project management solutions so far, including:

The ability to follow and unfollow tasks. By simply clicking a star next to a given item, you can add or remove yourself from following the task, making it easy to stay informed about the progress of certain milestones or to remove yourself from conversations and activities that don’t directly involve you.
The ability to organize milestones by context. Most project management applications I’ve tried offer the ability to rearrange and move tasks and to-do items quite easily, but not milestones, especially as they relate to other tasks you need to complete for a given project.
Tagging of milestones for quick searching and organization. Sometimes it helps to be able to search for tasks and other items quickly by keyword, and Binfire’s tagging feature makes it easy to organize items into groups for easy searching.
Quick view of item history. It’s easy to forget the status of particular milestones or tasks, especially when you’re managing several parts of a project (or multiple projects). With Binfire’s quick viewing of item history, you can easily remember where you are and what needs to happen next, in order to complete the item.
Clear hierarchy of tasks and milestones. One of the most useful features of Binfire is the ability to create a clear hierarchy of milestones, tasks, and sub-tasks. Add to that functionality the ability to create dependencies, and you know right away what needs to get done and in what order. With top down tasks and milestones, it’s easy to organize projects and not feel overwhelmed.

On top of these helpful features, here are a few of the other things you can do with Binfire:

Communicate With Your Team

Binfire offers easy commenting on just about anything: milestones, to-dos and status updates. The interactive whiteboard provides a direct way to brainstorm with your team in real time, including the ability to write, draw, import pictures, and open PDF documents directly within the whiteboard.

The quick status updating feature makes it possible for team members to keep each other in the loop. You can also use the online chat feature to talk to your team members one-on-one or as a group; it’s easy to add a new person to a chat by simply dragging and dropping them into the conversation.

Organize and Share Files

Each project has its own folder that is accessible to all team members and includes version control and file locking, making it possible to protect sensitive files and revert back to previous versions.

You can lock a file while you are working on it, making it visible to other members that you are using the file and forcing them to wait for you to finish your changes before they can access it. When you’re done, the members get a notification by email that your updated file is ready and available to them for their additions.

Track Progress

Through the dashboard and project overview, you can quickly track all activity for a project, and for every major action taken by your team members, a small summary is available.

Binfire currently offers the app for free, with a paid version coming soon that will include increased storage and file size limit, more projects and project members, Gantt and PERT charts, and advance project status reporting.

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5 Common Remote Work Misconceptions

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:02:39 +0000

Remote working may be on the rise, but there are still some assumptions made about a distributed workplace that prevent some employers from adopting the model, even when it has the potential to save a business a fair amount of money.

Here’s a list of five big reasons companies won’t pull the trigger on remote working, and some explanation about why those fears are mostly unfounded.

1. Productivity Will Drop

According to a recent study, remote workers work harder than their office-based counterparts. Whether it’s because they feel a sense of gratitude at being able to enjoy a flexible arrangement, or because they have fewer unnecessary meetings and distractions to deal with, or just because working from home is more fun, distributed teams tend to put in more hours, and do more with the time they spend on work-related activities.

2. Communication Will Suffer

Many people assume that remote team members will communicate less with one another. It may be true that, overall, time spent communicating will go down, but that doesn’t mean communication will suffer. In fact, my experience has been that communication is often better in a remote work environment, because unnecessary interaction is generally removed from the equation. And because communicating can be achieved only through tools, I often find that remote workers have a better understanding of those tools and how to use them, and which are most appropriate for each type of communication, unlike their office-based counterparts. It’s crucial to support remote workers with the proper communication strategy, but once that’s in place, you’ll find it’s nowhere near the problem you were expecting.

3. Costs Will Increase

Because there can be a significant initial spend when it comes to setting up a remote work trial, some companies assume those costs will continue throughout the life of the program. However, that isn’t the case. Remote working should actually reduce overheads significantly over time. Lowered facilities costs, combined with reductions to other things like transportation allowances, make the cost benefits of remote working one of its most attractive features.

4. Company Culture Will Evaporate

I’ve heard that some fear losing their company’s culture or “personality,” or at least the quirks that make the workplace feel human, when they switch to a remote setup. In my experience, that’s far from the case; I’ve gotten along better with remote workers, and felt that I’ve grown to know them better as people than I ever did with office-mates. So long as communication remains open and frequent, your distributed team members will be able to gain a sense of camaraderie that should shine through in interactions with clients and other third-parties.

5. Security Will Be Weakened

One of the major concerns surrounding remote working is that it endangers company security; data will leave the network from time to time, and employees are largely unsupervised. Sensitive information does seem more vulnerable in such settings, but there’s yet to be very much accumulated evidence proving that companies do indeed actually take on increased liability in this regard by moving to a remote work setup. Motivated individuals will leak or steal info regardless of whether you have remote working measures in place or not. The smart course of action is to prepare for the unique vulnerabilities brought about by remote working.

There are many good reasons to question whether or not a remote working arrangement will work at your company, but the reasons above are not among them. They’re just misconceptions that hang around because they seem to make sense intuitively. If you’re considering a remote work program, do yourself a favor and focus on real challenges, instead of challenges of perception.

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3 Challenges of Working Remotely

Amber Singleton Riviere — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:02:54 +0000

One of the biggest obstacles for a distributed workforce is the lack of personal connection, and while there are several ways to build stronger relationships with your team, the effects of the initial disconnect can have a lasting impact on the success of your company.

Here are just a few of the challenges of working remotely, along with ways to address them while you work to build a deeper understanding and commitment from your employees.

Challenge #1: No “Buy In”

In any relationship, it takes a while to get to know and understand the other person. The same is true for the people on your team. Your staff need time to adjust to one another (working styles and preferences, communication styles, etc.), so it can take a while to develop the relationships that will make your company culture thrive. It can also take a while for new team members to understand the mission and inner workings of your company as a whole, which can make it hard for them to “buy in” to what you’re doing at the beginning.

One solution: Have regular accountability calls with the people on your team. Use a service like iMeet to have face-to-face interactions that incorporate live video streaming with voice so that you can start putting faces and voices to names. Have calls every two weeks so that they’re not too demanding time-wise, and stick to a strict agenda and time frame for each call. Start by letting the person know how things have been going for the company overall, and then let the employee share what he or she has accomplished over the last two weeks, as well as what’s on the list to do over the coming two weeks. Make sure to reiterate what the person’s primary focus should be (and why) so that he or she understands how his or her job impacts the company as a whole.

Challenge #2: Clock-Focused Thinking

In almost any working arrangement, it’s easy for employees to focus solely on the clock, instead of on results or the overall vision of the company. Rather than keeping a constant pulse on how a given activity or task relates to the bottom line, employees more commonly monitor how much time it takes to complete, which can lead to a lot of wasted time on trivial tasks that don’t add real value.

One solution: Give employees a single metric to watch that isn’t time-related. Revenue, expenses, leads captured, new clients signed, or website visitors are all metrics that can be influenced up or down based on an employee’s activities, and by tying his or her efforts to one of those numbers, it’s far more likely that he or she will focus on activities that more directly impact it. Be sure to concentrate on that one key metric during your accountability calls, too, so that the person begins to see that that’s how you’re measuring his or her success overall, not by how many hours he or she clocks in a given week.

Challenge #3: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

One thing I’ve experienced within my own business is that, when there’s a lull on the client’s end, I’m tempted to take advantage of the downtime to focus on other areas of my business, making it possible for days or weeks to go by with no contact between myself and the client. This can lead to a breakdown in communication and to lost momentum within a given project, so when working with members of your own team, it’s important to maintain communication, even when things might be going a little more slowly than usual.

One solution: At the start of each day, send a quick email to team members to let them know where you are with things, what you’re waiting for (whether on your end or theirs), and what the next step will be as soon as that “waiting for” item is in hand. This keeps everyone on the same page and connected overall so that there’s no loss in momentum or communication.

In the end, regular communication and feedback helps to ensure that most of these problems are averted and that you and your team remain on the same page and moving forward with the goals and mission of the company.

What problems have you experienced with working remotely, and how did you fix them?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Y0$HIMI

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