With the pandemic, working remotely has become increasingly popular. Additionally, some companies have started working exclusively remotely, realizing the benefits it can bring.

However, employees can feel busy working from home as interacting with other colleagues may require more effort.

Remote collaboration allows employees in different states or countries to connect and form bonds that allow them to learn new skills and become more involved in the company.

In addition, collaboration between employees leads to better employee retention and better communication among colleagues.

Fortunately, some programs and activities encourage remote collaboration. As long as these activities are implemented while adhering to the three core principles of remote work, they will improve performance.

Remote work does not encourage collaboration.

Remote work has become increasingly popular with the pandemic. However, it requires some face-to-face aspects that make collaboration difficult.

For example, if you work in the office, you can easily chat with colleagues at the water dispenser or over a cup of coffee.

With remote work, a lot more of our communication becomes asynchronous. This is becoming more common as teams become more spread out across different time zones.

In addition, employees can brainstorm together with a real whiteboard in front of them. Employees might find collaboration opportunities when working remotely, but it won’t feel like it since they’re always in front of the computer.

Additionally, remote work requires more calculated and planned interactions, which takes away the spontaneity of working in the office.

Overall, companies need to focus on three core principles when working remotely: communication, coordination, and culture.

First, communication allows people within the organization to share information easily.

The second, coordination, gets people to work together to achieve a specific goal.

Finally, the culture sets standards and beliefs within employees to engage more with each other.

Elements such as virtual meetings, text communication, emails, project management tools and shared calendars enable good communication and coordination between employees.

Why remote workers need more collaboration

When working remotely, people work in different cities and possibly in different time zones. When an employee feels like they are working alone without a group of people working toward a goal, they can feel unmotivated.

Therefore, it is important to maintain a good flow of communication between employees and their goals.

It is important that they feel they belong to the company and have people to talk to about projects they are working on.

A study highlighted in the Harvard Business Review found that when faced with conflict, remote workers feel excluded and even allied:

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Additionally, emails and messages lack the nuance and emotional tonality that comes with a face-to-face conversation.

These misunderstandings and misunderstandings between colleagues can lead to frustration and reduced productivity.

How to encourage more remote collaboration

As previously mentioned, effective remote collaboration requires communication, coordination, and culture. Therefore, creating programs that encourage collaboration and help employees learn new skills allows for more engagement.

Knowledge sharing activities

These activities lead to a better learning culture in the company. Knowledge sharing actions create a knowledge base and knowledge network between employees, which is essential for successful virtual teams.

These benefits include faster onboarding and training, stronger bonds between colleagues, encouraging employees to share ideas and drive innovation through collaboration, and more.

For knowledge sharing activities to be effective, employees need a place where knowledge is centralized. A Deloitte study defines this as knowledge management.

The Deloitte study showed that many organizations view knowledge management as sharing rather than as value.

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This helps them to quickly find answers to their questions when they are working together on a project or when they need information quickly as a new employee.

Not only does this allow for greater productivity, but it also allows employees to work together to answer their questions.

Additionally, it is important to encourage employees to work with their peers to learn new skills as a group.

To make onboarding a little more personal, you can get new employees to connect with other employees to show them what it’s like to work at the company.

Not to mention mentorships between executives and junior staff that allow the junior staff to learn new skills.

At the same time, the senior employee gets to know the perspective of the younger employee in the company.

Peer-to-peer employee connection programs

As mentioned, peer-to-peer activities are a great way to get employees working together and learning new skills together.

You can pair employees within the same department, but it’s even better to pair employees who might not work together under other circumstances.

This will allow both sides to get a fresh perspective and share their knowledge.

Structure is very important when creating these collaborative sessions. Therefore, it is helpful to develop structured sessions that guide employees through the topics they can discuss.

Formal mentoring programs

Formal mentoring programs allow employees to learn new skills with every experienced employee in the company.

This type of program allows employees to really feel like they belong to the company, build communication skills and improve their performance by learning something new.

Mentoring programs help employees feel more engaged and less likely to leave the company or use it as a stepping stone.

Randstad, for example, has a global mentoring program and chose Together for a better user experience and more engaging mentoring programs.

As a result, employees who participated in mentoring programs at the company were 49% less likely to leave the company.

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Like Randstad, Cruise Automation needed to automate the delivery of their mentoring programs. The company builds the world’s most advanced self-driving vehicles.

Cruise has a strong focus on internal development to ensure the top talent hired continues to grow their skills and careers.

The company’s mentoring programs require a lot of organization as they can involve over 100 employees wanting to learn a new skill.

With Together, Cruise ran a program involving 300 engineers. Both mentors and mentees rated the program 3.8 out of 4.0.

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Together’s collaboration with Cooley is a great example of onboarding new and experienced employees. The global law firm with 1,500 attorneys in the US, Europe and Asia needed to make the onboarding process fast and scalable.

Therefore, Cooley paired new hires with more experienced employees to go through onboarding.

This mentoring enabled meaningful relationships between mentees and mentors, which is why 95% of employees think the company is a great place to work.