How to collaborate effectively if your team is remote – Insider secrets revealed by Osakwe

There are many advantages to virtual teams. (see some here)

But if you don’t know how to collaborate effectively if your team is remote, you are going to run into trouble.

In 2020 Osakwe wrote a paper, focussing on training gaps for remote healthcare practitioners (RHCPs), in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. This work displays how great training can be delivered and the results can be pitiful. Lessons learned from this directly show how to collaborate effectively if your team is remote.

It highlights how collaboration can look successful on the surface but as the thin layer of dust blows away in the wind all your hard work could be for naught.

I want to share some ideas with you so you can gain some keen insights of how to collaborate effectively if your team is remote.

What is highlighted by this study is that innefective training and leadership does not only demotivate, but has perilous effects. Following that, it begins to piece together a plan for resolve these challenges.

Each step that led to failure and each suggestion of improvement requires improved team communication and collaboration. You will learn by listening to the stories here and hopefully that will translate into a technique you can apply in your work immediately.

If illumination of ideas through narrative isn’t for you or you wish to skip to the nitty gritty click here

If your team are as effective as a band aid on a bullet wound, you are to blame

As the leader responsiblity ultimately starts and ends with you. As a leader you will be intelligent and So how could what does good training with bad collaboration look like?

Let me tell you a story of a Nigerian Health Care Practitioner called Mike.

All ideas that follow are based on true events. Reader’s discretion is advised, if you are ready, pull up your socks and let’s go…

“I watched his soul drain out of his eyes today”, said Mike, her husband, staring into nothingness.

Claire felt the same, her husband’s once brilliant sparkling eyes seemed to drain a little more every time he came home after a day like today.

When he started, he put his life and soul into his job, now she wasn’t sure if it had drained its last drops from him.

“Jimmy was a good boy…”, he tailed off.

“I know” she said softly as she paced her hand on his shoulder. A single tear fell down his cheek. The salt rubbing in the wounds. He knew he could have done more and yet there was nothing else he could do.

Jimmy was a 20-year-old man, had seen his family murdered when he was young. He never recovered from the mental scars.

Claire had seen Mike come home, just like this, over the years. Trying to help these kids, being called when they were having fits from an overdose.

He’d bring them round but never had the time or support to really help them. Typical style of a band aid for a bullet wound. A repetitive cycle of poor results.

Mike had been taught how to stabilise someone. But these people had PTSD, they needed a different type of care. He wasn’t equipped to deal with this. There was nothing for this in the training manual, there was no support he could get, nobody to speak to. He was alone in this. Isolated.

But it was the cycle that was most painful. Seeing her husband go through the same problem over and over. Was this supposed to be the life of a Remote Health Care Practitioner? He wanted to do more, he wanted to be more effective, yet here we were again.

Osakwe’s research unearths how ineffective training and support of remote workers can become an endemic problem in any organisation. You might think it hyperbolic, but if you manage a team, there is almost certainly one person who feels like Mike. Frustrated, isolated and unable to effectively carry out their tasks

Such a regrettable situation. Fortunately, it is also very simple to resolve if you take the correct steps. Furthermore, understanding and being successful at collaborating effectively with a remote team will supercharge your skills at working with local teams.

Enable remote workers – Take them from band-aids to surgery

You want to know how to collaborate with effectively if your team is remote. Let’s dig deeper into Osakwe’s study.

It is titled, “Exploration of competency requirements and current training models in remote medical emergency response in the oil and gas industry of Nigeria: a mixed method study.”

The title is a bit of a mouthful, but the study reveals some gems for understanding effective collaboration if your team is remote.

Most people assume systems and software and operation of these equates to collaboration. However, no matter what software and systems you have, there is something more fundamental at play. YOURSELF and your PEOPLE.

Although having the correct software and hardware is critical. Without a team operating and utilising it effectively and doing this to a clear common aim and goal (being on task) they are useless.

So, to become a better leader what should you be thinking about?

3 truths to improve remote team collaboration

From Osakwe’s revelations we can break this down into 3 truths.

1. How being blind and dumb can improve your leadership of remote teams.
2. Why, especially when leading remote teams, your ideas are probably wrong.
3. Doing this one simple task will break the cycle of doom.

How being blind can make you a better remote team leader

My mother always used to say, “god gave you 2 ears and 1 mouth, there’s a reason for that.” I would make a smart-ass comment, but mothers always seem to be right. As leaders and coaches, we must learn more and speak less. If you’re good, your ratio is even less than 2 to 1.

Leading an office team, you can use all your senses.

You walk down the aisles of desks, you can see people getting up and down, answering phones, writing on notepads.

You can hear the tapping of keys, ringing of the phones. You can smell the coffee, aftershaves, perfumes.

Sometimes you don’t need to ask any questions you can almost feel where you are needed. If people need to speak to you, they see you and can approach you.

You can sense where you need to be.

However, if your team is remote. You will not see everything that is happening. Even with technology.

You will not see Mike, the remote health care practitioner, go home and cry to his wife in the evening. Devestated at the hopelessness of a situation he has been thrust into.

A blind leader has to listen. They have no choice. A dumb leader cannot shout their opinion.

A great leader would know these problems that Mike was facing. The scary fact is that in most organisations the employees do not know how to communicate or that they can communicate with their leaders. Furthermore, leaders do not know how to initiate constructive communication or know how to listen to their teams.

At the very least this is not happening effectively! In his study Osakwe states that a training gap analysis as such had not been recorded for approximately 20 years!

Why your ideas are (probably) wrong!

As a great leader you must bridge the gap between your what your team lacks but required to fulfil their role. This isn’t achieved with your mighty intellect, or your ability to get the task done.

Your brain should only be used for one task. To formulate questions. Your mouth should only be there to articulate the questions and facilitate responses. That’s it. The rest of your job will be to listen. 

In Osakwe’s study he brings to light how these sorts of problems were effectively “rediscovered” simply by having an open forum with practitioners working on the front line.

The results of these conversations displayed the chasm that had grown between those creating and delivering the training and the people that used it.

As shown by the following statement:

‘…for the remote health care practitioners, you work alone and, the fact that the ….training that we have is something you do as a team’.

Formulate the right questions and patiently listening. Then you will be able to implement solutions that will directly help your team.

Remember the men and women who designed and delivered these courses were not stupid people. However, collaborate effectively if your team is remote, you must first pay attention to their needs.

Your business might have focus and a highly developed understanding of how to carry out certain practices, but you need to understand the terrain of your remote workers. The following statement is a clear indicator of this:

‘…. we find the things like gunshot wounds, bombs, are very common in these areas’ p20, ‘So, trauma, generally is common’p20, ‘the commonest things we see in Nigeria are more of trauma than cardiac arrest, or than heart attack and stroke, yeah, strokes, heart attack, they’re all there but, trauma is most common because of our environment’p19 “

 Remember you are blind. So your ideas will have blind spots and you MUST listen and learn from your team. 

Break the cycle of doom and build the cycle of success

Every bad thing in the world has an equal and opposite counterpart. So, if you are in the cycle of doom, create the equal and opposite cycle of success. What does that look like?

The core issue of the cycle of doom, especially relevant to remote teams, is pretty obvious when you think about it.

It can be summed up in one single word:

ISOLATION

Cast your mind back to Mike. Sitting there, isolated from his peers and his management. Neither understanding or able to support him. They might have listened if he had asked.

Management often assume they need not need not ask the question. Or subconsciously avoid asking, for fear of creating “problems” or “more work”.

You are a leader who cares for your team. So you would never do the above. However, if you do not initiate, the “Mike” in your team might assume that you do not want to know or would not do anything.

(Have you noticed we rarely we make good assumptions with regards to other people?)

Remember it took 20 years for somebody to even look at this again!

It is your job to open up that line of communication. Althought, illuminating and full of revelation, I worry that the intelligence of the individuals involved is preventing them from staying on task.

For your remote team to collaborate effectively they need to learn to communicate with one another and with you. A feedback loop needs to be generated.

The final steps put forward by Osakwe, in my opinion, seem more drawn out than necessary. I would be concerned that this would prevent a more swift response. Although, being the medical industry, this may be necessary for safety reasons. I would like to follow up with Osakwe and ask what happened next.

The point is that it is down to you to ENSURE something happens next. Open the lines of communication and grow them, enhance them and it will bring you results. So you know you are working blind and need to remove your preconceptions that you have. You can do that by asking the questions.

After you learn from your team you will learn what you need to implement and improve.

LAAW – Leaders Academy Action Work

As always, I hope this information has been useful. But if you really want to make a change and see benefits in your work and business you must do something.

So, each article I write I like to share some actionable ideas that will if implemented will make over time compound to make huge gains for you and your business. These are the law or LAAW.

Day 1:

Set aside 30 minutes to map out your teams.

Day 2:

Send each member of your team a survey to answer I would recommend finding out the following but feel free to add amend or otherwise.

1. The one thing I think would help speed my job up the most is… ….
2. The one thing that slows me down the most when I am trying to complete my tasks is…
3. The one thing I feel least confident about when completing my task is…
4. To improve team collaboration, I would suggest….

Ask to have the results back ASAP but with a deadline within 1 week.

You might be surprised by some of your responses!

If you like doing these mini challenges then register for my emails.

Want to know:

1. What is a Virtual Team?
2. The differences – virtual teams vs face-to-face teams

Ian B. is a teamwork and operations consultant for a technology group. He also consults a select handful of organisations on matters relating to integration and teamwork between departments and operations.