How To Get Remote Teams To Work Together

When the great work from home experiment started and organizations around the world sent their people to work from home, a lot of team leaders started to sense that they weren’t managing a team of 12, so much as managing 12 individual employees. People know how to connect easily with their bosses and show them what was getting done. But those same people struggled to find ways to work together. Despite seemingly endless video conferences, requests for help made directly to peers dropped-and collaboration quickly followed. Newly remote employees were working alone, but they weren’t working alone together.

Not everyone though.

Teams that already had experience working as a team remotely-whether in fully distributed companies or because their offices were already flexible-didn’t suffer the same fate as those teams who had remote work thrust upon them. Because, having learned from experience and trial-and-error, those teams had learned how to “work out loud.” Working out loud means that the team has developed a system to keep track of what everyone is focused on, what’s getting done, as well as a system for asking for and volunteering to give help. It means when project pivots happen, the team doesn’t have to wait for the next all-hands call to find out about it.