Overcoming virtual team connection and communication challenges

If you read my January blog you’ll know that I’ve identified 6 areas where leaders and managers are finding challenges as they adjust to managing their teams virtually. These are in the areas of managing and measuring work, team cohesiveness and a sense of belonging, connection, relationships and communication, engagement, motivation and wellbeing, meeting effectiveness and technology.

Last month I shared some tips to help you build team cohesiveness and your team member’s sense of belonging. This month I’m exploring how you can overcome common virtual team connection and communication challenges.

When I collated the information I had from 40 managers of their experience of managing virtual teams, their communication and connection challenges included:

(1) Meeting everyone’s differing needs for interaction and connection
(2) Missing out on the ‘at the edges’ /informal ad-hoc conversations
(3) Missing social/’chatty’ aspects of meetings

Below are some tips for addressing these:

Interaction and connection needs

From interactions with managers that I’ve been training about how to manage virtual teams I’ve learned that some are so keen to be there for team members who are new to working virtually that they are forgetting their own needs. Supporting team members through being available to talk by phone, video meeting or chat messenger is not something that you need to do at any cost to yourself. It is a balance between your team member’s needs and your needs as a manager. Key tips include:

• Determine your own time needs for work you need to do without interruption. While much of your time relates to the people that you manage, you will have work requiring you to focus. Consider when you work at your best for such focused work and map out time in your calendar for this work; one of my coaching clients knows his best time for this sort of work is 08.30-10am and blocks this out in his calendar daily.

• Have 1-1s with each team member where you can explore with them what support they need from you whether it be for coaching, decision making, or simply a check-in for personal connection.

• When you know all your team members’ needs, determine the best way to meet as much of them as you can while upholding your own needs.

• Have a follow up 1-1 with each team member where you agree to trial connection needs for a period of time

• Review after a trial period and adjust, again aiming for mutual benefit.

Informal ad-hoc conversations and social meeting aspects

I don’t think we realised how much we benefited from the informal short conversations we had with people while waiting for a meeting room to become available or while walking back from the coffee machine until we could no longer have them.

There is a benefit to this type of conversation – not only does it help us feel connected and have a sense of belonging but it can be the time when we get ideas from each other or achieve some alignment to a decision for example. While some transition back to office working may now be taking place, for those where this is not the case it can help to find ways to create space for these types of conversations. While they can’t be ‘ad-hoc’ in that they are planned times, the content can be free from an agenda. Ways that managers I work with are trying to do this include:

• Setting up a short, regular virtual coffee/tea catch-up e.g. 11am-11.30am each Friday that teams or interacting teams are invited to but which are not compulsory. While the conversation can be free-flowing, if an attendee does think of something that they want to discuss with another attendee they can agree to take their conversation onto a call.

• Having some ad hoc chat in a virtual meeting on return from a scheduled break. With the concept of ‘zoom fatigue’ meaning that we benefit from having a 10 minute break in any meeting that runs for more than an hour, on return from such a break you can have 5 minutes for people to chat generally before restarting. This works better than doing this at the end of a meeting when people are generally keen to have a quick break before heading off to their next one.

If you’ve been working virtually for a while you will likely have other tips that work for you. Do share them in the comments section for others to benefit from. I’ll share some tips for other virtual management challenges in a future blog.