In today’s world it is more likely than not that you will be working with someone in a remote location. They may not be a great distance, maybe in the same building. Regardless of distance, there are some skills you need to develop for interacting efficiently with remote individuals. Some of the behaviors are not intuitive, and can really make a big difference.
Let’s start with the biggest problem that occurs with a distributed team. The biggest issue is communication. It is expressed by a number of issues occurring because communication is diminished by using our normal methods of communication.
We all know that a lot of communication is not conveyed by the actual words we say. We know that intuitively when we use social media tools that have things like emoticons. Emoticons are an attempt to show things such as facial expressions, that may enhance communication drastically. English is horrible in this behavior. I’ve seen words such as gay, sick, bad, each which have completely different meanings, depending on the tone of voice or expressions use when saying the word. Sometimes your inflection gives a clue to which definition you are using as well. Often it is your face that helps define the word as you are using it. Even the context of the sentence may not communicate clearly.
It’s not just words. There are a lot of more subtle clues regarding a person’s engagement in communication. I heard about a person who was giving verbal responses to a speaker, “uh huh, etc”. as if they were actively listening. Then the speaker asked them a question, and their response was “uh huh” rather than an answer to the question. If you were in the same room, the speaker could see that the individual was not engaged in the conversation.
Video conferences have been developed to make this less of an issue. And, we aren’t far from having virtual holographic presence as well, which will help with the communication occurring in posture. But all of the current methods of remote visual communication are restricted to the number of end points. It really needs a lot of FAST bandwidth to be useful. If not fast, then you may as well have a still snapshot of the participants.
Another habit I have seen is for when a remote group is disagreeing with another, they press mute, stop listening, and talk with each other, rather than engaging with the speaker, even in dissent.
So, let’s say you have a situation where you can’t see everyone. Are there some things you can do to help enhance communication? I have a few suggestions:
- Don’t talk for long periods of time. Make frequent pauses. This allows others to ask questions before you have been talking for a few minutes. Even ask of other’s input. If everyone keeps their comments shorter, the conversation will engage more individuals.
- Identify yourself when speaking, if others may not know you by your voice.
- Try to have something everyone can see, and use the collaboration tools available. Even a web-ex with slides, or a shared screen is better than talking to the air.
- Have an agenda with points to cover. That helps you keep on task.
- Speak loudly. The less effective your hands free phones are, the more important this becomes.
- If you have a cell phone, or are not speaking, then it does help to mute the phone when you are not talking. That helps keep the background noise down, so everyone can hear more clearly. Don’t mute and have side conversations. Act as if everyone is in the room and cans see and hear all you say, or know if you are having an aside.
- Don’t use gestures to communicate your feelings. In this case, you have to make a concerted effort to share your disagreement. If you don’t have the kind of relationship with the group to embrace this, then you have work to do with your team culture. Know that disagreement does not mean you won’t comply. You either don’t understand something or have a concern. Either way, that needs to be heard. Don’t wait for someone to see the sour look on your face and ask what you’re thinking.
- Ask for individuals input when closing out a topic. If it is important, have individuals share 1 thing they like and dislike about any solution you have selected.
These are things I have experienced in different ways over the years that have really helped. Asking individual opinions had the most value when working with cross cultural distributed teams.
Do you have suggestions for enhancing communication? Share your comments here, or feel free to drop an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben