It’s not fun to have to track people down or be tracked down. Increasing digital visibility among your hybrid team boosts productivity and reduces stress. With a bit of structure and accountability to digital transparency, your team will thrive.
According to our hybrid workforce poll, a whopping 75.9% of respondents are now working remotely at least some of the time (55.2% of respondents are working at home only, while 20.7% are working at home and in the office). That’s why it’s so important to consider the structures and tools available to help your hybrid team succeed!
Business Communication Platform
Visibility into projects can greatly decrease errors and communication breakdowns. Does your team use something like Slack or Microsoft Teams to share information about clients or projects? If not, it’s worth investigating.
At Vivo Team, we share what our priorities are for the day in a Slack channel called daily updates. This can also be accomplished in a quick huddle. Our norm is to set ourselves to “away” if we need to be away from our computer to save our team members the hunt.
File Sharing
If you are sick or on vacation or even unavailable because of meetings, do you have a way to access shared files that your team members are working on? This again can be a huge productivity stuck point for remote teams. Whether it’s an intranet or Google Workspace (formally G-Suite), there are lots of options for increasing file sharing capacities within a team.
At Vivo Team, we have a carefully organized file system in Google Workspace for project files, documents, spread sheets and more that the entire team can access.
Shared Calendars
If you are working on a remote team, there is a good chance that it will be time-consuming to book a team meeting. By sharing calendars, this time can be greatly decreased. It might be that you only show business times, but that in itself is a huge time-saving.
At Vivo Team, we are able to access all team members calendars so we can easily see when people are available for meetings. Our norm is, if the time is open in my calendar I am available for a meeting. We are able to book team or project meetings without sending a single email!
Popular Tools
Our poll indicated that the most used tools are Zoom (69%), Microsoft Teams (48.3%), Google Meet (27.6%) and Slack (20.7%). However, it’s less important what the tool is, the agreement is what is important. If you are in a smaller company who doesn’t have a business communication platform, the team can instead agree to share information in other ways, such as via email or through a huddle.
Has your remote team worked out ways to increase your digital visibility? If not, there’s an opportunity here – establish your norms today and stay accountable!
