Collaborating and Communicating with others is essential to online working. The following are steps for communicating with remote teams.

Schedule Communication

• It’s nearly impossible to communicate too much when it comes to managing a remote team.
• Schedule monthly, weekly or daily team meetings. It’s important that communication isn’t just an abstract goal but a clearly outlined, measurable and achievable benchmark.
• Having a shared calendar is a great, easy way to keep everyone on the same page.

Give Each Communication Platform a Purpose

• If there are too many different places to communicate, they can end up serving only as a distraction.
• By assigning separate tasks for each platform, the whole process is streamlined. For example, use Slack for progress updates and Zoom for meetings. Also share calendars

Be Careful With Tone

• It’s easy to forget is that text and emails rarely conveys tone.
• State things clearly and avoid sarcasm.

Use Zoom Video Conference Calls When Possible

• Zoom video conference calls are the closest thing you’ll get to in-person meetings with your remote team.
• Seeing each other encourages productivity and staying on task, whereas audio-only calls leave room for distraction.

Be positive

• Don’t forget to tell your employees what they’re doing right.
• Constructive criticism goes a long way, but without some positivity now and then employees will only come to dread your feedback.
• Encouragement is one of the most effective things a manager can do.

In the online learning world, it’s essential to manage remote teams. The following are steps for managing team members who are in different locations.

Set expectations and define objectives

• Be proactive and define the objectives you want your team to achieve.
• Detail the plan on how to achieve team goals.
• Hold remote employees accountable. Give them goals to achieve on a weekly or quarterly basis. Evaluate their job performance the same way you would if you worked in the same office with them.

Encourage communication

• Don’t let remote workers feel “remote” or “forgotten.”
• Establish regularly scheduled meetings that attempt to accommodate team members’ availability.
• Stress to team members that they have an obligation to stay in regular contact.

Get to know remote team members

• Bond with remote team members to build trust, empathy and camaraderie.
• Make them feel a part of the organization by spending the first few minutes of a meeting to discuss weekend plans, kids and engage in other small talk and casual conversation.

Use Zoom Video Conference Calls When Possible

• Zoom video conference calls can spark spur-of-the-moment conversations.
• These talks can lead to new creative ideas and brainstorming sessions.
• Video conversations can be the remote equivalent of gathering around the water cooler.

Be positive

• Don’t forget to tell team members what they’re doing right.
• Constructive criticism goes a long way, but without some positivity now and then employees will only come to dread your feedback.
• Encouragement is one of the most effective things a manager can do.

Virtual teams consist of people who rarely visit a central office or work in remote locations. What follows are some steps on how to successfully be a part of a virtual team.

Ergonomics is defined as “an applied science concerned with designing and arranging things people use so that the people and things interact most efficiently and safely”.