Social Tools Enable Employee Engagement in Remote Teams

The new wave of employment is based on a totally different set of axioms than ever before, which benefit workers by giving them the flexibility to work where they want, when they want. This also benefits businesses, enabling them to find the best, most qualified team members anywhere in the world. 

But while technology has enabled us to work from anywhere in an efficient manner, we need to be careful not to lose that human touch.

"Using social media to collaborate on remote teams can help us to work out loud," said Lisette Sutherland, founder of Collaboration Superpowers, an agency dedicated to making remote teams more collaborative and efficient. "Work becomes more transparent and it creates more opportunities to help each other do great things. We share our knowledge instead of protecting or hoarding it."

People need a replacement for the hallway chatter and coffee breaks. Social media and technology offer us ways actually to increase remote collaboration and allow us to increase employee engagement while decreasing competition.

The team I am a part of Happy Melly and Management 3.0 is completely remote. We are like a board of creative freelancers that are committed to making people happy at work. None of us have permanent contracts but a living team agreement. Each of us commits to a certain percentage of work a week and are paid based on a mix of that commitment and bonuses allotted based on teammates' perception of our contributions. While we do our own thing, we need to be in regular (but not mandatory) contact. For this, I've gained interest in social media and telecommunication tools outside of the Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn I'm addicted to and the GooglePLUS I feel obligated to use.

Today I'm going to talk about the social tools that we and other teams focused on remote collaboration use to enhance that human touch and increase efficiency, productivity and creativity.

While we all love being able to show up to our 9 a.m. meetings in pajamas or less, there's something essential to employee engagement and human interaction about having face-to-face meetings. But that doesn't mean it can't be a face-to-screen-to-face meeting.

I live abroad and have spent the last few years working on teams that collaborate from around the world. Nothing can be more frustrating than VoIP teleconferencing technology. Sometimes I can blame Spain for bad WiFi but things just never run smoothly. I've hosted many a GoToWebinar and Google Hangout that you'd never find on YouTube because of technical difficulties, whether co-hosts getting disconnected for a moment and it erases up to that point or just the common messed up sound and/or messed up video quality. 

Same thing happens for Skype, but you have to pay more for a video recording from external apps you have to install. I do relish the great deal I have for Skype to call U.S. landlines unlimitedly (and really cell phones. Even though it says I can't, it always works for me.)

I have a MacBook but I've never gotten into FaceTime because it limits who you are talking to based on their tech of choice and it's just not super popular in Europe where Android has a more than 70 percent marketshare.

Then came zoom.us. I couldn't be happier with it. Our team has found it the best way to have uninterrupted conversations. And when there's technical difficulty, it notifies you whose bandwidth is the problem, so you can try to resolve it. Zoom's Freemium plan works for up to 25 participants with one host and localized recording. It says that its free version limits those meetings to a reasonable 40 minutes, but it hasn't cut off our sometimes long-winded team yet. 

I find Zoom, while not perfect, has a lower rate of people getting kicked off or becoming inaudible. I use Skype chat a lot throughout the day for quick communication but if I'm taking advantage of working from anywhere, I have to drag the charger along because Skype drains my Macbook battery. With Zoom, anyone who wants to connect can just shoot me a link via Facebook, email, Slack, WhatsApp, or whatever else I'm on at the time. And my luddite BFF can use it too! It is the FIRST tool that both she and I can easily connect to video talking on our Android smartphones. (Again, with Skype I can chat and phone via my smartphone, but I've never been able to do video.)

Bonus, it still makes some improvements and updates, but these updates replace the file. GoToMeeting clutters my desktop with its series of updated versions that seem to be every time I use it, never removing the last one. Because of this, I could have ten GoTo apps on my computer at one time.

Now, Zoom isn't perfect, my colleague says she simply can't get it (or any other VoIP) to work with PowerPoint slides and has to convert to PDFs, but it does run fast enough for her rad 3-D webcam to let her pop on top of slides in a group discussion. For me, Zoom is the best I've found so far, almost solving a continuous struggle for employee engagement in remote work.

As you can imagine, with a one hundred percent remote team, you can have an overwhelming amount of back and forth saturating your inbox. At Happy Melly, we use Slack to create purposed conversations called "channels." When I'm not online, I can set it to send info to the native Slack app on my phone or an email. Or I can simply click on the unread channels and messages next time I log on.

In the past, I've worked with companies that use Skype for this and you just create conversations on who needs to be involved. Slack doesn't allow that. Instead you have to contact people individually or create a topic-focused channel. I find it helps keep at least me focused on the subject at hand. (Although we do try to cheat that by still having a Random channel as well as a couple other generic channels.)

And we're not just doing it for our small remote team, but we are trying to get the more than 100 Management 3.0 business coaches to become active on Slack as well. IF we could get them into the habit, I really do believe that it could streamline communication, BUT a lot of professional social media is about training your teammates to implement and actually use the tools in hand.

Organizational and agile coaches Tabar actually took it a step further to integrate their remote workers into their office life by getting a Double Robotics remote worker avatar. You probably first saw this technology on The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon decides to work from home to protect his health or brain or something like that. Starting from $99 you can connect your iPad to this stand equipped with amplified speakers and directional microphone, that you can role around the office to better integrate remote colleagues into a conversation. Tabar even took it a step further to name their remote worker avatar Melly, showing that she is committed to making sure everyone is happy at work.

Since everyone in your remote company is BYOD—bring your own device—you can't control what they do on social media. But if you have a happy workplace, you don't need to worry about it. Encouraging your colleagues to be active on social media can help build important online branding for your small business.

Just because you give them freedom to show brand loyalty, doesn't mean you can't guide them. You shouldn't be able to control what your teammates put on their socials, but you certainly can suggest what they could put. Make sure your whole team knows what #hashtags to use, volunteer to help them with their LinkedIn Profiles teaching them about what keyword density needs to be associated with your brand. Do whatever you can to help them use social media to show the awesomeness of your company.

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Original source: Social Tools Enable Employee Engagement in Remote Teams.
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