How to Use Visuals for Effectively Communicating With Remote Teams‍

Managing a team in the virtual work environment is a very different task from handling onsite workers. Working from home has its advantages if your company is prepared to provide employees with the proper tools, video training, and support. Still, it also can lead to feelings like isolation and demotivation. 

So if you want to know how to get the most of your working-from-home team, keep on reading and find out how to effectively manage remote teams.

Preparing the Ground

To make a proper switch from onsite to remote work is essential to keep one step ahead and analyze the challenges you may face. Many things can stand in your way when managing a remote team: communication gap, procrastination, change fatigue, and technical difficulties, to name a few.

So it means you need to adapt your previous onboarding process to a new work model. If you don't do that, you might find your team confused about accountability, productivity and policies.

Re-onboarding 

When facing such a significant challenge, a new onboarding is needed to achieve your goals, and an excellent way to get started is by defining and communicating points like:

• Goals
• Deadlines
• Expectations
• Work from home policy

During onboarding, needs are too big to handle without having tools for communication, productivity, time and project management. Here are some options for your toolkit that will improve the workflow of your working-from-home employees:

• Slack, Connecteam - For messages. Easy to organize by departments, projects, and teams.
• Trello, Wrike - For project management. 
• When I Work, Nutcache - Time tracking and scheduling.
• Zoom and other tools for remote meetings.

The onboarding process must be simple, natural, planned, and pleasant so that people feel safe because they are backed by an organized structure. Onboarding has a central influence on engagement and talent retention, which also will make your team more productive.

Before starting the remote onboarding process, ask yourself a few questions:

1. When will it start, and how long will it last?
2. What impression do you want to leave?
3. What role should each person play in the integration process?
4. What are the expected goals?
5. What should employees know about your company's culture?

Preparing the onboarding process will help you create checklists like the one below:

The most important thing is to make employees familiar with goals, tools, tasks and roles even before starting their remote activities. The more comfortable they are and the more information they receive at the right time, the better the result.

Seeing the big picture

The virtual environment might present a blizzard of information you need to overcome to make your team more confident. And one good way of getting a clear overview of the many things that come into play when managing remote teams is mind mapping. 

Mind maps are great to organize, understand and communicate complex concepts and see how they connect. It means they will help you and your team at the same time. See how it works:

And here is the beauty part: you can find plenty of free tools on the internet to get started on mind mapping, so you don't need to be or have an in-house designer to help your team to have a broad view of projects and tasks. 

Lend a helping hand

The challenges in working from home are not only on productivity but also on employee's mental health. Besides the change fatigue, people who work from home tend to have a hard time when proactivity is demanded because they are more isolated and easily distracted. So managers must bear in mind providing tasks, schedules, milestones, and how employees are coping.

There are many things you can do to help your teams handle their activities in the virtual environment, like holding one-on-one meetings, for instance. Meetings are an excellent opportunity to keep conversations on subjects that we usually don't bring up in emails or chats. This less formal aspect can make people more comfortable to ask questions and tell how they feel.

You can also use visuals to help employees deal with things like time management in a friendly way by using mind maps like this one:

Job Aids

A job aid is an instruction on how to do something at work, and it helps employees remember steps to accomplish tasks, test new workflows, or adapt more quickly to changes. Peregrine Performance Group found that employee performance was 50 percent higher after an eight-page job aid was added at the expense of a one-week training course to a day.

Job aids do not have a specific format and can be created using different tools and be presented in posters, videos, audios, infographics, or flowcharts, among many other types. So let's go deeper into flowcharts job aids, which are excellent for supporting decision-making and helping employees complete tasks with confidence. 

This type of job aid is handy when there are several steps to be met with "yes" or "no" decisions that need to be taken in sequence.

Here is an example of a template for a decision-making flowchart:

To create an effective flowchart, outline the steps you want to include and define how complex the task you will represent is. After planning, start by choosing a free flowchart template that fits the process you want to visualize and edit text, colors, and design elements to achieve a clear and engaging visual to make a workflow smoother.

A job aid can be implemented at any time and for different purposes, such as correcting a procedure or helping with decision-making, or supporting processes. See how to create a job aid:

Performances and feedback 

Performance reviews are a great opportunity to reinforce or redirect habits, motivate and help your employees evaluate precisely their efforts and achievements faced to your company's goals. So make it clear that reports and performance reviews are not a trial but a way to put things together and assist with goal setting. Feedback is essential, and it should deliver a solution-focused message.

See an example performance review below:

This example has sections for both achievements and areas for improvement, highlighting the brighter side and pointing out goals the employee should work towards. And again, you can rely on templates you can find for free on the internet to make more engaging and straightforward performance reviews.
 

You may also consider implementing a self-performance review model. Hence, employees assess themselves because it can be an opportunity for your employees to share thoughts about goals, roles, or anything they may be struggling with. Relying on templates is a must in this case because by doing that, you provide your team with topics to write about and visually organized material to start a self-performance review.

Takeaway 

You can do many things to help employees handle tasks and become even more productive while working from home, from digital organizational charts, flowcharts, schedules to instructions on how to get in touch, as a part of an internal communication plan. If you want to leverage visuals to boost communication and support your teams, you can start by using free infographic templates to create job aids, performance reviews, onboarding checklists, mind maps and many other resources to engage and help your audience.

You can also rely on templates to provide your team with good pieces of advice on how to deal with remote working without getting overwhelmed, like the one below. Get the right tools, train your employees to use them, and communication will become smooth and clear.

About the author

Alessandro Oliveri is a Content Marketer at Venngage. After many years working as a journalist, he now enjoys writing on visuals, SEO, and content creation. His aim to help people to simplify the content marketing process and take visuals to the next level.