10 ways to improve remote collaboration

At Cisco we invest heavily in collaborative practices like design thinking as a way to ensure we find and solve the right problems (more on that here).

Collaboration relies on meetings and workshops and for various reasons its not always feasible to have everyone in the same room. We have gained a lot of experience with remote collaboration and we want to share some of our favourite tips for making it more effective.

1. Facilitation is key
   Every meeting, regardless whether it is remote or in person, should have someone appointed as the facilitator/chair/leader (not necessarily the organizer). This is one of the most impactful things you can do to ensure a successful meeting as they will be the person who makes sure all the other items below are being considered.
2. Act differently
   Do you remember when you were a kid and you went to someone’s house for dinner? You KNEW that you were meant to act differently and be on you best behavior. The same idea applies here. Recognize that in a remote meeting situation you need to act differently than in an in person setting — Help the facilitator, don’t dominate the conversation, include people who are remote.
3. Ensure a quality audio connection
   In low bandwidth situations ensure that you connect to the meeting audio with your cell phone, or land line so that you always have a stable audio connection. Be diligent about muting if you are in a noisy location(seems obvious, but not always put into practice).
4. Turn your video on!
   A lack of inter-personal chemistry, and ease of multi-tasking are two things that kill remote meetings. Ensuring that everyone’s video is on helps to solve both.
5. Control the dialogue
   Open and unstructured conversation can be a challenge in online meetings. Lack the natural facial and gestural queues, slight delays in an audio connection, co-located groups dominating the conversation are a few reasons why. The facilitator can help by calling on people one at a time, encouraging people to use obvious gestures like raising your hand to speak, or structured conversation techniques like the conversation café.
6. RACI
   The more people on the call, the harder it is to make it effective. Use RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) as a way to evaluate who needs to be in the meeting vs who needs to be simply consulted before hand and/or informed afterwards.
7. Share artifacts in real time
   Ensure that output is being created and captured in digital form so that everyone has access to it equally. Opt for tools like box notes or office 365 documents over physical whiteboards. Draw things on paper, take a photo with your phone and post into a Webex Teams space for everyone to see. Use online tools like Miro or Mural to run all your post-it note style exercises.
8. Ease into tools with an ice breaker
   If using tools like Miro and Mural it’s important to make sure you introduce it at the beginning of the meeting and make sure people know the basic functions. A great way to do this is to integrate it with an ice breaker activity. Have people go into the tool and post images that reflect their personality or illustrate where they live. Use these collages as people introduce themselves, and then vote on the most unique or funny items. This lets everyone get to know one another while also letting them figure out the tools before the real work begins.
9. Prepare — Prepare — Prepare
   The organizer, and the facilitator should put some extra effort into the planning. Test tools, dry run activities, create breakout groups (assigned to breakout webex meetings) ahead of time. Try to identify things that could fail and have a plan B in place.
10. Get more great ideas
    Elayna Spratley is a Cisco colleague and Duo’s design thinking coach. She has written a comprehensive blog post on this topic that you might find valuable — Innovating apart: How to create an inclusive remote working session.

There are a couple other resources that I have found really useful in developing a practice around remote workshops (Thank you for the collaboration Jay Melone, Daniel Stillman, Jim Kalbach).

Be sure to check these out:

Remote Design at IBM: Best Practices for Facilitation

The definitive guide to facilitating remote workshops - MURAL

Facilitating remote design sprints

Facilitation Means Designing Conversations