3 Ways to Design Across Borders
3 Ways to Design Across Borders
Many people may believe that collaborating with a design team which is spread across the globe is frustrating and shallow. But I can tell you with certainty that say this belief is untrue and a myth.
Today the lines of borders are already blurred by social media and technology. For instance, the products that we build at RingCentral further remove the gaps borders create by helping teams collaborate in incredible ways, using messaging, phone, video meetings and sharing documents all with a click within a single unified application.
For over two years, I have been working with an incredible Global Design Team at RingCentral that is spread across Belmont(USA), Colorado(USA), Xiamen(China), St. Petersburg(Russia), and Odessa(Ukraine). I have realized that there are many occasions when we make conscious and subconscious efforts to promote the collaboration between designers across borders and today I can truly say we work as one unit and get so much more done.
“We are producing designs round the clock”
The results are overwhelming; we produce more than 160 spec documents each quarter for a number of our products across multiple platforms. Each one of these documents represents teamwork between PMs, Devs, and Designers who are geographically distributed and working in different time zones.
Here are my top 3 tips that have helped us build and promote a creative and collaborative team across the globe:
1 Build a relationship
To collaborate more meaningfully and to tap each other’s creative potential it is necessary first to build a relationship. With a distant team, there is no physical proximity, so you need to find creative ways to build relationships. Here are some ways that you can try to build relationships better when you are across borders:
Don’t just talk about the work in the meeting, ask them about their weekend, their day or simply about the weather.
Plan your remote meeting well and have your camera’s turned on during the sessions. You can’t build relations staring at big avatars.
Make them feel like you are listening to them by nodding your head and responding when they are talking.
Summarize and state back to them what you heard. This makes them feel like you are paying attention when they are talking.
2 Crossing Borders
To design across borders it is necessary to physically cross borders first.
Have your team members travel to other locations and collaborate with the remote teams in person. The best way to bridge this gap of distance is by going to different office locations. It gives a whole new perspective and builds empathy towards your peers. You get a new perception, and you can experience how your peers abroad feel working in their environment. It becomes a shared experience between everyone. It’s one thing to ask about work or weather conditions and another to experience it.
We have built a practice of having our remote team members visit us, and some of us travel to visit them and collaborate together in person every quarter.
3 Celebrate wins
Don’t forget to celebrate and applaud any and all wins. “WIN” does not necessarily mean winning a client, award or a big competition. Any time you collaborate with another team member who is halfway around the world, it is a WIN. When you get a sense of achievement or simply accomplishing a task with the help of your peer thousands of mile away it is a WIN. You can celebrate this by simply acknowledging them and how their help contributed to your and the team’s success.
“A creative and a collaborative Global Team can do wonders and is equipped to build world-class products.”
