When You Take Your Business Remote, How Do You Keep Everyone In The Loop?

If there’s one thing every business worries about when it comes to working remotely, it’s the fact that you can never be sure how your team is coming along. 

You don’t know what progress they’re making, what obstacles they’re running into, and whether or not they feel focused and productive enough to get the job done. 

When they’re not there in the office with you, you have to get comfortable with letting the updates roll in at their own pace. And for a lot of people, that’s simply not a good way to run a business. 

However, there are many benefits to going remote - and quite a few unique advantages of having a remote team at your fingertips. Going remote could even cut overheads and keep your business firmly in the green. 

So in the meantime, business leaders simply need to find ways to make it easier to collaborate as a remote team. Here are a few tips and tricks on making that happen. 

Have One Main Communication Channel

If you want to know your team has seen an important bulletin, update, or sudden announcement, you need to share these things in the same place. 

When there’s just the one communication channel, it’s much easier to stay up to date on what’s going on with the business, no matter where you are in the world. 

After all, there’s no need to rifle through a bunch of different group chats or workflow apps. You can just go straight to this one channel to double check. 

Ask for proof of receipt

If you want to be sure your team members have seen something you’ve sent, you can ask them to send confirmation once they’ve read it. 

For example, if you send an email, you can simply ask for a reply. Or if you message a group chat, you can ask everyone to react with a thumbs up. 

This makes it much easier to follow up with anyone who should have seen it, but hasn’t yet sent proof of doing so. 

Create a Digital Handbook of Your Processes, Guidelines, and Policies

You can’t train a remote team in person. You can’t just call them all from the office into a meeting room and deliver an update. You need to be more purposeful about how this information can be accessed.

And with a remote team, the culture of the office or workplace is quite removed from their day to day lives. There’s no constant reminder of what’s right and wrong in the way they work, so the information needs to be something they can pull up whenever they need to. 

As such, you’ll want to create a digital ‘handbook’ of all your relevant processes, guidelines, and policies, and have them all linked up in one easy to access place. 

For any new team members, you can then design an easy to follow course that’ll guide them through their onboarding without any need for face to face interaction. Plus, you can use the exact same handbook materials for this as well, so the content and flow shouldn’t be hard to perfect. 

Review materials on a quarterly basis

Once you’ve made your handbook or course, you shouldn’t just leave it to gather dust. Once it’s been created and shared around, it should be reviewed every 3 to 4 months to double check the information is still relevant. 

You don’t want to train new employees on outdated systems, and you don’t want employees accidentally working to old guidelines. Review your materials regularly to make the updates easier to stay on top of. 

Encourage a Culture of Asking for Help

When you’re all working together in the same place, it’s easier to see when people are slowing down and scratching their heads. But when you’re all working remotely, this nuance doesn’t really exist. People need to ask for help - and they may not be comfortable doing so. 

However, you don’t want people to sit on the other side of the screen and feel stuck. You don’t want them to feel anxious over reaching out for some help. 

You want your team to know you’re there for advice whenever they’ve hit more of a sticky spot, and that’s something you need to encourage from the ground up. 

Remind your team over and over again that it’s OK to shoot you a question when they’ve got one. Remind them it’s perfectly OK to need some advice, and that’s what you’re here for. 

Make sure these reminders are outlined in all of your communications, as the repeated exposure really will start to add up.

Schedule Regular Check-Ins 

Even when you’re working remotely, you can still have the regular team meeting booked in on the calendar.

And it’s important to have these check-ins, so you can make sure people are on the same page in a more face to face way. 

Plus, if you used to work side by side and now have limited contact with one another, this is simply a good way to provide a proper catch-up space. 

How often should your check-ins happen?

It’s up to you! Weekly is usually the sweet spot, with mid-week or end-week meetings being most popular. Once a fortnight also tends to work well. 

Make Your Remote Workstyle More Collaborative

When you’ve gone remote, you can be left feeling like you’re adrift in the ocean - and there isn’t a single familiar face in sight. 

That can be a hard adjustment for many, but it’s one you can overcome by investing in your remote collaboration. There are ways to make a remote team just as connected as an in person one, and that’s something to focus on as you make this change. 

Send important news over just the one channel. Take your onboarding digital. Make it easy to ask for help. Schedule check-ins that work for everyone. Because above all, when you go remote, you simply need to make it easy for your team to stay in the loop with you. 

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