Working remotely can make employees happier and more productive, but it can also pose challenges for collaboration and communication. Employees who are used to interacting with each other face-to-face can often struggle to put their conversations into writing, and those who rely on periodic check-ins find scheduling and coordinating micro-meetings unproductive.

Fortunately, there are several strategies you can use to improve remote teamwork, thereby increasing productivity, morale, and collaborative potential.

How to Improve Remote Employee Collaboration

With these changes, you can improve employees’ capacity to collaborate and communicate with one another:

1. Prioritize the culture. When transitioning to a remote work environment, many business leaders forget about the importance of a strong work culture. Work culture defines the values of your brand, as well as how the people working for that brand operate. It ties people together, builds a sense of unity, and allows employees to work together as a united front. It’s harder to build and maintain a work culture remotely, but it’s still possible; spend time reminding employees of their shared values, and put an emphasis on working together for common goals.
2. Hire the right people (if you can). Some people naturally thrive in remote work environments, either because of their personality or because they’ve had significant experience working from home already. When you’re hiring new people, seek these team members out; they’ll be able to help the rest of your team adapt to this environment and thrive.
3. Change the roles of managers and supervisors. In the traditional workplace, collaboration often depends on the direct leadership of managers and supervisors, who spend the majority of their day delegating, assigning tasks, and checking in to see how employees are doing. You can improve productivity and allow more collaboration by changing their roles; rather than have them interfere with employees with obsolete check-ins, have them look proactively for new ways employees can collaborate more effectively.
4. Provide employees with more communication options. Different situations call for different types of communication. While some issues are best resolved with a face-to-face conversation, others can be handled with a chat message, or even a text. Give employees a wide range of options, and teach them how to use each option appropriately.
5. Give employees better collaboration tools. Similarly, you can give employees more collaboration tools they can use to work with others on their teams. For example, programs that allow employees to mutually contribute to a whiteboard-style planning board can encourage more effective teamwork.
6. Continue bonding opportunities when possible. People work better together when they get to know each other, and have the opportunity to bond. Your teambuilding events don’t have to disappear just because you’re working remotely. Host occasional events, like shared lunches, or offer unique challenges that force your employees to have fun while working together.
7. Reduce the impact of meetings. Meetings seem like a perfect opportunity to collaborate, but they often end up stifling productive potential due to poor planning, high frequency, or unnecessary length. Try to reduce the impact of meetings by limiting them and planning them better.
8. Grant employees more autonomy and flexibility. Autonomy and flexibility are two of the most important factors for employee happiness in any workplace, and in a remote environment, you’ll have the power to grant them. Give your individual employees more control over the types of assignments they take on, and the methods they use to execute them. Set high-level goals, like completing a certain number of tasks each week, and allow your employees to figure out the rest. They’ll be inclined to choose the simplest path forward, and will end up happier in their jobs as well.
9. Identify and correct instances of poor communication. No matter what kinds of systems you use, there will be instances of poor communication, like someone using the wrong medium or an inaccurate relay of instructions. When these instances of bad communication happen, point them out and use them as a learning opportunity. How can this be prevented in the future?
10. Ask for feedback and improve. Finally, ask for feedback from your employees and be open to improvement. No system of collaboration and communication is perfect, and your employees will know better than anyone what those shortfalls are. Learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of your system, and figure out some new ways to build around them.

Finding More Opportunities to Improve

There are countless ways you can optimize your organization for remote work, and not all of them are glaringly obvious. Feel free to experiment with different policies and approaches, and measure your results to see what works. You can also look to other businesses that are succeeding with remote work infrastructure, and evaluate what they’re doing differently.