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effective communication for remote teams

Effective Remote Team Communication Strategies: Guide for Global Companies Managing Indian Employees

Effective remote team communication strategies are crucial for building a strong and cohesive remote culture. They help foster collaboration, enhance productivity, and ensure that every team member feels valued and connected, regardless of their physical location.

Recognizing the significance of remote team communication, we at Uplers go above and beyond to ensure the success of the Indian talents working with global teams.

Uplers Talent Success Coaches invest their expertise in the pre-vetted talents, equipping them with the necessary skills to grow in a remote environment while collaborating effectively with global teams.

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore 12 proven remote team communication strategies that empower companies to establish open channels, bridge gaps, and foster a sense of understanding within remote teams.

Effective Remote Team Communication Strategies To Connect With Indian Employees 

Here are some communication best practices for remote teams you need to consider when communicating with Indian remote teams:

1. Establish Communication Norms

First things first, setting communication norms is crucial to establish clear communication within remote teams. This includes encouraging active listening, utilizing appropriate remote team communication tools, maintaining collaboration with cross-functional teams, and fostering an environment where questions are encouraged. 

2. Use Common Communication Channels 

When connecting with Indian talent in a remote team, it is important to use common communication channels such as email, instant messaging platforms, and video conferencing tools. 

Here is the list of the best communication tools for remote teams:

best communication tools for remote teams

Zoom

Features:
  • HD video and audio conferencing
  • Screen sharing and annotation tools
  • Virtual backgrounds and filters
  • Recording and transcription options
Pros:
  • Easy to use and set up meetings
  • Large participant capacity
  • Excellent video and audio quality
  • Wide range of collaboration features
Cons:
  • Limited meeting duration for free accounts

Microsoft Teams

Features:
  • Chat-based collaboration platform
  • Audio and video conferencing
  • Document sharing and co-authoring
  • Integration with other Microsoft tools
Pros:
  • Seamless integration with the Microsoft ecosystem
  • Robust collaboration features
  • Extensive customization options
  • Integration with third-party apps
Cons:
  • Limited support for external guests

Skype

Features:
  • Instant messaging and video calling
  • Screen sharing and file sharing
  • Call recording and live subtitles
  • Integration with Microsoft accounts
Pros:
  • Familiar and widely-used platform
  • Good call quality and stability
  • Cross-platform compatibility
  • Free to use for most features
Cons:
  • Limited features compared to other tools

Google Hangouts

Features:
  • Instant messaging and video calling
  • Group conversations and chat history
  • Screen sharing and live captions
  • Integration with Google Workspace
Pros:
  • Seamless integration with Google services
  • Easy to use and accessible
  • Reliable video and audio quality
  • Good for small teams and casual conversations
Cons:
  • Can be less suitable for large-scale meetings

Slack

Features:
  • Channel-based messaging platform
  • File sharing and integration with other tools
  • Threaded conversations and mentions
  • Voice and video calls (with paid plans)
Pros:
  • Excellent for team collaboration and communication
  • Powerful search and organization capabilities
  • Integration with numerous third-party apps
  • Extensive customization options
Cons:
  • Can be overwhelming with a high volume of messages

3. Train Your Employees To Use The Tools

To effectively connect with Indian employees in a remote team, it is essential to train them to use different remote team communication tools. Uplers Talent Success Coaches diligently provide training to Indian talent to ensure they are proficient in utilizing communication channels for efficient collaboration and engagement.

4. Video Calls Are The Best

Video calls are indeed a highly effective remote team communication approach for connecting with Indian employees. It allows for face-to-face interaction, which helps build rapport and foster better understanding. Visual cues and non-verbal communication can also be easily perceived, improving overall communication effectiveness and reducing misunderstandings. With the help of AI meeting notes, teams can focus on the conversation while relying on technology to document important discussions.

5. Say No To Unnecessary Meetings

Minimizing unnecessary meetings can improve communication for remote teams. To ensure productive meetings and avoid wasting time and resources, consider prioritizing essential discussions and utilizing communication channels as alternatives.

6. Welcome Friendly Communication in the Team

Encourage a culture of friendly communication within your team, where members feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and ideas. Foster a supportive environment that values collaboration, active listening, and empathy. This communication exercise for remote teams promotes stronger relationships, enhances teamwork, and creates a positive work atmosphere that enhances productivity and engagement.

7. Always Up For 1-on-1 Communication

Regular 1-on-1 communication with your Indian employees can also help in effective communication for remote teams overall. This allows for personalized discussions, addressing concerns, building rapport, and fostering a stronger connection. By prioritizing employee interactions, you can better understand their needs, provide support, and maintain open lines of communication to ensure a productive and engaged remote team.

8. Master The Art of Indirect Communication

Understanding how to communicate indirectly is crucial for remote teams to establish strong connections. This involves creating engaging messages that capture attention and using tone, body language, and persuasive language effectively.

9. Visuals Are Worth A Thousand Words

To effectively communicate with Indian employees in remote teams, it’s important to minimize unnecessary meetings. Instead, use communication tools like email, instant messaging, and video conferences to share information efficiently. This remote team communication strategy will help improve productivity, save time, and accommodate effective communication in different time zones

10. Promote Asynchronous Communication

In remote setup, encouraging asynchronous communication can greatly enhance productivity and collaboration within a team. Here are a few strategies for effective communication for remote teams to promote this type of communication:

  • Utilize collaborative tools: Tools such as Slack, Skype, Google Meet, and so on. will allow team members to communicate and collaborate at their own pace without the need for immediate responses.
  • Set clear response time expectations: Managers can encourage team members to prioritize deep work and focus on their tasks without constant interruptions.
  • Foster a culture of documentation: Managers should encourage team members to summarize important points from meetings or discussions and share them in a centralized location. This allows individuals to catch up on information and contribute asynchronously.

11. Feedbacks Are Important

Feedback is one of the crucial remote team communication strategies and connecting with Indian employees. Encouraging open and regular feedback channels, understanding cultural nuances, leveraging video conferencing tools, organizing virtual team-building activities, and adapting communication styles are essential for successful collaboration across borders.

12. Resist to Urge Micromanage

To effectively connect with Indian employees in a remote team, it is essential to resist the urge to micromanage. Trust your team members, provide clear communication guidelines for remote teams, and empower them to make decisions independently. Encourage open communication, establish regular check-ins, and foster a supportive work culture that values autonomy and collaboration.

Now that you’ve got 12 effective strategies on how to communicate with a remote team, let’s dive into communication best practices for remote teams (Do’s & Don’ts) that will really make a difference in the long run. 

communication best practices for remote teams

How To Build An Effective Remote Communication For Remote Teams: Do’s and Don’ts 

Here are the do’s and don’ts of remote communication – simple communication guidelines for remote teams to help you build strong connections with your team. Have a look: 

DO’s of Effective Communication Culture:

  1. Build personal connections: Take advantage of internal messaging tools to connect on a personal level with remote teams. Share hobbies, and interests, or simply engage in casual conversations.
  2. Practice empathy:  It’s crucial to understand and empathize with your remote team members’ situations. Be supportive and understanding when dealing with challenges or personal matters.
  3. Send messages: Send messages that address specific topics, it will make it easier for everyone to follow up and take action.
  4. Asynchronous communication methods: Consider using asynchronous communication methods, like chats or project management tools to minimize disruptions and maintain productivity.
  5. Use appropriate channels: Different situations call for different communication channels. Use video calls for important discussions, chat rooms for quick updates, and emails for formal communication.

 

communication guidelines for remote teams

 Don’ts of Effective Communication Culture

  1. Micromanage: Trust your Indian team members to deliver results by utilizing project management and to-do list applications to assign tasks and set clear expectations. Allow them the autonomy to excel in their roles.
  2. Sacrifice clarity for brevity: While concise communication is essential, be mindful of not sacrificing clarity for the sake of brevity. Find the right balance between being clear and concise to ensure your messages are understood correctly.
  3. Constant communication: Avoid overwhelming your employees with excessive messages, especially if you’re repeating the same information across multiple channels. Prioritize the most effective medium and keep your communication focused and necessary.
  4. Avoid constant communication: Avoid mistaking constant communication for productivity. Instead, focus on efficient and purposeful communication that fosters collaboration, clarity, and progress toward goals. Quality over quantity is key.
  5. Don’t send useless messages: Avoid sending unnecessary or irrelevant messages to your remote team. Prioritize meaningful communication that adds value and helps employees stay focused on their tasks and goals.

If you’re wondering how you would overcome communication challenges on a remote team? Then, implementing these do’s and avoiding the don’ts can help in promoting better communication, engagement, and efficiency within your remote team. 

“Effective remote communication is a key driver of success in the virtual workspace”.

Ready To Winning The Remote Team Communication Game With Your Indian Remote Team?

Effective remote team communication in teams is an essential skill that can unlock success in today’s globalized work environment. However, it’s important to recognize that every company and remote team setup is unique and requires tailored strategies to connect with India’s remote teams. 

That’s where Uplers come in! With expertise in matchmaking Indian remote talents with global teams, Uplers ensures effective communication for remote teams by providing Indian remote talent that is trained to ask questions, handle conflicts, and collaborate seamlessly with cross-functional teams when working with global teams. 

With Uplers, effective and seamless communication becomes the catalyst for achieving unparalleled results in remote team management.

10 Best Remote Team Communication Tips for Efficient Management

Best Remote Team Communication Tips for Effective Team Management

A recent study informs that employee productivity improves by 25% when employees feel connected with their coworkers and the company. Such a connection can happen when a company has a strong and effective remote team communication mechanism in place. 

“Like a human being, a company has to have an internal communication mechanism, a ‘nervous system’ to coordinate its actions.” Bill Gates. 

Effective Communication is Key

Effective communication is a soft skill that has a tangible and measurable impact on business success. 

A study involving 195 leaders from 30 organizations across 15 countries rated communication skills as the most important element of business success. That’s from a report published in the Harvard Business Review

Remote team communication and management

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The scenario doesn’t change when you work with distributed offshore teams. You just need to be innovative in the way you handle communication. 

Top 10 Remote Team Communication Tips to Help You with Effective Team Management

Tip 1. Organize Regular Online Meetings For All The Teams

It is critical to ensure that communication breakdown does not become a staller when you work with offshore distributed teams. Regular and sustained remote team communication is the solution.

Creating a schedule of weekly online meetings with your offshore remote teams is a good practice. 

Prima facie, it seems to be a challenge when teams are in different timezones. However, it is not an insurmountable problem. All it needs is some adjustments on all sides. 

All the parties involved need to be ready to attend meetings beyond so-called regular office hours. It is possible to fix mutually agreeable timings then. 

Suppose you are in the U.S. in an EST zone and one of your remote teams is in India. That’s 10.5 hours of difference in summer and 11.5 in winter. In summer, 9 am EST is 6.30 pm IST. That’s workable, right?

There’s no dearth of tools for online conferencing. Skype continues to be the most popular with 1.33 million users globally in 2017. Utilizing Unified Communication Solutions can significantly bridge the gap, enabling seamless collaboration regardless of geographical differences.

Tip 2. Adopt A Project Management Tool

There are several online remote team management tools to choose from. Jira, Proofhub, Slack, and Trello are some of the popular ones. 

When you work across time zones, the use of these technologies improves remote team communication and team functioning. The important thing, however, is to stick to the platform once you’ve chosen it. 

The proliferating remote working culture is coordinated with some popular remote team communication tools like Skype and Zoom.

Adopt A Project Management Tool

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Insist on the use of the platform for all project-related communications. Discourage your remote team project managers from picking up the intercom to instruct their colleagues next door.

Tip 3. Introduce Agile

The Agile approach originally emerged for software development teams to collaborate. However, it has since been adapted for use across diverse businesses.

Lonely Planet, for example, is a renowned publisher of travel books. The company’s legal team has adopted an Agile approach. In 2019, they reported a 25% productivity hike.

The Agile approach is particularly suitable for managing remote teams as the focus is on distributing project deliverables across the project timeline. That facilitates the immediate identification of bottlenecks and time-lags. 

Adopt the part of Agile that suits your project. Do not worry about the processes. 

Tip 4. Share the Vision

“Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as a shared vision.” That is what celebrated Systems Scientist Professor Peter Senge says. 

When working on managing remote teams effectively, getting the team on board about the project deliverables is critical. Sharing the larger vision is what works best, experts say.

Share the Vision

Source

Tip 5. Connect Each Team Leader With One In-house Team Person

Depending on the number of remote teams you have, make one in-house person connect with the team leaders/ project managers of one, two, or three teams. 

Let your offshore team leader know that X is the person to approach with all the questions, and for all clarifications. Inform your in-house team members that they are responsible for the overall performance of the team/s they are in charge of. 

Foster a buddy culture between the two team leads – offshore and in-house. 

The typical application of the buddy system is for the onboarding of new employees. However, it is a structured approach flexible enough to be adapted for longer-term use. 

Read more about the buddy system here

 

Managed Offshore Teams

Tip 6. Be Culture-sensitive

To be culture-sensitive is to recognize, acknowledge, and respect the diversity of cultures. When you work with offshore remote teams, it is of paramount importance to be aware of cultural differences. 

The key is to ask polite questions, inform experts, when you don’t understand something. That minimizes the chances of misunderstandings resulting from cultural variations and makes remote team communication effective.

Tip 7. Clarify That Asking Questions Is Fine

This is a cultural issue particularly applicable to the Asia-Pacific region. Asking questions, especially to people considered senior or superior, is considered a mark of immodesty. 

In case you have offshore distributed teams in countries in this region, it is critical to clearly state that asking questions for clarification is alright. 

It is also a good practice to state it clearly to all your remote teams, wherever they are. 

This is an area where the buddy program works especially well. That helps reduce the inhibitions people might have about raising questions. They feel easier to pose those questions to the buddy they have in your company.  

Tip 8. Be Inclusive In Your Approach

“You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy.” That’s what Steve Jobs said in his last interview in 2010 during All Things Digital’s D8 Conference. He died next year. 

Be inclusive in dealing with your offshore distributed teams. Discourage hierarchy in your teams and do not practice it yourself. You will get greater productivity.  

Not to be hierarchical is not to lose authority. It has more to do with working together with a team on the basis of a shared vision. 

If you are openly trusting and inclusive in your approach, you won’t have to watch over your teams. They will deliver.

Tip 9. Treat Offshore Teams Like Partners

If you actually practise everything we have been saying so far, this will happen naturally. 

Working together is a partnership that extends beyond the client-vendor relationship. Remember the costs that your distributed teams save you and the value additions they bring. 

That will help you treat them as long-term business partners, rather than as short-term suppliers of some services. Moreover, the partnership approach adds for effective and transparent remote team communication. 

Tip 10. Do Not Micromanage

Provide oversight and guidance by all means. Set up monitoring systems to ensure that things are on track. Utilize your remote team management tool optimally for that. 

But resist the temptation to micromanage when effectively managing remote employees. If you allow your teams to function in their own styles, the chances of project success are considerably higher. 

Do Not Micromanage

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Remember that micromanaging remote teams is also a waste of time for you.

Fine Print

What we have presented here doesn’t contain euphemisms from management textbooks or blogs. We have based our research on interviews by business icons like Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. On publications by eminent scientists and academics like Peter Senge.

And on employee reviews of Google, ranked the best employer in the world for the second consecutive year by Reputation Institute’s 2019 Global Workplace 100 study. 

These are all real-life doable tips. Follow them to manage your offshore distributed teams effectively.