Tips to conquer remote work

Tips to work remotely without spending all your time coordinating work and keeping stakeholders accountable. Collaboration is a complex process. The more people involved in the process, the more coordination and preparation are needed. Sometimes it can be difficult to hold people accountable so they participate, share their thoughts on time, or are held responsible for the decisions they make during a meeting. This often results in documenting meetings, having ongoing feedback sessions, and sending countless emails and reminders. We figured that we could leverage technology so that you don’t have to work like it’s 1955. Here are a few tips to start conquering remote work and work together effectively. - Start by defining your team rituals and culture. Use our team rituals tool inside Nova. - Define roles and responsibilities. - Keep your team aligned: Help your team and stakeholders visualize success and feel confident in each step of the process by creating workflows in Nova. It is no secret that documenting processes and best practices have been a must-do for a growing organization — but small and large organizations struggle to keep up with processes and documentation because this practice has never worked for them. Documentation has always ended up as documents that get obsolete and barely used by the team. Team members will not be able to know if something they are doing is not following best practices so they will not be looking for that documentation. Team members will spend too much time searching for the document or asking questions to other team members. As a result, people will naturally ask managers and other team members for guidance, creating a risk for the organization, making the process slow, and making managers the main bottleneck. This is one of the reasons we recommend using Nova. Team members are guided and can discover best practices and processes as they work. Team members and other stakeholders have access to those guidelines at the right time, in the right place, with the right information, so they can do their best work and make decisions with confidence without waiting for managers to get back to them, or search for documentation. - Say goodbye to “zoom fatigue”: Have at least two meeting-free days a week and provide asynchronous meeting alternatives, so your days are not fully booked the rest of the week. Use tools like Loom to share information with your team and tools like Nova to lead and facilitate meetings autonomously. - Facilitate meetings autonomously so everyone can participate on their own time and everybody can have more time to provide valuable information. Learn how to do this right using Nova. - Acknowledge your team’s contribution: Team members are more engaged to participate when team members and managers acknowledge their participation and work and when their participation is trackable and visual. - Leverage technology to keep track of tasks, manage projects, and avoid unnecessary meetings and sending endless messages to track the status of a task or project. - Give people the space, time, and recognition they need to provide well-thought-out ideas: Team members are more likely to provide well-thought-out ideas and feedback when they have more time to analyze problems, write their answer — and when that answer is visible to everyone in the team. We encourage you to describe the session’s goal, add steps and add a due date so teams can participate on their own time while keeping them accountable. - Create the right culture and provide a transparent and fair process: Team members are more likely to participate when organizations establish a “fair process”. For example, everyone submits proposals on the same day, due dates, tasks and process are visible to everyone. The results are available to everyone, and final decisions are made following criteria that everyone understands before submitting their ideas. - Establish a clear framework and process so team members understand what success looks like so they don’t waste time working on things that aren’t right or won’t be used. Give your team the ability to make decisions with confidence. - Nurture a culture of strategic thinking and creativity where the best ideas win and celebrate good ideas and excellent teamwork instead of tasks done. - Keep track of progress and have direct access to what decisions team members make by accessing the report and keeping all your conclusions inside each session. - Guide your team 24/7 without working 24/8 by adding steps and creating a library of processes that guide the team while they work. What other tips would you add here?