Today we share the blog with Anthony Flynn. He is the Founder of Amazing CEO, a business consulting firm for leading executives, professional athletes and entrepreneurs. He has been a featured speaker at Harvard University, SXSW, TEDx and more. He is the author of two books, The Execution Pipeline and The Happiness Map.
Do you struggle with efficiency and communication with your virtual team? Without being physically next to each other, emails may come off cold and critical instructions may get lost in translation. Time zones add extra confusion for scheduling and deadlines. How can you optimize the results of your virtual team with these barriers?
Whether you’re a virtual employee struggling to find answers due to poor communication, or you are a virtual manager struggling to explain processes to your team-- remote work can be challenging at first. No one likes to seem confused or out of touch at work, but remote work requires extra effort to improve communications.
Football legend Vince Lombardi said, “The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.” Streamlining communication and organization is essential for virtual teams to produce great results.
To avoid confusion and ensure your team is operating efficiently and communicating well, implement these three technology tips to enable your virtual team to work smarter. This will help you organize your files, manage clients, communicate with your team and keep projects moving forward in a timely manner.
If you’re ready to improve production with your virtual team, use these technology tips:
1. Google Drive - Google Suite offers many business-friendly tools, but Google Drive can help your entire business become organized. The manager or owner can set-up a “Team Drive” for the company or division and share with your employees. Then, you can create folders for each of your clients. Within the client folders, you can create folders for each task. You can even share some of these folders with your clients if you’d like them to collaborate with you and send files for both of you to use.
2. Voxer - This app lets you communicate with your team like using a walkie-talkie. Signup and usage is free. Voxer lets you leave voice messages that team members can respond to between meetings and often faster than email.
3. Trello - There are many task manager systems out there, but I like Trello the best because it is free and easy to use. Project management cards move left to right and subcategories can be added below. Attachments and notes can be added to each card, which can also be assigned to teammates with due dates.
What other challenges do you have while working with a virtual team? Tell me in the comments below. For more productivity and efficiency tips, subscribe to my YouTube page here.