Could You Collaborate Better When Working Remotely?

The shift to remote working transformed how teams operate overnight. What started as a temporary measure has become embedded in business culture. Yet many organisations still struggle with the fundamentals of remote collaboration. I’ve seen firsthand how the difference between thriving and barely functioning often comes down to whether teams understand how to work together across distance.

How can you improve remote working challenges beyond the technology?

When I work with businesses during acquisitions and turnarounds, I quickly notice that remote teams often replicate office patterns without adapting them. People schedule back-to-back video calls as though proximity is maintained. Managers attempt the same oversight tactics they’d use with staff in adjacent desks. Communication happens in fragments across multiple channels rather than through considered, structured exchanges.

The pandemic forced this shift before anyone was genuinely prepared. Teams moved their physical office experience into digital spaces. What they should have done was reimagine how work actually gets done. There’s a world of difference between video conferencing tools and genuine remote collaboration. Microsoft Teams, Slack, and similar platforms are enablers—but they’re only as effective as the strategy behind them.

I’ve observed that remote workers often feel more isolated, not less connected. The spontaneous conversations that happened at desks—the informal problem-solving, the relationship-building—simply don’t occur in the same way. When you’re joining a video call, everyone’s on the clock. There’s less room for the unstructured thinking that drives real collaboration.

How can you build effective communication strategies for distributed teams?

What works is being deliberate about communication architecture. That means establishing clear protocols for different types of interaction. Some conversations demand synchronous discussion—real-time video. Others can happen asynchronously through written updates that people absorb on their own schedule. Knowing the difference transforms how your team functions.

I’ve found that the most effective remote teams share one trait: they over-communicate deliberately. What feels like excessive clarity when you’re in the same building becomes baseline when you’re distributed. Project updates, decision rationale, why something matters—these need to be articulated explicitly rather than assumed. The cost of miscommunication multiplies when you can’t pop over to someone’s desk to clarify.

Tools like Microsoft Teams work best when paired with governance. Without it, you simply move the chaos online. Create separate channels for distinct purposes. Establish response time expectations. Decide which decisions warrant recorded calls versus asynchronous documentation. These structures feel bureaucratic initially, but they’re what allow remote teams to operate at their best.

How can you improve technology as foundation, not solution?

I’m cautious about organisations that believe investing in the right software solves remote collaboration. It doesn’t. Technology creates possibility—nothing more. The real work happens in how you deploy it. I’ve seen teams fail with the most expensive platforms because no one bothered to establish shared expectations about how they’d use them.

When assessing a business during acquisition, I look at how effectively remote teams actually coordinate. Not the tools they’ve purchased, but the patterns they’ve established. Do people know where to find information? Can decisions happen without everyone present? Is work visible across the team? These are cultural questions, not technology questions.

The Path Forward for Remote Collaboration

Remote working isn’t temporary. It’s not something to tolerate until normality returns—it IS normality now. The organisations that recognise this and design their collaboration practices accordingly will pull away from competitors who treat it as a problem to be minimised.

If you’re currently struggling with remote collaboration, start by auditing what’s actually broken. Is it lack of tools? Unlikely. Is it unclear expectations about when people are available, how decisions get made, or where work gets tracked? Probably. Fix the process before you blame the platform.

Related reading: Train disengaged employees like a pro with these development strategies, How to instil a collaborative working mindset into new team members and A checklist for bringing staff back following the pandemic.