With so many of the Digital R&D Fund projects involving teams with members in different parts of the country, they have learned a great deal about how to make remote working actually work. And with distributed teams being an increasingly common feature of  project work today here are five great tips sourced from across the R&D Fund of how to make it work.

1. Find the collaboration tools that work for you. There are now a core suite of free tools that are very commonly used as the basis for project work. These are Basecamp for a closed project space, Google Drive and Dropbox for document management and Google Hangouts and Skype for video/phone real-time communication.  The world of project delivery tools is constantly innovating and there are some new less well known tools available. One of the most useful is Trello which is an app which allows you to manage workloads, to-do lists and activities across a remote team. The key advice when using tools id to discover which actually work for your team, this may require some research and trialling to see what fits best.

2. Ensure you have a regular schedule of check-ins. Keeping regular contact – ideally weekly or at least fortnightly – means that everyone knows what everyone else is working on and where help is most required. Check-in meetings should be done in real-time i.e. using some sort of video/phone conferencing and even if they are really short (e.g. 20-30mins) they can be a very effective way of ensuring that no-one in the team feels isolated or is stuck on any particular problem.

3. Develop your own language. In a collaborative project where team members come from very different backgrounds, it is often the case that people are using the same words but not necessarily talking about the same thing! For example, the word development means very different things if you are a technologist, an arts administrator or a researcher. Working out or at least clarifying the language for the specifics of your project that everyone understands can avoid problems down the line and ensure efficient communication.

4. Assume that team-forming will take time. Unless you already have a good relationship with your team members from past work, it is likely to take time to build trust and understand each others working style. It is therefore worth ‘front-loading’ your project with opportunities to learn from and with each other.

5. Don’t underestimate the importance of face-to-face. It may sound a little contrary, but one of the best ways to make remote working work is to try and spend as much time as you can afford to in the same room together. Nothing builds relationships like face-to-face contact and this is especially true if that time spent together is in some part social rather than exclusively task-oriented. Building in time for face-to-face sessions can really pay dividends later in the project should the road get rocky at all.

Thank you to Hannah Nicklin of the Albow project upon whose insights this guide was based.

Image courtesy of flickr user Paul Jacobson