Desk

Whether in staff selection or ongoing management, take deliberate steps to slow things down and over-communicate. Although face–to-face is always the best way to build a relationship with staff members, videoconferencing also enables participants to pick up nonverbal communication cues. Build time into formal and informal meetings to allow for a little fun and to get to know each other better. These informal exchanges build rapport and tend to happen naturally when staff is co-located. To get the same results with your global team, be intentional about creating time and space for informal communications to flourish. It is worth the effort: studies report that dispersed teams, when carefully staffed and developed, provided good processes and tools can perform even better than co-located teams[1]!