1. Hold Digital Face-to-Face Meetings And Turn On Your Video Feed

How to Be a Great Remote Team Member: 9 Strategies for Remote Work Success Working remotely from a product development team is increasingly common these days. At the same time, design and development teams need to collaborate more closely than ever no matter where they’re located. To support remote client engagements, we’ve developed a set of remote-work strategies that cover everything from team dynamics to spontaneous communications to collegial empathy. Studies show that face-to-face communication is crucial to building interpersonal trust and enables participants to pick up nonverbal cues. According to a study from UCLA 93 percent of communication comes in the form of nonverbal cues: 55 percent is visual, i.e. body language and eye contact, and 38 percent is vocal, i.e. pitch, speed, volume and tone of voice. Even when participants on the other end choose not to turn on their video feed, keeping your video feed on sets an example of openness and transparency for the team. Put your best face forward by avoiding sitting in front of a white board (they cause glare), finding good lighting and positioning yourself so that others can see your face when you speak. Conversely, when other people are speaking instead of typing on your computer look at the speaker so you appear engaged and attentive. 2. Set Expectations at Project Start Setting expectations is always important, but it’s doubly important for remotely located teams. At DesignMap, we focus on ensuring the following elements are clear before work starts: Team Roles: Before client kickoff, the relevant internal parties should come together to determine who will take on the role of project lead and what everyone else’s role is. If you are taking over for another team member, find out what their role was. Project Definition: The kickoff meeting is a great time to define project goals, deliverables, key deadlines, and future check-ins. Priorities: If team members are working on multiple projects, work with your Project Lead to set priorities. If a single project has multiple deliverables ask the team to set priorities for them. 3. Air Grievances Early with a Project Pre-Mortem The Pre-Mortem is concept we’ve used at DesignMap that allows all of the team members (our clients and ourselves) to express their concerns and worries before they surface. To ensure success and a positive experience, we ask the client to air their concerns and address them before we started designing. Learn more about Pre-Mortems 4. Build Positive Team Dynamics with Spontaneous Slack Sessions Building a team and establishing trust is hard when you can’t get together for drinks at the end of a long week and talk about something other than work. For remote teams, opportunities to build good team dynamics do exist but they must be implemented intentionally and can be slow to take effect. We’ve found that instant messaging tools like Slack help designers feel like part of a team. It may seem silly to participate in Slack chats when you have a lot of work to do, but consider them a virtual replacement for real-time hallway chats or lunchtime conversations. 5. Be Transparent on Your Progress and Process Remote teams benefit from frequent status updates. Are you 10 percent complete with your tasks and making incremental improvements? At DesignMap we use the following touch points to maintain transparency when working remotely: Team News Give all teams members access to the same news and updates, no matter how big or small. Make sure the process is a two-way street. Daily Stand-ups A recent high profile project needed daily check-ins between remotely located designers to combine files and coordinate tasks. Weekly Updates Weekly updates on project details keep all stakeholders informed about project progress and specific project tasks. Flag Issues Raising issues as the arise instead of waiting for the next scheduled meeting contributes to a culture of transparency. Explicit Feedback Requests Tell team members what kind of feedback you want. Add explicit notes and questions to your design to reiterate what you need to move forward. 6. Communicate Your Process Designers put a lot of thought and effort into their work, often laboring over details and perfecting designs before they share them. Instead of waiting to show a perfect design, build trust and establish a good feedback loop by sharing your process with the team. One way to do this is to show early sketches so that stakeholders can discuss design concepts without getting bogged down in minutia such as color choice, icon shape or exact placement of detailed controls. 7. Show your Value Being remote makes it hard for your boss or coworkers to see how much time and effort you’ve put into your work. You can establish a presence in virtual channels, ask to be video-conferenced in for company-wide meetings or communicate proactively to team members who might forget you are on the team or need a reminder of the valuable work you are doing. A simple action for establishing reliability is to respond to emails in a timely manner. Another is to follow up promptly after meetings with notes and next steps. 8. Use Co-working Tools At DesignMap, we’ve found that co-working tools really work to keep remote teams on track and on task. Here are some we use: Trello Everyone on the team can see what you are working on and raise high priority issues to your attention. Slack This is a great tool to keep the whole office on the same page, regardless of location. Feeling part of office camaraderie is easier when all water cooler talk is done in the #watercooler channel. Invision is a great tool for collecting feedback as well as creating quick prototypes. Our content writer for client projects prefers gathering and iterating with Invision because it’s easier for tracking comments by page and eliminates the need to send commented documents back and forth. Collaborative Workshops Collaborative design is a well-documented area of UX design. Remote brainstorming can also be done successfully using video and online tools. 9. Have Empathy Designers represent the voice of the customer. It is our job to speak for them both in our designs and in the way we work with remote team members. The empathy we apply to our design thinking process can also be applied to understanding the perspectives, objectives and needs of remote stakeholders. TL;DR Working with remote teams that never meet in person poses unique challenges and offers great opportunities for designers. Working remotely forces us to be on top of our game in all areas. We need to reach out and establish connections, set clear priorities and expectations and, most importantly, ask for feedback early and often in the design process. Building trust is an important part of any professional relationship and the strategies outlined above show that even when working remotely designers have opportunities to be responsible, efficient, transparent and collaborative team members. DESIGN DIRECTOR Sunny Yang