How to Increase Virtual Collaboration to Ensure Project Success

Every successful business should pay attention to team building and corporate culture in its environment. The team spirit is not easy to be fulfilled, especially within virtual teams where in-person meetings are rare and far between.

Many distributed team members have faced the hard way since it takes only a moment to destroy trust. To build trust among the team members, leaders must get familiarised with the basic components that promote trust. You can establish credibility by your words, but you should demonstrate reliability through actions.

The best way to express it is by demonstrating your commitments time after time. If some of the team members have damaged the trust by missing deadlines, you should mention that and talk about what you can do to correct the situation.

As remote work becomes an increasingly obvious trend and necessity, team leaders should think about some restructuring of collaboration within the company and be ready to provide proper virtual collaboration.

Collaboration and Working With Remote Teams

Remote work has gone from being a unique opportunity to the norm. The pandemic rules have become a necessity. However, embracing the working from home lifestyle hasn’t been easy for many people.

Some managers are still struggling to overcome operational efficiency challenges, especially with remote communication and collaboration.

It can be a challenge to get teams to band together. And when you throw physical distance into the mix, it becomes even more challenging. Therefore, this problem should be overcome and you must be able to reap the business benefits of remote team collaboration

Actually, it’s easier than you might think. By following a few best-practices, you can enable your teams to achieve smooth remote collaboration. Let’s dive into some practical tips on how to collaborate effectively.

General Steps That Will Help You to Collaborate Effectively

There are several steps to a good team spirit:

1. Enhance your project leadership

All company’s successes and failures are directed from the top. When a project leader (or a project sponsor) enforces teamwork, it will happen. If you are a project leader, you should point out that team members work together to develop ideas and to help each other with tasks. When you emphasize the value of collaboration, teamwork will increase.

2. Enforce the teamwork

You will increase the chances of success by communicating the importance of teamwork. You should provide examples and loudly explain how teamwork will benefit the end result and the value to the organization. If some team members collaborate and others fail, teamwork will not occur. The team members should understand that they work on one project.

3. Point out individual values

You will efficiently encourage teamwork if you emphasize each person’s strengths. If the team can accept the collective efforts of its team members, the project success will be reached. You must uncover the strengths of each member and highlight these strengths. You should enforce people to focus on strengths and allocate the parts with their weaknesses to teammates with strengths in that area.

4. Communicate the team values

You have to improve the team spirit. Teamwork can be taught every day. In order to aid the teamwork, you will have to explain the best ways to communicate and collaborate. You must show examples since communication is the most important factor in achieving good team collaboration. If all team members, supervisors, sponsors and other related stakeholders understand the value of teamwork, it will succeed.

5. Pay attention to the critical path

The critical path is a set of critical activities (on the project path) and it consists of functional tasks that directly contribute to the project’s timing and success. You must point out the importance of teamwork as it relates to the critical tasks. Of course, teamwork will be a solution to succeed in the accomplishment of the critical tasks. You have to train your team to understand this strategy.

6. Consider mentoring

You may think that a training class will solve all problems, but it is just the start. You have to mentor the team constantly, and not to dictate. If you try to dictate teamwork, most possibly you will get the opposite effect. When you mentor, you must show an example, especially with the right behavior. You have to give the people opportunities to try new ideas. Do not introduce penalties; instead, provide corrective feedback and prove your trust in all team members.

7. Measure the performance

The project metrics are introduced to measure the team’s progress, but you also have to apply performance feedback. You will provide this performance feedback to all team members and it will align the value of the teamwork. The point is that they cannot succeed in the long term project if they act as individuals. You have to communicate with the managers of your team members and to make sure they understand the metrics, their employee’s strengths and weaknesses, and the overall project outcomes. You will also have to ensure that this feedback will appear in their performance review.

8. Optimize team schedules

When it comes to virtual collaboration and remote work, a common concern for most managers is availability.

Often, a flexible schedule is a side benefit that comes with working from home, and it might not always be feasible for your team. In order to ensure efficiency and smooth remote collaboration, you’ll need clearly defined team schedules. Try to find different schedules that work for your employees, and then stick with it.

9. Equip your team with the right tools

A proper online tool for managing remote teams is what you obligatory will need.

Make sure your remote team is equipped with the right set of tools. After all, the reason telecommuting and virtual collaboration rose in popularity in the first place was because of digital innovations like project management software and flexible team collaboration tools.

All CEO-s expect from projects to deliver a large majority of improvements to their company performance. Enforcing teamwork will largely increase the chances of delivering a project on time and on budget.