3 Ways to Improve Communication Across Your Remote Team

Any team that’s remote, and has been for a while, will tell you one of the biggest obstacles of remote work is communication. In the last three years as a remote team we’ve struggled with communication issues, and worked hard to overcome them. Below you’ll find our three must-haves for fantastic team communication.

Host Regular All-Hands Meetings

It might be tricky when your team spans different time zones, but this is one of the best communication tools for us. 

If you’re not familiar with the term, an all-hands meeting is a meeting the whole company is expected to attend. We have one all hands every two weeks and use these to share important information with the entire team. That way we’re all on the same page, and everyone gets a bit of facetime with team members they don’t directly work with.

Typically, we share company wide updates around new features or improvements, hiring updates, and important stats. The cadence at which you host and the content is going to be different between organizations, so try a few things out and find what works best for you. It might be a  20 minute meeting once a week where you share accomplishments from the team, or it’s an hour every two weeks breaking growth numbers, company updates, and team wins.

Company Wide Chat Channels

Having a space for both work and non work related work chat is one of the best things we have at Flow. We created a bunch of chat channels in Flow for this, but there are other programs out there too. Slack and Discord are options to look into if you want to adopt just a chat program. 

With channels you can scroll through it also means team members across time zones can still chime in; we don’t miss the whole experience. It brings us together even when we’re provinces or countries apart. With channels for #Pets, #Celebrations, and #WatercoolerChat there’s space for non-work conversations. When we need to, channels like #iOS, #Operations, and #Feedback let us discuss important work topics in one place.

Team Video Hangouts

This is pretty new to us, but has been a lot of fun so far. Once a month we schedule in a video hangout just to spend some time together. We’ll play a game together online like Skribbl, or have a happy hour where we all crack open a cold drink, and hop on a group video call. It usually starts out work related but quickly transitions to just about everything. This has been really important to bringing us closer together as a team. 

Whether you’re a newly remote team, or one that’s been remote for ages, these three tips are worth trying out! If you do give them a try, let us know your experience on Twitter @getflowapp.