How video conferencing helps managers of remote teams

Managers of remote teams face a very specific challenge

For anyone running a business, connecting individuals and teams is vital to success as it fosters communication and employee engagement. Excellent communication is mission critical to your business’s success, especially if your teams are distributed and spread across the globe.

Recent research by the Project Management Institute found that, for around a third of us, poor communication is the leading cause of project failure.

Thanks to advances in technology – and in particular web conferencing – it has never been easier to connect and collaborate efficiently.

Enter Gather, a new breed of web conferencing tool

At Gather, we provide high-definition web and video meetings, conference calling and SIP meeting rooms for reliable connectivity and collaboration with automatic video and voice recording as standard. We also offer automated meeting minute transcriptions and AI-led data collection, which, in turn, gives you amazing control and coordination of your meetings as well as helpful contextual records and analytics.

How can Gather help me, as the manager of a remote team?

Face-to-face communication

As a Project Manager, you have a vast array of collaboration tools to consider for your distributed team such as Notion, Slack or Trello. They’re perfect solutions for project management, but communication via these tools will always be, at least slightly, asynchronous.

When you need to get stuff done, nothing beats face-to-face interaction with your team. In fact, face-to-face communication is an ESSENTIAL part of project management. Hosting meetings by video conference lends an awareness that doesn’t happen with written communication. Being aware of body language, for example, can provide you with completely different insights, perhaps not even related to the discussion at hand.

When you meet face-to-face you gain a better understanding of what is being said and, importantly, what’s NOT being said, whether a colleague is 100 miles down the road or 1,000 miles across the ocean.

Team accountability

When we rely heavily on email, WhatsApp or sporadic phone calls as our primary methods of communication, we run the risk of complacency creeping in among team members.

Disjointed team communication makes it too easy to overlook individual progress on key deliverables and milestones. Have you ever been in a meeting where a colleague only gives an update on their progress when asked? Or been on the back foot on a conference call and zealously agreed to complete a key action that you now can’t remember?

Gather not only hosts video conferences, but it also records them (video and audio). For the call imagined above, if you were speaking via Gather, you could have an automated meeting transcription that notes agreed actions in your inbox – immediately after your meeting.

Our meeting recording feature gives you and your team more accountability and makes it much easier to track progress on essential tasks and milestones. Gather even provides a list of key topics discussed in your meeting, making it easy for your team to find exactly what was said and, importantly, what actions were agreed.

Build a strong team culture

Working remotely has its perks, but it can be a lonely experience. According to Buffer’s 2018 State of Remote Work, feeling alone is becoming an increasingly common physical and behavioural health concern for which remote workers are acutely at risk. Buffer’s report notes that 21% of remote workers have concerns about communication and collaboration.

When was the last time you had a coffee with Lucy in Singapore? Can you even remember the last meeting you had with James that wasn’t held on the fly during a shared business trip?

Gather was built for distributed teams, like yours. By utilising Gather for face-to-face communication, via video or voice only, you can connect with every member of your team (our multiple time zone scheduling tool is amazing, by the way). Gather is always ‘on’ so you can quickly and easily host online team events, like virtual coffee breaks or working lunches.

When you Gather as a team for events OTHER than meetings, you shorten the distance to the opportunities that being around other people provides. Your team might not actually like bowling nights or miss the chance to grab a co-worker for a quick lunch at the canteen, but they are likely to miss having reasons to get together. Gather helps dynamic teams get to know each other.

Boost your team’s efficiency

We all like instant action and, let’s face it, meetings are not known to provide that on a regular basis! When was the last time you had minutes in your inbox instantly after a meeting? Or, if you had to miss a meeting, when did you last receive a complete meeting summary including presentations, files, documents and notes and agreed actions without having to chase the meeting organiser?

Gather combines video conferencing technology with a host of extremely powerful tools to boost the efficiency of your team. After each call, automatic transcriptions and tags are generated, while any shared documents or slides remain easily accessible – and all in one place. After every session, every member of your team can review proceedings, learn and grow.

Interested in using Gather to power your remote team?

We have recently launched and invite you to explore our new website, where you can check out Gather’s unique features and register for a free account. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.

We’d love to hear your feedback on our web conferencing service, so please get in touch at hello@timetogather.net.

What are you waiting for?

Good things happen when we Gather…