3 Steps To Better Remote Collaboration
By Lisa Bodell for ForbesWomen
After the COVID-19 crisis hit America, competitors like Ford and GE joined forces to manufacture medical equipment. Rival NYC chefs combined resources to provide take-out to loyal customers and paychecks to loyal employees. Big pharma firms like Gilead and Novartis began sharing data with the collective goal of discovering a vaccine.If this level of openness and cooperation is currently missing from your own organization, obstacles to collaboration could be the culprit. To get to the root of those barriers, consider leading your teams through one or all of the following remote exercises.
Survey + Solve. Get real talk from team members on why collaboration isn’t working when you leverage the polling or voting feature in your virtual-meeting platform. When one of our clients in the professional-services space recently deployed this exercise, it presented the following three questions to employees for anonymous reply:
What’s preventing you from making collaboration part of your remote workday?
In your opinion, what are your team’s biggest barriers to collaborating with X or Y teams?
What would compel you to continuously engage in collaborative behavior?
The survey revealed gaps between leaders’ goals and team priorities. It also compelled discussion around ways to incentivize and reward collaborative behavior in a remote setting. With your own teams, use this survey exercise to identify obstacles to collaboration — and remove them virtually.