Today's businesses are becoming more collaborative, consisting of teams that are constantly evolving and reconfiguring as the company grows to maintain agility. One of your colleagues may be unfamiliar with your job, team, or organization, and as a result, you need to work with someone you've never met.
More so, remote work also gives chance to the teams to collaborate with many people that never met in person before. Collaboration can be challenging for remote teams. But it can lead to great innovation and improve the results.
According to a Stanford University study, collaboration is essential motivation. The participants stayed up to 64% longer and more challenging tasks with more interest and energy.
But on the other side of collaboration is that decision-making is significantly slowed down, with endless meetings, phone calls, and emails that take an estimated 80% of employees’ time. The other factors namely different work styles and expectations affect people's frustration.
Nevertheless, working with people you've never met before can lead to new relationships that can achieve great results.
The important thing to collaborate and stay connected with coworkers is better communication. So why communication with coworkers is important?
Why communication with coworkers is important?
Clear communication in the workplace enables your organization to become more agile. It also leads to achieving better workplace collaboration.
In addition, clear and right communication can do a lot to drive innovation in the workplace. If you want great teamwork when you work with people who never met before, you can build communication strategies to achieve great results.
Benefits of better communication
Before moving on to the details about how to communicate with coworkers you never met before, here are the benefits of better communication with coworkers.
- Boost Productivity
Better communication with coworkers can boost productivity at work. Productivity can help employees' involvement and engagement. More so, it gives employees a sense of collaboration that will lead to new ideas and creativity. - Resolving the conflict
Conflict resolution with communication is a skill that is imperative in the workplace. Better communication can turn the potential crisis into a healthy discussion. - Bonding with coworkers
When you are connecting with coworkers, even with partners who never met before, you can do team bonding. Bonding strategy with coworkers can start with better communication. Thus, bonding can level up your teamwork.
How to communicate with coworkers who never met before
Communication plays an important role to keep positive relationships at work, especially when you work with people across the country. To sum up, here are the strategy to communicate with your coworkers.
- Scheduling Introduction
Scheduling an introduction allows you to listen, learn and introduce yourself to your coworkers. Sometimes, a small group introduction gives you many perspectives. Create group meetings for more interactive sharing, allowing everyone including quieter people to participate in discussions and listen to feedback. - Using project management tools
Many things can contribute to the success of a project, but one of the most important is good communication. Maybe each project has its people and situations that determine which form of communication is most effective. But the goals of all projects are the same.
It's about getting everyone on the team to make the right decisions. Decision-making requires open communication that allows information easy to get for each person.
The communication platform that can use to communicate with coworkers even if you never met one before is project management tools.
- Being fully present and engaged
You can show that you're in a conversation by focusing when your co-workers are talking and setting aside the phone or other distractions. Check what your colleagues say and respond accordingly. In a face-to-face video meeting, you can respond with a smile, a nod, or a polite gesture that conveys your feelings about what they are saying. Especially when you're in a virtual meeting or discussing important progress.
When working remotely, you can try those strategies above and respond accordingly to the messages from your colleagues. - Show empathy
It is important to understand that there is an inevitable learning curve for organizations in the world of remote work, especially if the team member is not particularly tech-savvy or a newbie in remote work.
One way to alleviate the pain of this learning curve is to empathize and empathize with all employees. We guarantee that they will be available during the transition and will be able to raise questions and concerns.
Anyway, working remotely can position some people in a stressful time and it is very helpful to create an open conversation with a little compassion. - Appreciate your coworker's time
At the end of the virtual meeting, appreciate your coworkers for their time and their contribution to the meeting. Appreciate the discussion and meeting and show your coworkers that you really care about their present and ideas.
More so, appreciate them as a form of communication skills that help you and coworkers build confidence and learn better communication in the workplace. Applying this communication daily also can help you keep your workplace running smoothly, especially when you work with a partner you never met before. - Using effective chat messages
Written communication through chat messages conveys what you want to deliver in written words. It's a popular use type of communication in the form of chat, notes, reports, and email.
Using effective written communication is simple and clear. By communicating in chat, you can bring up one idea at a time, look for a message of clarification, and be sure to correct the words. You can use chat features in VirtualSpace. It will help you send chat messages, and communicate fast in written words effectively with your coworkers. You also can use the notes features that will help you organize the task projects. - Giving feedback
When you are working with your coworkers who never met before, take the opportunity to adjust your leadership styles. Show your team values and observe. Especially if you have the opportunity to make an early impact. You can share the information and knowledge to provide good feedback and help them to get their job done.
Communication ideas may seem simple enough, but in reality, collaborating with others who never met before can be challenging. Each person in the team has strengths and weaknesses. They also have communication styles and different personal goals.
Corporate culture also influences how team collaboration. Some companies focus on collaboration and provide collaboration webinars, and provide collaboration tools such as VirtualSpace.
VirtualSpace can help your team do a collaboration with the team or coworkers who never met before. Many features that you can use to level up teamwork. Such as chat features, project collaboration, calendar, and many more.
More so, VirtualSpace is available on Appstore and Google Play. You can download and register VirtualSpace now!
