It is not easy working with the remote team. Most experienced professionals with previous experience in working with the remote team follow a few guidelines. You can also reduce the fiction with the remote team by following the proven guidelines to work effectively with the remote team. The article working from home will also help you in setting up your home office suitable to work with the remote team.

Your focus should be on the following four objectives to establish best practice for remote work by :

Standup meeting in the morning: You can arrange a 15 minutes standup meeting with your team members on task for the day, priorities, any challenges on last day tasks and remedies, expectations for the day, and coordinate discussion on each other to keep the uplift environment.

Have 1 or 2 minutes of a call with each of your team members in the day to keep a feeling of real-time relationships. You will be busy on work throughout the day and it is important to keep the relationship active as if you are working on the same location. At the office, you can take regular coffee breaks or lunch breaks with your colleagues but you will lose this opportunity when you work from home. You will gradually lose your relationship with your colleagues without those personal interactions. You may also feel that you are having a communication gap while working remotely. The best way to avoid a break in relationship and communication gap is to have regular video calls or audio calls with your acquaintance. You will be amazed to see the difference between having regular interactions and in-frequent calls with your colleagues.

Relay more on the video calls, phone calls, or chat instead of e-mail. Try to have your personal touch on communication and real-time. E-mail is an excellent option you can have a real-time feeling through e-mail conversation. Chat, audio, and video call has more real-time feeling in that order and can give the personal touch.

It is advisable to over-communicate than having a feeling that you are not reachable. You can be conscious of other people’s time yet try to communicate more and be accessible so that others will feel that you are trying to avoid them.

If you do not want to get distracted from your work and not getting disturbed by your colleagues then let all know about your available time during the day so that they can plan their call according to your availability.

Working from home is challenging for the supervisor. They always have tight schedules and do not get sufficient time to follow with all the team members on their progress. This is can be a detrimental issue for the team members if they are not keeping their supervisor regularly updated on progress. If you are reporting to someone than communicating the day’s work to your supervisor is a top priority. They will not get sufficient time to follow up with you to get information on the progress and sometime they may take it as an additional burden on their time. Better schedule your one to one call with your supervisor for daily updates and keep a healthy personal relationship.

If you are managing people and want to avoid any communication gap or do not want to get a last-minute surprise then schedule a short call with your team members individually.

Be attentive to communications from your colleagues, any undue delay in response from your side can project a negative image. The simple way to avoid any distraction as well as respond to their communication is to have an auto responder’s setup on your e-mail, voice mail, or chat that you have received their communication and will respond at a specific time. This will give them a sense that you have acknowledged their communication and will respond to them as soon as you finished your existing work.

Some of the frequent communication can be to access some of the information or documents which are with you. You can avoid the distraction by uploading those documents or information on a common platform which can be accessed by them. That will save your time and they can move ahead with their without waiting for your response.

Dress professionally and have a nice background so that you can project a good image during the video call. Sometimes we can get so comfortable with working from home that we become too casual for the office environment. Please remember that whatever your colleague can see during the video discussion will create an impression about you. Try to safeguard the impression by maintaining the same decorum that you like to maintain at the office.