Remote Team Effectiveness
Remote Team Effectiveness During and Post Pandemic and How to Plan for the Return to the Workplace
The "New Normal" of Remote Teamwork During and Post-Pandemic and How to Prepare for the Return to the Workplace
This is a unique and challenging time and your team's resilience will be tested. Whether your organization is embracing remote working as a long-term approach, or planning for employees to return to the workplace, employees will need to adapt. It will be critical for your teams to establish innovative norms, strategies, and best practices for communicating and collaborating. During this time, we are uniquely poised to offer customized, proven, and innovative solutions to help your team members and organization be as effective as possible. While working remotely, or as you consider what needs to be in place for the return to the workplace, we understand the inevitable anxiety your team members may experience while balancing both professional and personal needs.
Our stream-lined four-step process is designed for remote working teams, is completely virtual, quick, and efficient. First, we will conduct a team assessment specifically developed for your team's current reality. Next, using the resulting data from team members and emerging themes, we will facilitate a targeted, virtual team effectiveness solution intended to address your major challenges. Alternatively, organizations can run local or global Town Halls and seek feedback and themes derived immediately live from 100s or 1000s of colleagues locally or globally using the world-leading technology from Entromy. We will help you PLAN - whether for long-term remote working in small teams or partnering to provide and act upon an executive-led communication to the entire global organization of thousands of employees.
The 4-step P-L-A-N Approach for Remote Team Effectiveness During/Post the Pandemic and Preparing to Return to the Workplace
1. Partnering to Customize
2. Leverage Team Diagnostics
3. Align Team via Virtual Customized Team-Effectiveness Session
4. Norms and Action Plan
Time Commitment
- The assessment takes up to 20 minutes
- The virtual team meeting takes between 60-90 minutes based upon your preferences
- Or integrate the approach into a special or regular Town Hall/global meeting with hundreds or thousands of employees’ responses and themes fed-back live using Entromy.
The 4-step P-L-A-N Approach for Remote Team Effectiveness
1. Partnering to Customize
We work with you to find solutions that address the specific business and emotional needs for you and your team members. We have decades of team development experience in the biotech and other industries. Given the emotional demands associated with the current pandemic and "new norm" of remote working, our team includes a practicing clinical psychologist. We partner with you throughout:
- Discussion with you before the team assessment to ensure we include all items you want addressed
- Prior to the virtual team meeting, to discuss themes from the data, or to hear immediately from employees live for large “All Hands” meetings (the latter partnering with Entromy using their world-leading live feedback technology.
- After the virtual meeting to finalize solutions and ensure you and your team have all you need.
2. Leverage Team Diagnostics
Team members do not always feel comfortable expressing their needs even in normal times. Diagnosing team needs anonymously using us as external experts to gather and interpret and share back the data removes such barriers. In a quick online survey or via a 20-minute call to each team member, or using Entromy for large or global meetings, we can best address:
- Current state of mind
- Prioritization needs (work, family, etc.)
- Resilience in change
- Views around team connectivity, communication types and frequency
- Team member recognition and appreciation
- Coping mechanisms
- Ideas to maximize team effectiveness during this period
(Optional) team leader rating by team around these items and other team leader metrics.
3. Align via Virtual Customized Team-effectiveness Session
Based on the data-driven needs identified by your team members, we discuss with you how to tailor a virtual team workshop to fully engage your team working remotely and/or what the data suggests is required from the team to responsibly return to the workplace.
4. Norms and Actions
We provide a facilitated session to leverage the data and have the team come up with their own priorities, actions, strategies, and norms to help themselves be as effective as possible. No "off the shelf" ideas, rather real world solutions identified and committed to by your own team.