How to Overcome Challenges of Working with Remote Design Teams?

The world slowly moved toward remote work for years before the COVID-19 outbreak. But with the pandemic, the pace of workforce distribution rose in leaps. Today, thousands of companies work remotely, and many of them don’t plan to get their staff back to offices once the restrictions are lifted.

If you have made up your mind to work with a remote design agency, our guide will be super useful for you. Here we lay out the major challenges associated with remote work and discuss ways to overcome them hassle-free.

Remote Work: Pros and Cons

On the one hand, the remote work trend positively changes people’s lives. It gives workers unlimited freedom of movement. It also enables corporations to hire staff from different locations, thus accessing the global talent pool without geographic limitations.

On the other hand, not all people are ready to work remotely. Online communication and asynchronous work in project management programs are not for everyone. Many workers miss the friendly chat next to a coffee machine or a heated discussion of design in the conference room. Thus, when you plan to create a design project with a remote team, you need to consider the potential hurdles and bottlenecks of this process.

Why Is Remote Work Hard for Teams?

When staff work separately, each in their homes or offices, communication gets irregular and disrupted. Thus, the absence of ongoing face-to-face collaboration can affect mutual understanding and reduce the team’s productivity. The most common issues reported by remote design teams are:

• Flawed feedback. Remote workers often complain of receiving delayed or incomplete feedback. Others don’t like that the feedback process is too formal and bureaucratic. Working in isolation usually weakens the expert’s self-esteem, and negative feedback worsens things.
• Absence of personal communication. People often report a lack of face-to-face communication and social isolation in remote work settings. No project management or task tracking tool can give employees the sense of real presence in a busy, crowded office with its unique atmosphere. As a result, their productivity and quality of team dynamics erode.
• Commitment to project goals. If the team works together in one room and discusses the project every day, it’s much easier to focus on the goal. Once employees are divided, they may lose track of the project’s progress and miss some important new details. Information easily gets lost in online channels.

All these problems arise from the remote mode of work. People cannot function well in isolation, as the team dynamic gets disrupted. The team’s members don’t feel like a part of a greater whole and work each in their own direction, thus causing much heterogeneity and inconsistency within the project.

The good news is that these problems are manageable. Here’s how you can address them.

Solutions to Remote Teamwork Challenges

Now, let’s see what you can do to minimize the harmful effect of remote work on your design team’s productivity.

#1 Feedback

As the main problem with feedback is its delay and excessive red tape, you can take measures to address these negatives. First, it’s vital to pick the right tool for gathering and distributing feedback that suits all staff members. Choose a platform with quick onboarding and no specialized knowledge required for use. It will be much easier to get everyone on board if the entry barrier is low.

Second, you need to focus on one tool and stick to it, avoiding staff confusion or data duplication. You’ll quickly achieve lower turnaround time and less missed data if everyone works in one channel. No information will be lost in the communication process if everyone has a single reference point to get all instructions and updates from.

Finally, you need to address feedback delays, as this drawback is the main team productivity killer. Set the exact timing for feedback collection and encourage all staff members to follow that schedule.

#2 Natural Communication

Things get harder when it comes to natural, face-to-face communication in the team. It’s impossible to mimic an offline environment when all team members are far away from each other. Still, you can take some measures to add the informal communication component to the workflow.

• Schedule collaboration sessions for the team with no structure, giving that time for a free creative discussion.
• Reserve some time within each meeting for an informal discussion of personal matters and relationship-building. This technique will help staff get to know each other better and develop trust.
• Organize office-like video conferences to keep everyone engaged in an ongoing work process. Team members can stay online, working with muted microphones and unmuting them once they have a question or comment. This arrangement can mimic real-life conversations in an office, thus giving staff a sense of team belonging.

#3 Focus on the Project Goals

To maintain the focus on the project’s broader goals, every staff member should be kept in the loop with the ongoing changes and updates. It’s not easy to maintain such a level of update when all staff members work at a distance and need to study all documentation independently. Not everyone will go through multiple files and meeting recordings. Most staff will likely give up in the middle, saving their working time.

What can you do to remedy the situation?

Here are a couple of quick tips:

• Organize a single database with all project documentation. It should be something like a Wiki, with clear arrangement and structure, allowing anyone to find the necessary data quickly.
• Keep documentation informative and concise. Mind that not all your colleagues but people with no specialized knowledge may need to study those files. So, keep things simple.
• Keep in contact with the team and discuss the progress. It’s vital to check from time to time whether you’re moving in the right direction; it may be a huge time saver.

You Can Do It

So, this is the formula for effective work with remote teams. As you can see, the secret to productivity and effective communication is in understanding the difference between office and remote work. By minimizing the tension of isolation and giving workers support, you can achieve similar results as with an in-house team.