How do you make remote team collaboration work? It’s a really big question. In this blog, I’m gonna give you a really clean 3-step process that you can go through to make remote collaboration work better. Even though I don’t know your team and your context or how you ended up on this blog exactly, I can guarantee that if you go through these 3 steps with a group, your team will be working more effectively, more collaboratively together.
Blog Note: The following is an adapted and edited transcript of one of our daily YouTube tutorials. We know sometimes it is easier to scroll through written content which is why we are publishing here. Because of that, there may be typos or phrases that seem out of context. You’ll definitely be able to get the main idea. To get the full context, visit our YouTube channel here. And if you want to watch the video on this topic specifically, you can scroll down to the bottom of this post to access it as well.
I get to do this stuff for a living with some of the coolest organizations and universities on the planet and by the end of this video, what is in my brain will be in your brain.
Create Collaborative Vision Template
Number 1, create a collaborative vision template is an idea I kind of warped, sourced and adapted from this book and website called “Fun Retrospectives.” A little snapshot here of the activity that they call a “collaborative product vision.” This is a little bit different, I’m warping and adapting this but, feel free to check out that site in the link below to Fun Retrospectives. It’s a book written by and for the agile community. I do a fair amount of work with agile folks for non-agile people. It’s basically… agile is this a whole system and process to help groups work more efficiently and better together. Agile folks will help streamline things in an organization. An agile person might slap me on the cheek for giving that definition but, that’s enough of a summary for now. A collaborative product template might say, “This is for our target customer and then who insert statement of need. Then you might put in 1 of the key benefits of blank, insert product name there, is blank, insert key benefit there.” You can see basically we’re creating a fill in the blank to help us talk about a product template and create a collaborative vision for it.
What I’m saying is create a collaborative vision template for how you want to work together remotely. Your vision template might start out, “The most important ingredient to our work is blank. 1 of the core values that we have while doing that is blank.” You can see, you do a little bit of prep work to come up with a base template and then step 2, you brainstorm the blanks. I don’t know how big your team is but let’s say you’ve got 12 people. What I would do if I was working with a group of 12 folks, I would get that 12 people together and let’s say we’re remote because we’re talking about remote collaboration, we’re together on a video conferencing platform. I would have that collaborative vision template written out with the blanks, and then I would split the group up into 3 or 4 groups, and have them work through and fill in the blanks of the whole sentence. This could be as long or as short as you want to, right. The idea is that it creates a cast… some vision for how you want remote collaboration to operate. The groups separately work together and depending on how complex your template is, that may take somewhere between 10 and 50 minutes to come. Probably not 50 that’s a little long so, between 10 and 30 minutes, depending on how deep it is and how complex you’re working on. By the way, you know, there’s a collaborative vision template… you can use this for anything there’s a really cool way to get the group all aligned or together. We, you know, we say a lot like, “Let’s meet to get on the same page or get aligned.” This method of creating a template and then having small groups fill in the blanks is a really phenomenal way to actually get on the same page about something. This could be a template about anything. This could also just be a 1 sentence template even of just saying, you know, an opening activity in the beginning to say, “By the end of this meeting, I want to… or by the end of this meeting we want to blank.” Split up into small groups, fill in that blank, everybody comes back and shares their sentence.
Before we go to step 3, I might have actually jumped ahead of myself a little bit. When brainstormed the blanks… brainstorming 101 is brainstorm alone first and together second.
Step 3 is that together second. Step 3 is small group sentencing. Steps 3 is I would actually split those groups out at that point. Have them brainstorm alone first, split those groups out, then they put their ideas together, come up with a collaborative template. Just in a group of 3 or 4. A lot easier to decide on in a group of 3 or 4 than 12. Then, you’ve got 3 solid templates after about 10 to 30 minutes, you bring everybody back and have each group just read off their template. Just share their template, what it is. Then depending on the complexity, you can have a conversation in that larger group to try to winnow it all down to 1 template. If you really want to be democratic about this, you need some voting process depending on how serious of a template this is for you. But really, the point of this video is how to make remote collaboration work. Creating this vision template is what’s important because this will form the guidelines that everybody’s agreed and contributed to for how remote collaboration should actually work. By the way, you can reverse this a little bit. Typically collaborative vision template, we think about, you know, a sentence or a series of sentences that ends in a period. I would invite you also to think about creating question templates. This is a great opening exercise to invite people in the chat. “What do you think about when you hear the word blank?” Have people type a word that they want to end that question with into the chat and then pick 1 that you think is especially funny, useful, interesting etc. and then split people out into breakouts to do a little connection before content about that question. So, just another way to make remote collaboration more effective. I’m thinking about using this template, this collaborative template idea with questions as well.
This is a really great question to dive into some examples and get concrete with something. If you want… if you’re starting out some sort of a remote brainstorm of any sort, “What is one of the best examples of…?” You could invite each group to cut fill in that blank with a part of the idea that you’re going to be talking about so you can really dissect and dig deep and look at that from a different perspective. Question of the day, I’m wanting to continually build the comments section of videos as the channel grows to be a library of other good ideas and insights. I would love for you to answer the question “What is one of the best examples of remote collaboration?” Feel free to drop an example or a little note or a thought or comment on that. If you don’t want to really leave creating a collaborative vision template up to chance, this is what I get to do for a living. You can find my info below. Feel free to check that out. If you liked this, you will totally love these videos. Thanks for subscribing to the channel and being a part of making connection and engagement easy with we and me. Have an awesome day.