How to Create the Culture of Collaboration When Running Remote Teams

Cross-team collaboration can be a make-or-break factor when it comes to numerous business processes, like digital transformation or product innovation. Now that remote work tends to become a standard model for the foreseeable future, it’s crucial to create a strong collaborative culture. 

Many articles offer answers on how to build tight-knit remote teams. This is why, here you’ll find out more about the knowledge shared across different teams, regions, and time zones that can lead to enhanced remote teams collaboration

The Mutual Knowledge Issue 

For functionally or geographically distributed teams, not starting from the same information can be challenging. Sharing different points of view within a team is a desirable practice leading to effective solutions. However, if employees don’t work from the same knowledge base, the mutual knowledge problem may arise. 

This term coined by professor Durnell Cramton refers to a situation where employees working together may not have the same information. And they aren’t aware of this. This often leads to misunderstandings and assumptions that may cause projects failure. 

How can you avoid this miscommunication and build a solid collaboration culture between your remote team members that’ll boost productivity and overall success?

Here are 3 steps you can take to ensure effective knowledge sharing across all your teams, motivating them to work together.

Make Knowledge Accessible

Democratization of knowledge is all about giving the right information to the right people. However, employees in charge of collecting or managing specific data like customer research, marketing reports, or employee tracking records may have doubts that this information will be misused.

You can prevent this from happening by turning teams that collect and analyze various information into strategic business partners that work closely with different teams within your company. This shift in roles can lead to enhanced trust across teams. And trustworthy relationships contribute to open and clear communication that eliminates misunderstandings or misinterpretations.

You can also give self-service access to relevant insights to specific employees or team leaders, making the knowledge-sharing process faster, without them wasting time between requesting information needed and receiving feedback.

Share Knowledge Intentionally

If you want to boost your cross-team collaboration make sure that the needed information is shared intentionally. This means that everybody in your organization needs to be on the same page when it comes to knowledge sharing, gaining clear answers to:

• What is shared?
• Why is it shared?
• Who is sharing or getting information?
• When and how is this specific knowledge shared?

You can compile all these answers and create a clear Knowledge Sharing Policy that will make cross-team cooperation and communication much easier wherever your teams may be.

Streamline Your Cross-Team Communication

Open and clear communication is a precondition for effective collaboration, especially between remote teams. However, there isn’t a universal solution to this issue, and you need to provide different communication channels to meet the needs of employees who demand specific information.

This said asynchronous communication gains more and more attention as it has proven to be effective when managing remote teams. Asynchronous communication means that you don’t expect your employees to reply immediately and it can be effective when sharing comprehensive company policies or back materials that need better understanding. 

Besides fostering asynchronous communication, you can rely on advanced video conferencing platforms to host meetings. But if you want these meetings to be effective, first find out whether they are purposeful. 

If you can share the information via email, you don’t need a team meeting, for example. You also can avoid team meetings if you don’t have a clear plan with specific topics that you want to discuss.

However, video calls give you and your remote teammates a chance to see each other, adding a much-needed non-verbal aspect to cross-team communication.

Don’t Forget to Recognize and Celebrate Remarkable Achievements

Celebrating success encourages team spirit and enhances relationships between employees. So don’t miss the opportunity to recognize the remarkable results of cross-team collaboration. 

You can use remote work monitoring data to create unbiased, real-time performance evaluations that will clearly show who contributed the most to cross-team collaboration.

This will show your employees that you nurture a people-first culture where outstanding results are rewarded and their needs are met.