<h4>Working together is harder than it looks. Our collection of collaboration articles will help you and your team lay a solid foundation for transparency, discoverability, and communication.</h4>

Collaboration

Working together is harder than it looks. Looking for ways to improve collaboration in your team? Find new ideas and advice in our collaboration blog series.

Collaboration | Qatalog blog

As organizations grow, communication is often one of the first things to fail. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/distributed-companies-need-centralized-knowledge/" rel="follow">Knowledge</a> gets increasingly fragmented. More and more time is spent searching for answers to the same questions. In fact, knowledge workers waste almost one hour every day digging through their storage for the info they need, <a href="https://language.work/research/workgeist/">according to our research with Cornell University</a>.&nbsp;
This results in less time being spent on creative, rewarding, and productive work.
An effective knowledge management strategy is critical to addressing those problems. And the first step is creating a documentation culture that&rsquo;s embedded throughout your organization.&nbsp;
But what does that really mean? And how can you make it a reality?
<h2>What we mean by documentation</h2>
<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/company-culture-and-documentation-culture/" rel="follow">Documentation</a> is a critical part of knowledge management, but the term simply refers to a way of storing knowledge.
It&rsquo;s material we use to record, describe, explain, or instruct. Its focus could be a policy or procedure, a system, or an object. And it could take the form of digital material, paperwork, or even audio recordings.&nbsp;
But documentation can&rsquo;t exist or be useful without people. It needs people who understand and value it. Teams who will create, disseminate, use, and update it.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s why a documentation culture is so important. It&rsquo;s what turns documentation from an administrative overhead into a living, breathing part of the organization. And it&rsquo;s what creates and sustains its value to individuals and the whole workforce.
<h2>Why documentation matters</h2>
Knowing how to find key knowledge is important in any organization. But if your business is growing fast, and/or <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/building-blocks-of-remote-teamwork/" rel="follow">your team is remote or distributed</a>, it&rsquo;s even more vital.
For example, relying on help from a colleague at a critical moment (via Slack or Teams) isn&rsquo;t without consequences: it interrupts the person you&rsquo;re asking, it slows everyone down, and it doesn&rsquo;t solve the problem for the next person who needs an answer to the same question.
And without a full picture of what&rsquo;s being worked on throughout the organization, it&rsquo;s all too easy for work to be duplicated and collaboration opportunities to be missed.
In fact, <a href="https://language.work/research/workgeist/">our research with Cornell University</a> shows that&rsquo;s exactly what&rsquo;s happening:&nbsp;
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">61% of professionals in distributed teams say it can be hard to figure out what their colleagues are working on.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">44% say siloed digital tools make it hard to spot if work is being duplicated.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">62% report missing opportunities to collaborate and achieve better results.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Addressing those issues in dispersed and flexible teams can bring huge rewards. Another <a href="https://language.work/research/killing-time-at-work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">study we worked on with GitLab</a> found that 81% of knowledge workers believe they are more productive and create higher quality output when they have more flexibility over when they work.
Related reading: <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-knowledge-management/" rel="follow">What is knowledge management and why does it matter?</a>
And for companies that want to attract and retain the brightest and the best, facilitating flexible working is non-negotiable. The same study found that <a href="https://language.work/research/killing-time-at-work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">66% of knowledge workers</a> would resign from a job if their flexibility to choose their hours was limited.
How a documentation culture adds value
An effective documentation culture is about more than simply creating lots of documents. It means everyone is clear about how documents are created, where they&rsquo;re stored, and how they&rsquo;re accessed and updated. And it gives everyone ownership of those processes.
The result is both simple and transformative: people are able to find the information they need, when they need it.
For remote or distributed teams, or rapidly growing businesses, that brings a multitude of benefits:
<ul>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It helps organizations scale faster, avoiding bottlenecks where essential knowledge is confined to a few key individuals.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It supports better decision making by democratizing access to up-to-date, accurate information.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It avoids mistakes by providing authoritative, quality-assured guidance.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It brings new joiners up to speed faster, empowering them to find answers to questions as they arise.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It facilitates flexible working by providing information whenever and wherever it&rsquo;s needed.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/SkhzLQnyQyGw5STkX3k0" alt="undefined" width="661" height="446" />
<h2>How to create a documentation culture</h2>
Creating a whole new culture can seem like a daunting task. But put in place these key building blocks, and you&rsquo;ll create the momentum for real change.
<h3>1. Lead from the front</h3>
Communicate clear, consistent messages from the very top of the organization. Explain why documentation is important, and be clear that it&rsquo;s a shared endeavor. Create and capitalize on opportunities to reinforce that message. This will help you build the culture.&nbsp;
<h3>2. Share ownership</h3>
Give individuals direct responsibility for documenting information in relevant business areas. Be clear about what you expect, and empower them to share new ideas.
<h3>3. Set clear guidelines &mdash; and hold people to account</h3>
Be clear about what&rsquo;s expected. That means being explicit about how, where, and when you want information to be documented. Check what people are doing. Reward them when things are going well. And if they&rsquo;re not, let them know what needs to change and why.
<h3>4. Be pragmatic</h3>
A fully-internalized documentation culture doesn&rsquo;t happen overnight. So start with the most important aspects of your work to get the ball rolling. For example, FAQs for key cross-organizational processes &mdash; like onboarding or ordering equipment. Build up from there, stay consistent, and take the long-term view instead of rushing big changes through.&nbsp;
<h3>5. Make it easy with the right tools</h3>
Invest in <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-company-wiki-notion-confluence/" rel="follow">the right documentation tools</a> to make your processes simple. Documentation software that&rsquo;s easy for users to get to grips with is more likely to be used, and more likely to help foster a sustainable documentation culture in your company.&nbsp;
With Qatalog, the documentation process is effortless because it&rsquo;s where work is coordinated, decisions are made, and processes are created. That means there&rsquo;s no need to create separate records. And because it works seamlessly with your other tools, you can find documents wherever they&rsquo;re stored.&nbsp;
Book a call with our Customer Team to learn more about how Qatalog could help you implement a documentation culture in your organization, or sign up here for a<a href="https://qatalog.com/pricing/"> free trial</a>.

Effective knowledge management starts with a documentation culture. But how do you create that in your organization? We share key tips for success.

What is documentation culture?

What is a documentation culture? (And how to create one)

Over the past two years, I&rsquo;ve spoken to more than 500 operations leaders in tech, from big tech giants to high-growth startups, in all sorts of different verticals. Despite this, they all have one thing in common; they are still trying to figure out remote work.&nbsp;
More than two years after the entire industry started working from home, it&rsquo;s still proving a challenge. That got me thinking. . . why is it so hard, and how do we get it right?
<h3>Too many tools&nbsp;</h3>
First, some context. The tech industry has evolved unbelievably fast in the past two decades. We&rsquo;ve built new technology for almost everything and incorporated it into how we work. We&rsquo;ve acquired deep, specialized knowledge, created new, better ways of doing things, and new teams and functions to do them. That should have supercharged our productivity, but it came at the expense of simplicity. Now, with all this new complexity, we&rsquo;ve lost the shared context among teams, there are silos everywhere, and it&rsquo;s become harder and harder to actually get work done.
Let&rsquo;s look at a modern software company. There are typically more than 10 teams involved in the development process. Front-end developers, back-end developers, devops, reliability engineers, data scientists, growth engineers, designers, product managers, project managers, and that&rsquo;s only product. If everyone isn&rsquo;t aligned, it breaks.
Yet alignment has become harder because each team has a different set of tools and a unique way of working. Engineering might document tasks in JIRA and follow agile methodology, while the Design team uses Asana, Figma, and a design thinking approach. Product Managers use another shiny new thing. Sales and support, another still. Everyone ends up working in their own little silos, speaking their own languages.
Meanwhile, work across teams still needs to be done. So, we fall back on one of the three things teams still have in common: Email, Slack, and Zoom.&nbsp;
<h3>The unholy trinity</h3>
Email, Slack, and Zoom have become the de-facto coordination layer within a company. We send hundreds of emails and spend hours on calls, just telling people what we&rsquo;re doing, translating it from one tool&rsquo;s language into another.&nbsp;
Company announcement? Email. Project update? Zoom. Looking for a doc? Slack. Who&rsquo;s working on what? The dreaded &ldquo;@here.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s pure brute force. Scale this process up to 5,000 people and it falls apart completely.
But it&rsquo;s not realistic to expect Email, Slack, or Zoom to be the foundational coordination layer of your business. These tools don&rsquo;t have enough structure. They weren&rsquo;t built for it. We default to them because they&rsquo;re the one thing everyone still has in common. A lot like a tourist grunting and gesticulating to get by in a foreign country where they don&rsquo;t speak the language. But we can&rsquo;t operate this way at scale.
Cornell University&rsquo;s Idea Lab partnered with Qatalog to investigate this idea. According to the <a href="https://language.work/study/" rel="follow">research</a>:
<ul>
<li>69% of people report that finding the information to do their job is time-consuming</li>
<li>59 minutes each day are spent finding information trapped in different applications</li>
<li>48% said they had made mistakes because they can't keep track of information stored across online tools and apps</li>
</ul>
<h3>Technology has failed</h3>
This explosion in specialized tooling started as a way to enhance productivity and improve collaboration. Now, it&rsquo;s wasting our time, driving us apart, and causing mistakes. It has failed. We&rsquo;ve lost our shared context and we&rsquo;re forced to operate at our company&rsquo;s lowest common denominator: Slack, Email, and Zoom. We spend hours in these systems each week, translating our work from one language to another. It has become unsustainable. According to Asana&rsquo;s Anatomy of Work Index, it now consumes over 60% of working time. That&rsquo;s not just a problem, it&rsquo;s a fatal flaw in the way we&rsquo;re working today.
<h3>Anarchy or tyranny?</h3>
In my experience, once companies identify the issue, they go down one of two paths:
1) Total anarchy - &ldquo;Let everyone use whatever tool, system, or methodology they want. We&rsquo;ll deal with it.&rdquo;
As the company grows, teams will get disconnected from each other and any work happening outside their own bubble. Next thing you know you regress to brute force processes.
2) Tyranny - &ldquo;Everyone has to use the same tool stack and they have to operate in the same, standardized way. I don&rsquo;t care if people don&rsquo;t like it, they&rsquo;ll do it.&rdquo;&nbsp;
In this scenario, the team gets slowed down by process, stifled by the one-size-fits-all approach, and ends up stuck with outdated tools.
<h3>A common language</h3>
Thankfully, it doesn&rsquo;t have to be a choice between the two. Instead, we can give back to ourselves what the great unbundling took away. We need to rebuild our shared context and introduce a common language and shared structure to organize the work of myriad diverse teams. Something designed for how work happens today, not just messages and calls, and not a poor imitation of the office. A <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow">new way of work</a> that drives unity through visibility and connection.

Are we using too many tools at work? Qatalog research suggests we are, and it's become a barrier to collaboration and communication.

The unholy trinity of work tools

The tools designed to boost productivity and collaboration are driving us apart. Learn how to build a common language and create a new way of work.

When collaboration tools become barriers to collaboration

The Qatalog team is an inherently curious bunch &mdash; we&rsquo;re always eager to find out more about <a href="https://language.work/study/">how people are working right now</a>, and how they would like to do so in the future. Most recently, to satiate some of this curiosity, we ran a survey across 200 senior and executive-level knowledge workers in consulting, marketing, media, PR, and advertising firms to find out exactly how their client-facing teams are making their work, work.&nbsp;
As over three-quarters of our respondents ticked the &lsquo;hybrid&rsquo; or &lsquo;remote&rsquo; work box, we were eager to get insight into the cutting-edge client management, task management, and project management solutions these execs carried in their arsenal.&nbsp;
We were in for a surprise.&nbsp;
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/fxBG0CX7SEiHDSyExVen" alt="undefined" width="801" height="394" />
When we asked our respondents about their go-to tools, we found that industry-leading SaaS apps were sparingly used. Digital workplace solutions, made for the sort of seamless remote and hybrid collaboration that our participants could benefit from, were only used by 21% of managers. Instead, 92% of respondents admitted to keeping one eye on their inboxes throughout the day, while 75% had the other on legacy Microsoft office applications.
That&rsquo;s how we learned client project planning was stuck in the past. The good news? A <a href="https://qatalog.com/work-hub/">Work Hub</a> can bring it into the future.&nbsp;
When we asked our respondents how they would like to improve their current work tools, 35% said more features and capabilities, and 31% wanted an easier way to share the work piled within them externally. Within Qatalog, client <a href="https://qatalog.com/projects/">projects</a> are easily divided into phases, with visible <a href="https://qatalog.com/goals/">Goals</a> tied to them. Tasks and sub-tasks can be assigned to team members, or whoever else needs to be pulled in as a collaborator for cross-functional initiatives. Routine processes are streamlined into fully customizable <a href="https://qatalog.com/workflows/">Workflows</a> and resources across your other tools can be uploaded to answer every how, what, why, or who.
And to keep the &ldquo;hey can I get an update&rdquo; or the &ldquo;just wanted to check on the status&rdquo; type requests and interruptions from clients at bay, projects can be shared externally.&nbsp;
When we probed further, asking if there were any meetings that our respondents wanted to reduce their time in, 71% named internal meetings, such as daily stand-ups, internal progress updates, and internal project planning as their main time sink. With a shared Work Hub, these <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/too-many-meetings/">routine sync meetings</a> can also be left in the past. Qatalog enables visible, traceable, asynchronous, and context-first team communication &mdash; freeing up calendar whitespace and keeping critical conversations and knowledge out of the black hole of folders, subfolders, or the archived mailboxes of ex-colleagues. Threads open up visible project decisions, Posts are used for consolidated updates and Pages allow you to create rich docs such as project charters.&nbsp;
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/33TSPf48S1eCk1H7M89t" alt="undefined" width="799" height="394" />
While a Work Hub provides structure and visibility, getting collaboration right starts with onboarding. If your processes for this aren&rsquo;t in place, neither your new joiners nor your new clients have a chance of getting off on the right foot. A central hub provides a complete and transparent onboarding experience for both. With Qatalog new joiners can explore how teams intersect, priority initiatives, company-wide processes, and get status updates on client projects.
Then once your people are up to speed, you can move that momentum over to your clients. Externally shareable Workflows allow you to collect all the information you need to onboard clients in a structured way &mdash; customizable steps include forms, checklists, and approval requests, and can even be automated with connected apps. A well-planned, repeatable onboarding process means no more back and forth, no information bottlenecks, and compliance is never an afterthought.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s no secret that client or customer-facing roles can be challenging, especially given the volume of initiatives and dependencies on multiple teams to deliver a project. But it doesn&rsquo;t have to be this way. Email is cluttered and reliance on legacy software creates silos &mdash; the future is structured and centralized. Consistent ways to document initiatives, streamlined processes, clear visibility into what other teams and departments are working on, and externally shared project updates are all a signup away&hellip; whenever you're ready.

Research shows collaboration tools are scarcely used by client-facing teams. Read to find out why that's a mistake and how a Work Hub can help.

Survey shows project collaboration is stuck in the past | Qatalog

We share some of our survey results on how client-facing teams are collaborating currently and explain ways a modern-day Work Hub can help them do it better.

Say what now? You still use email to collaborate?

In February of 2022, the Qatalog team ran a survey with more than 700 knowledge workers in the UK and the US, to find out how much time was spent in online meetings, what was achieved through them, and most importantly, how they felt about it all.&nbsp;
The rise of hybrid and remote work arrangements brought an influx of virtual meetings, some necessary, others often deemed a waste of time. The pandemic fuelled &ldquo;new&rdquo; ways of working, but two years later, just how much time are we still talking (or muting) away?
42% of respondents said they spend between 25-50% of their workday in online meetings while 15% said it was more than half their day. This can make the &ldquo;what did I actually get done today?&rdquo; question a painful one to answer.&nbsp;
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/68Ak6ARUipFIgSe5ZvaA" alt="undefined" width="690" height="340" style="font-family: sans-serif;" />
Read about further challenges that our <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/new-way-of-work/" style="background-color: #eccafa;">new ways of working</a> have introduced and how to overcome them.
When asked what the respondents' involvement was in these meetings we found that 32% of people are active participants in at least half of their meetings. 35% of respondents are active in 25-50% of their meetings, leaving a third of respondents involved in less than a quarter of their meetings. This staggering ratio raises the question: for those not actively partaking in or driving the discussion, was it worth coloring-in valuable calendar whitespace?&nbsp;
When we probed respondents on how they felt about it all, we found that 17% were content with the share of their day spent in meetings. This leaves the majority, 83%, desiring change &mdash; 23% would like to greatly reduce their time spent in meetings in the future.&nbsp;
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/V7FHt9L7QGBhNpRoyOSa" alt="undefined" width="691" height="340" />
When we inquired what solutions they thought could drive this change and we heard an echo of cries for defaulting to <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/the-definitive-guide-to-async-communication/">asynchronous communication</a>. Over half of respondents agreed that a structured way to plan team initiatives and a consistent way to<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-share-updates-with-your-team/"> share updates and progress </a>across these would be most helpful. 
Queue the <a href="https://qatalog.com/work-hub/">Work Hub</a>.
<h2>How do we at Qatalog have fewer, better meetings?</h2>
<h3>1. Our first rule is no meetings for the sake of meetings.&nbsp;</h3>
We resort to meetings when and as they become necessary and for everything in between we use Threads. Unlike with email or other <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-team-instant-messaging-apps-slack-teams/">direct messaging systems</a>, in-depth discussions aren&rsquo;t logged at the user level, destined to be lost forever. Threads keep us aligned with all our critical conversations, and real-time updates to them appear in our personalized feed. Once resolved, these conversations don&rsquo;t disappear but stay within the Work Hub. Even newcomers can retrace steps and get context around how decisions were made.&nbsp;
With Posts, you can turn end-of-week or end-of-month meetings into an asynchronous status update. Posts keep our conversations visible and searchable company-wide. You can instantly see who has read the update and they can leave their feedback and questions within or just leave a well-deserved party popper emoji. Kudos can also be sent to the author for immediate recognition of their work.&nbsp;
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/ZiDGvOEqRnYb1r6sU1HK" alt="undefined" width="691" height="340" />
If your team requires more granular, daily status updates or stand-ups the Qatalog solution is to assign these as Workflows. Add three steps: what was accomplished yesterday, what will be accomplished today and what obstacles are blocking progress, and send it out to your team.&nbsp;
<h3>2. When we do hold meetings, we make them more effective.</h3>
Within Qatalog Projects you can ask for input from team members around discussion topics and then make these visible throughout the meeting so there&rsquo;s no lack of focus. Set agenda items collectively using Tasks, ticking them off as you progress through the meeting, and adding actionable items for follow-ups. Tasks, as the word suggests, ensure nothing gets missed.&nbsp;
You can find out more about how to run effective meetings in our <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-run-effective-meetings/" style="background-color: #eccafa;">detailed guide</a>.&nbsp;
<h3>3. We set intentional ways of working.&nbsp;</h3>
27% of respondents believed having a top-down directive, with asynchronous methods embedded into company culture was key to reducing meetings. <a href="https://qatalog.com/about/">Our team</a> is spread across 15 different time zones, making it hard to tap a shoulder or ping someone for an immediate answer so planning ahead and documenting is critical to our work. Under Pages in the Company section, teams can set ground rules for why, when, and how they like to share updates as well as house all their documents and resources.&nbsp;
Our survey results also found that 70% of all meetings were internal; 68% of the time they strive to plan and discuss projects and 45% of the time are an effort to <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/work-hub-vs-performance-management-software/">track and align on goals</a>. With Qatalog everyone stores their work in the same place so projects and goals are accessible company-wide. We give each other time back by opening up dialogue and updating progress or results within our Work Hub rather than over a perfunctory call.&nbsp;
Find out more about the growing trend of documentation and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/company-culture-and-documentation-culture/" style="background-color: #eccafa;">how to make it part of your corporate culture.&nbsp;</a>
+1) We take action.
The desired clean-up of calendars will only come from a systematic change in how you collaborate with your team. A Work Hub can&rsquo;t replace all meetings, but it can provide a place to request and add the cross-functional input that allows for fewer and more productive ones to take place. Our meetings always have actionable items, just like this blog post: <a href="https://qatalog.com/signup/">Sign up to harness the power of a Work Hub.</a>

Qatalog's 2022 survery on meetings concludes that there’s still too many in our calendars. Read for how to have fewer, better meetings.

Too many meetings | Qatalog

We asked 700 knowledge workers about their online meeting habits and how they felt about them. The verdict: they want fewer and better.

Qatalog survey shows there's still too many meetings

Some design is so brilliant it feels effortless. But your favorite platforms don&rsquo;t retain a consistent look and feel throughout each page and feature without the input of a design team and the support of a design system.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;ve <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-design-system/" rel="follow">written about Qatalog&rsquo;s brand system before</a>, including why we made the choices we did when establishing our brand and product. But we haven&rsquo;t gotten the chance to talk about how we maintain the design system.&nbsp;
Getting familiar with brand and design systems at a new company takes time. Your system can also go through growing pains as well, which is what our team was experiencing.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;ve grown a lot as a designer in my nine months at Qatalog, and I think our design system revamp was the most collaborative project I&rsquo;ve worked on thus far. It showed me how important it is to create a design system that excites and delights, but also how it needs to remain consistent through collective organization.&nbsp;
<h2>What is a design system?</h2>
A design system is a set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns (N/N group).&nbsp;
If a design team is the brain, your design system is the backbone. It gives structure to the rest of your body of work but also provides limitations to what you can and cannot do.&nbsp;
In order to build a kick-ass product, you need to do your homework. And design systems end up feeling like that: a list of endless tasks and chores that altogether make a great, scalable system. It will not only make your product very cohesive in terms of functionality, visuals, and usability patterns but will also make your teams&rsquo; work more efficient.
If your brand is evolving, your brand system needs to adapt as well. Your design system should mirror the growth in your company, which is why it&rsquo;s important to revisit it once and a while.&nbsp;
<h3>Breathing new life into our design system</h3>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/Y1nGemZdQmWtB1vFrcPw" alt="Qatalog work hub elements" width="689" height="339" />
Now that I&rsquo;m nine months into my tenure at Qatalog, I&rsquo;m more aware of the reasoning behind the decisions that were made to get it to where it is now. Once I understood the work and its context, I could help the team ideate improvements to the design system.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Qatalog&rsquo;s brand system needed a revamp. We didn&rsquo;t need an overhaul of the months of work we&rsquo;d done previously, we just needed to clean up bits and pieces and perfect some of the areas we didn&rsquo;t have time for originally.&nbsp;
<h3>How we did it</h3>
Ceremonies. That&rsquo;s how we are able to bring our team together since <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/building-blocks-of-remote-teamwork/" rel="follow noopener">we all work remotely.&nbsp;</a>
Our design team is made up of diverse individuals. We have talented designers from different countries and backgrounds, and through ceremonies, we remain connected as team members and individuals contributing to a larger picture.&nbsp;
Design work is inherently collaborative. For our team, coming together every day to showcase what we&rsquo;re working on is how we collaborate. That&rsquo;s how we started organizing our design system revamp.
<h3>Design challenges</h3>
Working on a design system in addition to the other projects is a lot to handle. Our company is very design-focused, so we work cross-functionally with a lot of different teams. Actually, we work cross-functionally with every team.&nbsp;
So when it came to our daily design sessions, we&rsquo;d discuss current designs for our projects then move into system work.&nbsp;
For us, it was important to not delete anything in our Figma files so we wouldn&rsquo;t lose formatting. But we needed to be clever on how we would introduce this new version of the library to our workflow.&nbsp;
Once we spent a few hours refining existing components and creating new ones, it was very important to migrate everything. And that part we did all together, synchronized &mdash; starting by copying components and pasting them in a new, organized file.&nbsp;
It was tedious work, but going through it one piece at a time made it easier to accomplish. Plus, we could see the struggles our colleagues went through when trying to solve some issues along the way, and we learned from each other.&nbsp;
Looking back, I think we had a lot of fun. This particular project kept us engaged and entertained. Made us a stronger team. And helped us create a more structured design workflow. Now that we understand the amount of work that goes into it, we value it a lot more. Now, I think of design systems as living organisms that need to be fed and taken care of in order to keep growing in a healthy, steady way.

Qatalog's design team is fully remote. Here's how we collaborated on revamping our design system.

How Qatalog’s design team builds a strong design system | Qatalog

A design system is a set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns (N/N group).

How Qatalog’s remote team builds a strong design system

Instant messaging apps or chat solutions replicate the casual flow of ideas that can happen in an office context while connecting team members across countries and time zones for more effective online collaboration.
However, research from <a href="https://language.work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Qat</a><a href="https://language.work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">alog and Cornell University</a> shows that instant messaging apps, along with the other tools in your arsenal, actually contribute to disorganization. 54% of people say that apps can make it harder to find information, and cycling through different messaging, collaboration, and productivity tools wastes almost an hour per day.&nbsp;
Our reliance on messaging is a double-edged sword. Hybrid teams need an avenue for communication, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/productivity-tools-killing-productivity/" rel="follow">but a case could be made for instant messaging apps</a> not being the full-proof solution for modern work.&nbsp;
They do have their pros, though. Team messaging apps allow teams to:
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Separate team conversations into channels for different people and projects</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Start voice or video calls</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Share <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-documentation-apps/" rel="follow noopener">files and documents</a> to collaborate on them</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Communicate with your team across time zones and locations</li>
</ol>
Here are a number of instant messaging apps that we love:
<h2>The 5 best instant messaging apps for hybrid teams&nbsp;</h2>
<h3>1. Slack</h3>
<a href="https://slack.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Slack</a> has, without a doubt, defined the team chat space. It was developed for the user, and packs in delight through audio calls and custom emoji capabilities. For all that Slack has done for the instant messaging space, it makes sense that it&rsquo;s the frontrunner for everyone&rsquo;s favorite. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/productivity-tools-killing-productivity/" rel="follow noopener">However, there is a lot to be said about the impact Slack</a> has had on remote office communication &mdash; which we&rsquo;ll get into in a little bit.&nbsp;
<h3>2. Microsoft Teams</h3>
<a href="http://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Microsoft Teams</a> is part of the Office 365 offering and creates a chat-based workspace. Teams offers instant messaging, video, and audio calls. Teams, as well as the Office 365 offering, is optimized for larger teams who can have a dedicated IT staff to assist with the rollout.
<h3>3. Google Chat</h3>
Google offers a lot of work software, including a free instant messaging app. <a href="https://mail.google.com/chat/u/0/#chat/welcome" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Google Chat</a>, rebranded from Google Hangouts Chat, breaks conversations down into chat rooms, similar to Slack&rsquo;s channels. The ease of Google Chat comes with how easily it integrates with the rest of the Google suite.&nbsp;
<h3>4. Discord</h3>
 <a href="https://discordapp.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Discord</a> is similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams, but its interface was developed to be more gamer-friendly than business-friendly. Huge pros: most of the features that you&rsquo;d need are included in the free plan, and its audio features are an interesting benefit for async communication. Cons: its lack of threads could make file sharing a little chaotic.&nbsp;
<h3>5. HipChat</h3>
<a href="http://www.hipchat.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">HipChat</a> features the classic instant-work-messenger capabilities including 1-on-1 instant messaging, group chat rooms, and file sharing. They also include screen sharing and video conferencing.
<h2>What makes a great work messaging app?</h2>
Workplace communication is vital to creating a healthy, happy, cross-functional team. Especially in the era of modern work, communication has to be a frictionless experience across all sorts of barriers. Your instant messaging app shouldn&rsquo;t be one.&nbsp;
A great instant messaging solution for hybrid teams:
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Enables organized communication and collaboration. Team instant messaging apps should enable communication, that&rsquo;s a given. The important part here is <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener">organized communication and collaboration.</a> It&rsquo;s one thing to shout into a void of singular updates that aren&rsquo;t attached to the context of work, but collaborating requires both organization and context.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Offers a search feature. With instant messaging comes the ability to chat about things unrelated to work. So finding that design file you sent a co-worker on Friday afternoon might not be the easiest thing to scroll for on Wednesday morning. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workplace-search-tools-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener">Being able to search for files and messages</a> based on keywords, channels, or who the message was sent to is a necessity for work IMing.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Provides a user-friendly interface that the whole team actively uses. According to our research with Cornell University, <a href="https://language.work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">58% of people report</a> that not all departments use the same online apps. Obviously, this leads to silos and creates organizational roadblocks. Instant messaging should be not only accessible to everyone in your company but utilized by every team.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<h2>The three main challenges of team messaging apps</h2>
Of course, the things that should make a team chat app great are expectations, not reality, and there are a lot of things that can become overwhelming when you&rsquo;re expecting an instant response from your coworkers throughout their 9-5 workday.&nbsp;
<h3>1. Information overload</h3>
With the endless number of conversations taking place on your team messaging app, the tool can start to look increasingly like the mythical Hydra &mdash; sprouting new heads (or threads) the more you try to get it under control.
As an individual team member, it becomes harder to know which information is relevant to you, so you might end up missing a crucial project update.&nbsp;
Or, if there are too many messages, team members might feel discouraged and decide not to read them at all. Once those little red notifications take over, it can be hard to get them to disappear.&nbsp;
<h3>2. Short information shelf-life</h3>
The ease and speed of team messaging might be a benefit, but it also has the side effect of devaluing the information that&rsquo;s shared.
Team members get used to messages being swept away in the thread, so information distributed in this way might lose significance. Fine for a quick emoji &mdash; less ideal for important weekly team updates.
<h3>3. Diversity of formats</h3>
In team messaging apps, information is shared in diverse formats &mdash; messages, voice calls, document links. When everyone has their own way of writing updates, setting meeting agendas, or naming links, it&rsquo;s <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/work-management-tool-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener">hard to navigate the complexity.</a>&nbsp;
Details of a project can be spread across multiple messages and/or calls, making it difficult to monitor progress.
<h2>A work hub is a vital addition to your team&rsquo;s instant chat</h2>
Instant messaging isn&rsquo;t sustainable as the sole vehicle for workplace communication. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-digital-workspace/" rel="follow noopener">Information overload</a> can be a huge added burden to employees trying to shuffle through the noise of the day-to-day.&nbsp;
Adopting a work hub in addition to your instant messaging tool helps adds context to the information constantly being sent back and forth. It also gives you a place to connect the work being done with your instant communication, resulting in cross-team collaboration you didn&rsquo;t have to dedicate time to sync on. Plus, it makes all your work inextricably linked.
<h3>Adopt longer, context-driven async updates with a work hub</h3>
A work hub breaks down silos by cascading updates and comms automatically to the right channels, for a feedback loop that doesn&rsquo;t require a pingback. By integrating a work hub with your instant messaging tool, you can send structured updates (complete with context, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/work-hub-vs-performance-management-software/" rel="follow noopener">goals</a>, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-company-wiki-notion-confluence/" rel="follow noopener">files</a>, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-project-management-asana-trello-jira/" rel="follow noopener">and the teams involved</a>) to the right messaging app channel.&nbsp;
Threads in <a href="https://qatalog.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Qatalog</a> allow everyone to comment on projects in an organized way. You can follow threads and stay aligned with all your critical conversations. Plus, with our smart feed, you get a personalized dashboard of important updates across posts, threads, projects, and goals.
The async messages of a work hub keep everyone in the loop of things without intrusive, focus-breaking noise and red badges &mdash; whether it&rsquo;s a project update, <a href="https://qatalog.com/templates/team-updates/" rel="follow">team weekly</a>, or personal news shared with the team.
And when adding a work hub to your existing tool stack, it takes the reliance on instant messaging down a notch. Now you don&rsquo;t have to panic about finding that one file that was sent in the chat before you started talking about the movie marathon you had this week.&nbsp;
<h3>Search for information, easier</h3>
On Slack and Teams, you can have one channel per topic, but when there are tons of messages on each channel, it&rsquo;s hard to retrieve the right one &mdash; especially if you don&rsquo;t have the right keyword or when search doesn&rsquo;t deliver as quickly.
Qatalog doesn&rsquo;t replace your synchronous messaging app but rather complements it. When you integrate your messaging app with Qatalog, you make every single message retrievable, through a powerful, custom-built, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-search-for-files-at-work/" rel="follow noopener">full-text search</a>. You add context to the messages being sent back and forth. And you cut through the noise.&nbsp;
<h3>Keep work together with a Slack integration</h3>
Sometimes in-depth project discussions end up happening in Slack, when they really should be visible to everyone. Keep track of decisions and feedback by easily adding a thread from Slack directly into Qatalog. Your content stays together and your team stays updated and informed.&nbsp;
<h2>Team instant messaging apps vs. work hub</h2>
There are remote teams that have ditched instant messaging apps entirely, citing addictive qualities, disorganization, and the inability to conduct in-depth conversations. Some have even argued (myself included) that reliance on instant messaging detracts from a true async-friendly working model. Because if your team has to be ready to respond to a message at all time, who is getting the deep work done?&nbsp;
Some teams still rely on instant messaging as their only form of direct communication. By now, you know that we think this is a mistake and it&rsquo;s keeping your company from advancing to modern work. Instant messaging might still feel like the future, but in reality, it sits with the rest of your legacy tools keeping you in the &ldquo;old way of working.&rdquo;
<a href="https://qatalog.com/work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">A work hub</a> isn&rsquo;t a replacement for instant messaging, it&rsquo;s an important addition that gives you context and enables you to connect with your team. The new way of working is communicative and people first, so stop being distracted by the endless notifications.&nbsp;

How is Qatalog different from team instant messaging and chat apps for teams like Slack or Microsoft Teams?

Work hub vs. Team instant messaging apps | Qatalog

A work hub is a vital addition to your team’s instant chat.

Team instant messaging apps vs. work hub

Cue the opening credits and intro music because the battle between remote and office work continues. Hybrid hasn&rsquo;t been the solve-all solution we were hoping for. And as workers remain scattered between offices, co-working spaces, homes, and coffee shops, our research reveals how distributed work is eroding trust and visibility for knowledge workers everywhere.&nbsp;
<h2>What are my colleagues up to and can I trust them?</h2>
<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workplace-trust-crisis-press-release/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Qatalog conducted a study of 2,000 knowledge workers</a> in the US and UK and found that when working remotely, two-thirds (66%) of survey respondents reported that they lack visibility of what their colleagues and leaders are working on. Less than a third (28%) of the workforce feel that their positive contributions at work are regularly recognized, and one in ten say that their positive contributions are ignored altogether.&nbsp;
The negative impacts of silos are easy to spot. For one, they inhibit sharing and collaborating across teams. With hybrid workplaces, any issues with visibility can make work very challenging.&nbsp;
And perhaps we just haven&rsquo;t discovered the right kind of infrastructure to support transparency in a hybrid org. After nearly two years of remote work, 40% say they still find it hard to manage work across distributed teams. About a third (34%) say their employer has either not invested, or has not adequately invested, in the tools and policies needed to support remote or flexible work.&nbsp;
Trust and visibility impact the workplace by allowing your employees and coworkers to collaborate effectively. It&rsquo;s hard to imagine a workplace without them, yet so many of us are operating in silos because we don&rsquo;t have the infrastructure to give us the visibility we need to better trust one another.&nbsp;
Visibility is critical for employees to trust each other. Otherwise, how do they know they can be relied upon and are working on the right things? Without it, you are left with a culture of suspicion and mistrust.&nbsp;
<h2>Who can I trust?&nbsp;</h2>
Mix that with a lack of trust, and you&rsquo;ve created a work environment that eliminates most of what keeps workers happy and productive.&nbsp;
The strongest argument for going back to the office is that having in-person relationships with your coworkers improves relationships. Trust gained through in-person interactions is highly valuable to the workplace because it gives you a well-rounded view of who they are and how they work. It&rsquo;s no wonder, then, that 63% of workers from our survey believe it's harder to build trust with their colleagues in a remote environment.
The world of work today is vastly different from just a few people in the office, which means we need to rethink how we build trust within our teams.&nbsp;
Yes, building remote relationships is harder. But the majority of knowledge workers (75%) want to remain working with flexibility. So there have to be ways of facilitating visibility and enhancing trust within a distributed workplace that works for everybody. And if this is going to be the new norm, we can&rsquo;t always rely on in-person interactions to inspire team collaboration.
Speaking of everybody, it&rsquo;s also worth commenting on the gap between executives and non-executives in the return-to-office debate. We found that 37% say a full-time return to the office is in the interests of their bosses, but only 2% say it&rsquo;s in their own interests. 37% say a return to the office is in nobody&rsquo;s best interest.
So now we&rsquo;ve presented the problem: knowledge workers are lacking visibility and trust in the workplace but want to remain flexible.&nbsp;
How can you solve this within your own company? If only we had a handy-dandy listicle with actionable ideas for you to implement. Oh wait, here it is!
<h2>Bring trust and visibility back into your hybrid workplace</h2>
<h3>1. Establish a culture of documentation</h3>
If you have a context problem, the first solution is <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/company-culture-and-documentation-culture/" rel="follow">documentation</a>. The second part to this is making sure everything you&rsquo;re documenting is well organized and accessible to your entire organization.&nbsp;
Documentation gives your teams context. That&rsquo;s the information you need to understand how your work fits into the bigger picture. Context is the reason why you initiated the project, how it relates to the team goals, who&rsquo;s working on it, and more.
The best part about documentation is that it&rsquo;s repeatable. Once you&rsquo;ve created a process for documenting your projects and goals, it makes it that much easier to recreate the same process for the next project.&nbsp;
If visibility issues are still happening within a culture of documentation, ask your employees where their frustrations with visibility stem from. Maybe your team is having a hard time accessing specific tools or documents due to permission settings. Maybe the answer is as simple as not knowing who to go to with questions, or not having <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-create-role-clarity-within-your-hybrid-team/">clear role clarity</a> to enforce team structure and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/redistribution-of-credit/">recognition gaps.</a>&nbsp;
<h3>2. Reset your technology</h3>
Let&rsquo;s revisit an earlier statistic.&nbsp;
About a third (34%) say their employer has either not invested, or has not adequately invested, in the tools and policies needed to support remote or flexible work.&nbsp;
This isn&rsquo;t to say that your company hasn&rsquo;t invested in tools. The average company uses <a href="https://www.blissfully.com/blog/saas-statistics/">137 unique Saas apps</a>, which is a 30% increase from 2018. The problem here is that none of these tools were specifically designed to allow for coordination across platforms and teams.&nbsp;
Resetting your technology doesn&rsquo;t mean doing away with your existing tools and moving to ones specifically designed for a hybrid workspace. Those tools won&rsquo;t work for you either unless you have the structure in place to utilize your tools in a way that benefits your entire team.&nbsp;
We like to think of work like an open book test. If your tools aren&rsquo;t allowing your team to go find the answers on their own, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/productivity-tools-killing-productivity/">you have an issue.</a>
Your virtual tools are just that &mdash; tools. Meaning that you need a place to keep them to minimize disorganization, like a tool box.&nbsp;
That <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/">tool box looks a lot like a connectivity layer</a> that allows you to coordinate team activity.&nbsp;&nbsp;
<h3>3. Make goals accessible to everyone.&nbsp;</h3>
Professional trust is more than the belief that a team member is reliable; it&rsquo;s a mutual confidence that is earned through a relationship of faith in individual expertise or potential ability being reinforced with consistently-fulfilled expectations.
To build a track record that earns trust, teams need a reliable management structure that confirms your team is working effectively even when you can't see them.&nbsp;
Carefully creating this structure with trust and autonomy in mind is also critical, because nobody likes to be micromanaged. That&rsquo;s why incorporating visible, accessible team and personal goals is so important to the success of your team. Not only will you be able to showcase an individual contributor&rsquo;s work, but you can easily track the progress of every team member.&nbsp;
Working context-first implies that trust and visibility are built into your day-to-day. By providing your team with context, you allow them to operate independently with everything they could need to be productive. Our work hub gives teams a simple way to coordinate work and add context.

Trust and visibility impact the workplace by allowing your employees and coworkers to collaborate effectively. You need both in hybrid model

Putting trust back into teamwork | Qatalog blog

Hybrid hasn’t been the solve-all solution we were hoping for.

Putting trust back into teamwork

Focus is about unlocking our creative potential. Deep work begins when we&rsquo;re immersed in something challenging. And it's often where we master our craft and produce work of real value, the stuff we&rsquo;re proud of that brings us back to the job.&nbsp;&nbsp;
But the typical workplace promotes context-switching and drains this healthy cognitive function.&nbsp;
Context switching happens when you move quickly from one task to the next, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/productivity-tools-killing-productivity/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">but it comes as an interruption</a>. This can be person-based, like a co-worker pinging you for an update they need right now, or app-based, where you have to switch from a <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-project-management-asana-trello-jira/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">project-management tool</a> to a goals spreadsheet in order to get all the information you need.&nbsp;
In a study run by <a href="https://language.work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Qatalog and Cornell University</a>, 45% of survey respondents said context switching makes them less productive, and 43% said it is very tiring to constantly switch between tools and communications channels.&nbsp;
Focus is needed for creativity. And focus looks different for everyone. For me, I like to have my headphones in, window open, and everything on do not disturb. That&rsquo;s when I can truly achieve that &ldquo;flow&rdquo; or deep work state.&nbsp;
At work, I&rsquo;ve been able to communicate this with my team. And as a company, we&rsquo;ve communicated a few working model pillars that enable everyone to find their focus &mdash; starting with flexibility.
<h2>Flexibility is needed for focus</h2>
When each team member is equipped for flexibility, they have the freedom to pursue their focus.&nbsp;
Deep work has become less and less easy to find in the maze of tasks and apps we&rsquo;ve adopted. Because I have the freedom to arrange my workload and schedule in a way that prioritizes my deep work, I don&rsquo;t have to restrict my creativity. And as a designer, that is absolutely necessary to get my job done well.&nbsp;
Focus can be hard to measure. You understand when it cannot be achieved, which looks like an interruption and feels like jogging up a never-ending hill, but it can be hard to showcase the value of focus until a project reaches completion.&nbsp;
However, flexibility is easily measured through <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/autonomy-and-employee-engagement/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">team autonomy</a>. In getting to know your team, you&rsquo;ll very quickly understand if you are trusted enough to get your work done autonomously or not.&nbsp;
Granted, to have healthy autonomy you need enough intrinsic motivation to take initiative on your own. You need resources that help you independently analyze, evaluate, and strategize. You must adopt self-management methods that enable you to adapt to changes and manage their impacts. All of this is made easier <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">with a work hub.</a>&nbsp;
<h2>Operate autonomously with trust</h2>
When I was starting out in this industry as a designer at Wise, I had a team and managers that fully encouraged me to build my design skills, but they also taught me how to manage my time in a corporate setting and the importance of saying no.
Becoming a designer for a fast-moving startup can be quite overwhelming. There are a lot of different projects that you&rsquo;re pulled into at once, and everyone wants their deliverables to be ready yesterday. Plus, when you&rsquo;re building a brand, you need to set aside creative time to make sure your brand system stays aligned with company direction and your creatives are growing at the same pace you are. 
At <a href="https://wise.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Wise </a>(previously TransferWise), the work of the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/wisedesign/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">design team</a> was very autonomous. Everyone had the opportunity to collaborate but each project had specific owners who would manage the timeline of deliverables, stakeholders, and establish what success looked like. Wise being a 2000+ person company meant the feedback culture was constant and intense. So I had to learn how to justify my designs and rationale quickly, in order to not be compromising on the quality of the design.&nbsp;
What helped me thrive in this environment was the trust that was given to us on day one. It actually surprised me at first how much ownership I was given, but it allowed me to feel valued and empowered. If you were part of the team, it was understood that you knew how to do good work, and having that sort of trust as a creative is necessary to taking the design risks needed to evolve a growing brand.
When trust is added to the equation, employees have the freedom to speak up, take risks, and fail. And how else is a company supposed to grow?&nbsp;
We talk a lot about trust at Qatalog as well. If you have a fully distributed team working across time zones, you need to trust that your team is supporting you and the <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-design-system/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">work you&rsquo;re doing.</a> Luckily, I collaborate with a group of people <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/why-we-built-qatalog/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">who care about our product and our mission </a>&mdash; but we also have a <a href="https://qatalog.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">work hub</a> to keep everything transparent and accessible.&nbsp;
<h2>Coordinate and cooperate with a work hub</h2>
Not all technology promotes context switching. Yes, software in the typical workplace causes disorganization, interruption, and frustration &mdash; which all cause a drag on our creativity.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;ve worked with a lot of different apps, project management tools, design files, project briefs, random documents, Google sheets&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;everything under the sun. And as a designer, I find myself uniquely positioned so that I assist every team by working horizontally across them all, meaning I have to be familiar with all of their apps, tools, files, briefs...you get the idea.
Moments of creativity happen when different teams with different perspectives come together. But our disjointed work environment makes it harder for us to work on projects cohesively. A work hub becomes your digital office space that allows teams to share and coordinate work. It takes pressure off of individual employees by making accessibility and accountability the norm. And it leaves room for that perfect deep work time. You know the kind: where everything is going right, the sun is shining, and you haven&rsquo;t been pulled away from your focus.
Qatalog&rsquo;s work hub helps me manage information and the context that surrounds it. It helps keep my work accessible to other teams, and vice versa. That way I&rsquo;m not designing in a silo, or my designs aren&rsquo;t being implemented in a way they aren&rsquo;t supposed to. There are checks and balances built-in with a work hub in a way that allows everyone to coordinate effectively, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/building-blocks-of-remote-teamwork/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">without endless meetings or messages back and forth.</a>&nbsp;
Everything at work should be linked. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">And with a work hub</a>, everything can be.

Unlocking creativity in the workplace requires focus, trust, and a work hub that enables collaboration. Eliminate context switching and get that deep work done.

Tools that unlock creativity | Qatalog blog

Focus is about unlocking our creative potential. Deep work begins when we’re immersed in something challenging. And it's often where we master our craft and produce work of real value, the stuff we’re proud of that brings us back to the job.

Tools that unlock creativity

A couple of years into working remotely I realized the most often overlooked challenge remote teams had was poor <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-share-updates-with-your-team/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">knowledge management</a>. Our team&rsquo;s communication was scrappy, we never knew what a team member was working on unless we asked, and when it came time for project updates, there was a massive amount of information and docs to sort through.&nbsp;
After talking to other remote workers, it hit me: we weren&rsquo;t the only ones dealing with these hurdles.&nbsp;
All teams are built on top of <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/becoming-a-world-class-knowledge-worker/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">shareable information</a>. Most of the time, it's the access to that information that stops teams from aligning and building a replicable documentation structure.&nbsp; Work, team cohesion, and client relationships all play a part in this. But most times, juggling everything can lead to teams feeling disjointed.
Building a remote team involves trust, structure, and accessibility. But each of those pillars should be introduced through the culture, tech stack, and elements that create your organization's foundation.
<h2>Remote teamwork requires more than just shifting to a virtual workspace</h2>
Most remote teamwork efforts were built on top of a single aspect: switching all operations to the virtual office. However, we&rsquo;re beginning to find the cracks in this hasty approach. If we don&rsquo;t specify how remote and hybrid teams need different processes, eventually we&rsquo;ll be stuck in the awkward teenager years of the hybrid/remote transition.&nbsp;
For example, management looks different for remote teams. And <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/07/remote-managers-are-having-trust-issues" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">many managers aren&rsquo;t prepared to lead remote employees long-term</a>. This isn&rsquo;t anyone&rsquo;s fault. Managers don&rsquo;t perfect remote leadership through osmosis, they need training and programming to help them through the transition.
Your regular office practices also won&rsquo;t work for the team members who come from different places and backgrounds. If your company has used the opportunity of remote to hire employees from different parts of the country, or even the world &mdash; you&rsquo;re tapping into new cultures, markets, and types of personalities.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;ve been doing remote for a while now. And still, we&rsquo;re getting so much of it wrong. Here are some concrete tips to build your remote teamwork that won&rsquo;t have your working model collapsing as soon as a problem arises.&nbsp;
<h2>Enhance teamwork with these 4 remote collaboration techniques</h2>
<h3>1. Establish a remote communication charter</h3>
We&rsquo;ve <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/the-definitive-guide-to-async-communication/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">gone over how companies like Doist and InVision</a> use communication charters that are in use as early as the onboarding stage. These charters provide vital guidelines for defining synchronous vs. async communication. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/company-culture-and-documentation-culture/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">You can document</a> your preferred communication methods and rules and later present them to new hires and existing team members alike.
Collaboration can&rsquo;t exist without communication. And for remote teams, having guidelines on when to send emails versus a Slack can help new hires get used to your organization&rsquo;s preferences (they&rsquo;re probably different from wherever that new hire came from).
The <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/building-a-digital-office-in-a-hybrid-world/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">remote communication charter</a> also goes beyond internal collaboration. It outlines how team members can interact on social media, what they can share, and how the organization as a whole communicates with the general public.
<h3>2. Set aside time for team building</h3>
Informal interactions, like asking about someone&rsquo;s day or grabbing lunch over a conference call, builds community. Remotely, it&rsquo;s hard to have these types of conversations without deliberate planning <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/keeping-virtual-teams-connected/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">so don&rsquo;t be afraid to schedule them</a>, or even set goals around talking to team members you are less likely to interact with day-to-day.&nbsp;
Team building plays a pivotal point in helping employees feel like they&rsquo;re a solid part of the team and keeping them with your company for years. After all, the key to building a strong foundation for remote teamwork and ensuring no knowledge is lost is to retain your people.
<h3>3. Adopt a work hub</h3>
Under a work hub, your team can work efficiently and effortlessly.&nbsp;
There are many things a work hub can do for your organization, including packaging your teams, documents, projects, and goals under one connected roof. By structuring your company&rsquo;s information in an accessible way, you can spend less time in meetings, giving internal updates, and updating those spreadsheets hidden away in Google Drive.&nbsp;
You can also:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Align team members on goals throughout the entire lifecycle</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Eliminate manual processes through <a href="https://qatalog.com/workflows/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">workflows</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Find files, messages, and even code snippets across any app you&rsquo;re using</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Connect with the right people by immediately finding out who&rsquo;s in charge of a task and even getting to know more about their talents and hobbies</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Put an end to context switching and keep all documentation under a single dashboard</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Catch up on work after a long break with tagged updates and milestones</li>
</ul>
<h3>4. Prioritize accountability&nbsp;</h3>
No remote worker should ever be left behind. This is a core value all remote teams should strive to achieve on two levels.&nbsp;
First, you&rsquo;re looking to make every person feel welcomed on the team. Isolation and loneliness are common occurrences that can lead to <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/limited-visibility-at-work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">people feeling less visible</a> and straying away from your culture as a whole.
From a work perspective, assign clear roles to every employee so they&rsquo;ll take ownership of their KPIs. Team members should also have full control over the projects they&rsquo;re in charge of so they&rsquo;ll feel valued and get a chance to grow professionally. When accountability and visibility of work streams are prioritized, a remote worker is less likely to feel siloed or disconnected from the team.&nbsp;
<h2>The best remote collaboration technique is ultimately still communication</h2>
Effective communication remains the liaison between remote teams. And there&rsquo;s always some extra room for improvements when it comes to how you store information and how easy it is for the team to access it.
A work hub is <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">your single source of truth</a> so you can manage all projects while hitting deadlines without the manual effort. However, remember that remote teamwork should be built to become an integrated part of your culture. This way, new employees can always adapt without the hassle of a disjointed workplace &mdash; be it a remote or hybrid one.

Techniques that can take the information overload off your team and ensure remote teamwork efficiency in the long run.

4 building blocks of remote teamwork | Qatalog blog

The 4 building blocks of remote teamwork

The world of work is dynamic and ever-changing. It's never stagnant, and every company has its own environment and ways of adapting to new employee needs, workplace trends, and shifting working models.
Staying up to date on new developments is critical to understanding where our work is heading. We&rsquo;ve heard a lot about hybrid, remote, and flexible working models. We&rsquo;ve seen a lot of news about changing technologies, more transparency, and going-back-to-work trends because every new change impacts what we do day-to-day and how we interact with the people around us.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;ve compiled a list of remote and hybrid work statistics in 2021 that we&rsquo;ve returned to repeatedly, so we have decided to keep it relevant by adding fresh data from 2022. We hope these stats allow you to connect with your colleagues, leaders, and customers as we navigate shifting sentiments about staying at home, going to the office, flexible working, or adopting new tools.&nbsp;&nbsp;
<h2>Remote and hybrid work statistics 2022</h2>
<ul>
<li>65% of workers said they have more flexibility to decide when they work compared to before the pandemic (<a href="https://language.work/research/killing-time-at-work/?utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=qatalog&amp;utm_campaign=killing-time&amp;utm_content=statsblog" rel="follow">Qatalog, GitLab</a>)&nbsp;</li>
<li>An all-time high of 79% said they were more productive working remotely. (<a href="https://morningconsult.com/return-to-work/" rel="follow noopener">Morning Consult</a>)</li>
<li>A quarter of all professional jobs in North America will be remote by the end of this year (<a href="https://learn.gitlab.com/allremote/remote-playbook" rel="follow">GitLab</a>)</li>
<li>52% of respondents would like an asynchronous-first working policy moving forward (<a href="https://buffer.com/state-of-remote-work/2022" rel="follow">Buffer</a>)</li>
<li>However, only 38% said their companies have async-first ways of working in place&nbsp;(<a href="https://buffer.com/state-of-remote-work/2022" rel="follow">Buffer</a>)</li>
<li>43% of leaders say relationship-building is the greatest challenge in hybrid and remote work. (<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/great-expectations-making-hybrid-work-work" rel="follow">Microsoft)</a></li>
<li>88% of workers the flexibility of hybrid working has increased their job satisfaction. (<a href="https://www.ergotron.com/en-au/resources/resource-details/6302" rel="follow">Ergotron)</a></li>
<li>72% of companies are planning on permanently allowing some amount of remote work, compared with 46% last year. (<a href="https://buffer.com/state-of-remote-work/2022" rel="follow">Buffer</a>)</li>
<li>Remote jobs on LinkedIn attract 2.6 times more views and nearly 3 times more applicants compared to on-site roles (<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/great-reshuffle-2022-top-trends-watch-karin-kimbrough/" rel="follow">LinkedIn</a>)</li>
</ul>
<h2>Return to office statistics 2022</h2>
<ul>
<li>38% of hybrid employees say their biggest challenge is knowing when and why to come into the office (<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/great-expectations-making-hybrid-work-work" rel="follow">Microsoft)</a> </li>
<li>66% of workers said they would consider resigning if they were prevented from working flexible hours, and 43% indicated they would consider a lower-paid role if it gave them greater schedule flexibility (<a href="https://language.work/research/killing-time-at-work/?utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=qatalog&amp;utm_campaign=killing-time&amp;utm_content=statsblog" rel="follow">Qatalog, GitLab</a>)&nbsp;</li>
<li>As of February 2022, 34% said they would still be uncomfortable returning to the office (<a href="https://morningconsult.com/return-to-work/" rel="follow noopener">Morning Consult</a>)</li>
<li>51% of hybrid employees say they will consider a switch to remote this year...and even more remote employees (57%) say they&rsquo;ll consider a switch to hybrid&nbsp;<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/great-expectations-making-hybrid-work-work" rel="follow">(Microsoft)</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Employee experience statistics 2022</h2>
<ul>
<li>Beyond fair pay, employees are looking to get the following from their employers: positive culture (46%), mental health and wellbeing benefits (42%), a sense of purpose/meaning (40%), flexible work hours (38%), and more than the standard yearly vacation (36%) <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/great-expectations-making-hybrid-work-work" rel="follow">(Microsoft)</a></li>
<li>56% of hybrid workers report improvements to their mental health since making the change (<a href="https://www.ergotron.com/en-au/resources/resource-details/6302" rel="follow">Ergotron)</a></li>
<li>Full-time office workers report 1.5x (and worsening) work-related stress and anxiety, compared to remote workers (<a href="https://futureforum.com/pulse-survey/" rel="follow">Future Forum Pulse</a>)</li>
<li>However, due to new tech, 73% of people receive and reply to work notifications outside of working hours, eating into their leisure time and making it hard to switch off from work&nbsp;(<a href="https://language.work/research/killing-time-at-work/?utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=qatalog&amp;utm_campaign=killing-time&amp;utm_content=statsblog" rel="follow">Qatalog, Gitlab</a>)</li>
<li>54% of asynchronous workers feel pressure to show they are online at certain times of the day, rather than being encouraged to focus on their output (<a href="https://language.work/research/killing-time-at-work/?utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=qatalog&amp;utm_campaign=killing-time&amp;utm_content=statsblog" rel="follow">Qatalog, GitLab</a>)&nbsp;</li>
<li>In order to avoid suspicion from colleagues and bosses that they are not working hard enough, remote and hybrid asynchronous workers are spending 67 extra minutes online every day, the equivalent of more than 5.5 hours each week (<a href="https://language.work/research/killing-time-at-work/?utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=qatalog&amp;utm_campaign=killing-time&amp;utm_content=statsblog" rel="follow">Qatalog, GitLab</a>)&nbsp;</li>
<li>Knowledge workers with little to no ability to set their own work hours are 2.6x as likely to look for a new job in the coming year, compared to those with schedule flexibility (<a href="https://futureforum.com/pulse-survey/" rel="follow">Future Forum Pulse</a>)&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<h2>Remote work statistics 2021</h2>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">30% said they were more productive and engaged working from home (<a href="https://bfi.uchicago.edu/key-economic-facts-about-covid-19/">University of Chicago</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">16% of companies globally are fully remote (<a href="https://resources.owllabs.com/state-of-remote-work">Owl Labs</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">73% of employees want flexible remote work options to stay (<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work">Microsoft</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">57% of British workers want to be able to work from home (<a href="https://yougov.co.uk/topics/economy/articles-reports/2021/04/13/one-five-want-work-home-full-time-after-pandemic">YouGov</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Women with child-care needs are 32% less likely to leave their job if they can work remotely (<a href="https://www.catalyst.org/reports/remote-work-burnout-productivity/">Catalyst</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">As of February 2021, 6.9% of Indeed job postings cited remote work as an option, compared with 2.9% in January 2020 (<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/remote-work-listings-in-u-s-doubled-in-year-job-site-finds">Indeed</a>)</li>
</ul>
<h2>Hybrid work statistics 2021</h2>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/VxPvL5XRQOX5UxyFEtQ0" alt="undefined" />
<ul>
<li>75% of executive leaders believe they are already operating within a culture of flexibility, yet only 57% of employees say that their organizational culture embraces flexible work (<a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/what-is-work-really-like-today-leaders-and-employees-see-things-differently/">Gartner</a>)</li>
<li>66% of leaders say their company is considering redesigning office space for hybrid work (<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work">Microsoft</a>)</li>
<li>71% of managers were surprised by remote workers&rsquo; productivity (<a href="https://hoxby.com/blog/covid-19-remote-working-survey-results">Hoxby</a>)</li>
<li>51% of employers support the hybrid work model, while only 5% mention fully remote work as a possibility (<a href="https://www.apollotechnical.com/hybrid-working-statistics/">Remote work &amp; compensation pulse survey</a>)</li>
<li>Hybrid work models are used by 63% of high-growth companies</li>
<li>A hybrid model that works for all generations may be a challenge: three in four Gen Zers (74%) want more opportunities to collaborate with colleagues face-to-face, a higher percentage than Gen Xers (66%) and Baby Boomers (68%).</li>
<li>83% of 9,326 workers surveyed say they prefer a hybrid model &mdash; in which they can work remotely at least 25% of the time (<a href="https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/consulting/future-work?c=acn_glb_talentandorganimediarelations_12163686&amp;n=mrl_0521">Accenture</a>)</li>
<li>After COVID-19 92% of people surveyed expected to work from home at least 1 day per week and 80% expected to work at least 3 days from home per week.</li>
<li>Around 42% of leaders believe hybrid working boosts employee wellbeing (<a href="https://resources.owllabs.com/state-of-hybrid-work/2021/europe">Owl Labs</a>)</li>
</ul>
<h2>Return-to-office statistics</h2>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">71% of executives agree leadership at their organization has expressed a preference for work conditions to return to their prepandemic model; only 50% of employees heard that same message (<a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/what-is-work-really-like-today-leaders-and-employees-see-things-differently/">Gartner)</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">66% of organizations are <a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/executives-split-over-timeline-of-return-to-normal/">delaying reopening</a> their offices due to new COVID-19 variants (<a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/08-31-2021-gartner-hr-poll-finds-two-thirds-of-organizations-are-delaying-workplace-reopening-due-to-new-covid-19-variants">Gartner</a>)</li>
</ul>
<h2>Employee experience statistics 2021</h2>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/kBXBYuhHSQi6qjoAVR64" alt="undefined" />
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Only 41% of employees agree that senior leadership acts in their best interest &mdash; compared to 69% of executives</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Only 47% of employees believe leadership takes their perspective into consideration when making decisions, compared to 75% of executives (<a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/what-is-work-really-like-today-leaders-and-employees-see-things-differently/">Gartner</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">20% of the global workers surveyed said their employer stopped caring about their work-life balance, which left 54% feeling overworked and 39% saying they were downright exhausted (<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work">Microsoft</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">55% of people in the workforce said they are likely to look for a new job in the next 12 months (<a href="https://www.bankrate.com/personal-finance/job-seekers-survey-august-2021/">Bankrate</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Over 97% of employers report they won&rsquo;t reduce pay for partially remote employees. However, 21% of employers would adjust their salaries with respect to an employee&rsquo;s contribution and geographical location (<a href="https://www.salary.com/">Salary.com)</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Workplace tech statistics 2021</h2>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Technology traps knowledge: employees are digging through cloud storage systems, scouring message channels, and cycling through tabs, wasting around 59 minutes per day&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Apps restrict access to knowledge: 54% of people say that applications can sometimes make it harder to find information and 58% of people report that they&rsquo;re not certain all departments use the same online apps</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">49% of people report concerns that important information will get lost and one in two are uncertain the information will reach the intended audience</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">43% of people report spending too much time switching between different online tools and applications, and 48% report making mistakes because they can't keep track of information stored across online tools and apps (<a href="https://language.work/study/">Language.work</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Only 66% of employees agree they have the technology they need to <a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/9-tips-for-managing-remote-employees/">effectively work remotely</a>, compared to 80% of executives (<a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/what-is-work-really-like-today-leaders-and-employees-see-things-differently/">Gartner</a>)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Only 38 percent of Europe&rsquo;s SMBs are planning to invest in new tech (<a href="https://resources.owllabs.com/state-of-hybrid-work/2021/europe">Owl Labs</a>)</li>
</ul>

22 remote and hybrid work statistics that you need to know looking back at 2021 and out into 2022.

Remote and hybrid work statistics 2021 - 2022 | Qatalog

22 remote and hybrid work statistics you need to know.

Remote and Hybrid Work Statistics 2021 and 2022

There is a place that good ideas go to die. It&rsquo;s on the last slide of a presentation.&nbsp;
This slide is usually titled something like &ldquo;Misc. Ideas.&rdquo; It includes a few random thoughts that were thrown in just in case the big ideas preceding it are met with a thumbs down.
The first time leadership sees out-of-the-box ideas should not be tucked away at the end of a presentation. They belong at the beginning. Ideas won&rsquo;t succeed in reaching the finish line if you don&rsquo;t take the right steps out of the starting gate.&nbsp;
<h2>It&rsquo;s a risky business</h2>
To think out-of-the-box means to explore creative and unusual ideas. The term is thought to have origins in the Nine Dots Puzzle. It was included in the 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles and management consultants later used it as a metaphor for the clich&eacute; phrase.
The puzzle was meant to encourage eliminating boundaries. But when we start thinking outside the lines of conventional thinking, there are bound to be risks involved. Consider these pros and cons when bringing ideas that push the envelope to your team:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">What impact will this idea have on the business&rsquo;s present and future?</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">How does it stack up versus the competition?</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">What does it mean for your own personal success?</li>
</ul>
<h2>Hope is not a strategy</h2>
No matter how unconventional the idea, it still needs to generally fit with an organization&rsquo;s overall objectives, budget, and audience.&nbsp;
This is why <a href="https://qatalog.com/templates/project-proposal/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">project briefs</a> are so important. A project brief gives you the chance to outline your strategy, dependencies, and deadlines early on.&nbsp;
For any new idea, context and background are crucial for building your justification on why it&rsquo;s worth time and budget spend. Even if your idea doesn&rsquo;t require capital to get off the ground, it will require some sort of attention and dependencies from across your team.&nbsp;
Everyone loves a good story, and storytelling can be a beneficial way to anchor a strategy for brand-new ideas. Start with gathering data. Facts and figures can make people&rsquo;s eyes glaze over, so pull key insights from the data and form them into a story.&nbsp;
Then take the &lsquo;&rsquo;ell me like I&rsquo;m five&rsquo; approach. Break down the strategy into very simple terms that are easy to comprehend. You don&rsquo;t want your stakeholders to get caught up in jargon or complicated wording.&nbsp;
<h2>The early bird is special</h2>
To get buy-in for your creative ideas you must play well with others. This means <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-share-updates-with-your-team/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">collaborating with stakeholders</a> early on in the process.
If you haven&rsquo;t yet identified the stakeholders for your <a href="https://qatalog.com/templates/project-charter/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">project idea</a>, you should get up to speed on what they are looking for and what questions they could possibly ask about your strategy.&nbsp;
Everyone likes having their opinion heard and is more willing to support an idea if they feel they have a voice in it. Be open to receiving feedback, even if it&rsquo;s not what you want to hear. Find the right balance between incorporating stakeholders&rsquo; opinions and not letting your original idea get blurred in the process.
<h2>Timing is everything</h2>
Now that you have a strategy formed, it is important to communicate a timeline of when the idea will come to fruition. We live in a world that expects instant results. That Amazon order can be delivered in a few hours. Any movie you want on demand. And every stakeholder wanting to see results generated ASAP.&nbsp;
Err on the cautious side when creating the timeline for your out-of-the-box idea. You want to be realistic and not overpromise and underdeliver. Break down the project scope, build in milestones for deliverables, and establish deadlines.
<h2>Leave a digital paper trail</h2>
Keeping <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/company-culture-and-documentation-culture/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">detailed documentation from the start</a> will help to mitigate risks and align expectations. Consider using a <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">work hub</a> to keep all your records in one place and encourage ongoing communication.&nbsp;
A work hub gives you a head start in the race to the finish line for your idea. You&rsquo;ll have crucial visibility into all your people, work, and tools. You can search across your files and messages to find exactly what you need at that moment.&nbsp;
The best part is that you&rsquo;ll now have a proven process to revisit again and again for all your future out-of-the-box ideas.

Getting team buy-in on your out-of-the-box ideas involves strategizing and collaborating with stakeholders from the very beginning.

Get support for your out-of-the-box ideas | Qatalog

How to make unconventional ideas come to fruition by strategizing and collaborating from the very beginning.

How to get support for your out-of-the-box ideas

If you've ever been OOO and missed an important meeting, hopefully, you received a recording of that call &mdash; or notes, at the very least. This way, you would have been able to catch up on the content of that meeting without being there in person.
This is a great example of utilizing async tools to catch up on work. But it's also a great example because it showcases that we have the tools at our disposal to make our meetings async, we just have to apply them.
Scheduling real-time meetings for remote teams can be tricky, which is one reason why many remote teams are converting to <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/the-definitive-guide-to-async-communication/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">asynchronous communication</a>. Asynchronous communication is any communication where there&rsquo;s a lag between when the message is sent, and when it&rsquo;s replied to.
Apply this concept to remote meetings, and you get discussions that don&rsquo;t take place in real-time. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-run-effective-meetings/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Async meetings by</a><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-run-effective-meetings/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">pass the small talk and schedule conflicts</a>, skipping right to addressing the meeting topic.
Seems like quite an easy concept, but for the majority of us who are used to having that instant feedback, it can be tough to switch gears. However, I've found that async updates in the form of audio or video recordings are massively helpful since I don't have to schedule my work time around meetings. Instead, I can start my day the way I like and end it by listening to feedback, updates, or calls I needed to catch up on.&nbsp;
<h2>Best practices for remote team meetings:</h2>
<h3>One-on-ones</h3>
To make one-on-ones async, you can talk through your agenda in a video recording, using technology like <a href="https://vimeo.com/" rel="follow">Vimeo</a> or <a href="https://www.loom.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Loom</a>. These videos are especially useful considering they can be revisited. Viewers don&rsquo;t have to worry about taking notes and remembering the details of the meeting, as they&rsquo;ll always have the video to look back on. Additionally, the person recording the video can show their screen, which can help clarify assignments or projects.
Understanding the makeup of your 1:1 will help to determine when they can be synchronous and when you can get away with adopting an async rhythm. For example, in my one-on-ones with a previous manager, we would dedicate our last 1:1 of every month to professional development and feedback. These were extremely helpful for my own growth at the company, but I like to receive written or documented feedback so that I can return to it later. If this meeting had been moved async, I would have much preferred the format and it would have been one less meeting to add to the day's schedule.&nbsp;
The majority of my one-on-ones have remained synchronous. For me, it's helpful to have bi-weekly sync checks in order to correspond in real-time and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. I've been using <a href="https://www.meetwithspot.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Spot</a> to chat with my clients while enjoying the outdoors, but of course Zoom, Slack, and regular calls work just as well.&nbsp;
<h3>Standups</h3>
My team's standups were async long before the word became part of everyone's vocabulary. We used Slack bots to automate questions for the team on Wednesday mornings. These questions helped to prompt what we spoke about in later meetings, but were a great way to bypass that check-in sync time that has the potential to become repetitive and unproductive. These questions looked like:&nbsp;
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">What did you do yesterday?&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">What will you do today?&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Any obstacles in your way?</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Anything else to bring up to the team?</li>
</ul>
With async meetings, it&rsquo;s always a good idea to provide a time frame during which you expect answers. For my team's standups, we always sent in our answers around mid-morning. Granted, this would look different for teams that occupy various time zones.&nbsp;
A real-time standup meeting involves getting everyone together to update on a specific project or general team happenings. I tend to think that standups are the most meetingy of the meetings, meaning I'm always grateful when they're moved to an async model because these are the chats that really could have been an email.&nbsp;
 Hopefully, if a synchronous standup meeting ends up on your calendar, it comes with an agenda or a discussion order that prompts participation and productivity. Some other tips for sync standups are:&nbsp;
<ul>
<li>Find the right cadence for these status updates. Odds are, you don't need a standup with your entire team every day, maybe even every week. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/company-culture-and-documentation-culture/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Especially if your documentation skills are top-notch.</a>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Determine clear meeting leadership. This could also be a rotating order so that everyone has a chance to show off those leadership skills. Plus, it's good to have someone to go to if you have a question about the agenda or discussion topics. This leads us to &mdash;</li>
<li>Have an agenda. Have a clear agenda that ensures your team knows why this meeting is happening, why it's important, and why it's not an email.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<h3>Status and project updates</h3>
A <a href="https://qatalog.com/templates/project-summary/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">project status update</a> includes information about a specific project across departments. These can sit on their own or be wrapped into standups or other meetings. The goal here is to determine blockers, action items, and give status updates where they're needed. If this is a cross-functional meeting (and most of them are), time can also be spent adding context and background information to inform everyone on timelines.
Here are topics that come up within project updates:&nbsp;
<ul>
<li>Status</li>
<li>Schedule</li>
<li>Action items</li>
<li>Budget</li>
<li>Blockers</li>
<li>Scope issues</li>
</ul>
To give the most relevant information during project updates, you need to know who you're talking to. You can break this down by thinking about your meeting attendees, what they already know, and what they need to know. Focusing on the need-to-know is crucial here.&nbsp;
<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-share-updates-with-your-team/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">This is why context is so important for project meetings.</a> Of course you know everything about what you're working on, but not all of that information is necessary for stakeholders to help you make a decision or take action.&nbsp;
<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">With a work hub</a>, context is woven into the structure of your projects from the very beginning. You can notify your team members about updates through notifications or threads, and continually update your status and goals on an ongoing basis, without having to find space on everyone's calendars.&nbsp;
<h3>Company all-hands</h3>
To hold an asynchronous all-hands meeting, have your presenters record short videos. Your employees will then watch the videos and either ask their questions in a specified location, or in a scheduled synchronous meeting intended only for questions and answers.&nbsp;
Synchronous all-hands meetings have their purpose, but they&rsquo;re hard to pull off virtually. They involve getting the whole crew together for one meeting, which is super hard to schedule. Additionally, virtual meetings typically result in less engagement than in-person meetings, rendering face-to-face time pointless.&nbsp;
<h2>Moving meetings async</h2>
Async meetings are the ideal solution for remote teams seeking flexibility across time zones. The <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/autonomy-and-employee-engagement/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">freedom of asynchronous communication empowers employees</a>, allowing them to get their work done in a way that works best for them.&nbsp;
Read more: <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-become-async-first/" rel="follow" style="background-color: #f8cac6;">How to build an asynchronous culture in 12 steps</a>
Of course, synchronous communication still has its place in the workplace. Certain situations call for face-to-face conversations (like catching up with employees, brainstorming new ideas, and problem-solving), but balancing async meetings with synchronous check-ins can help your team establish autonomy and get into the deep work zone.&nbsp;<a href="https://qatalog.com/" rel="follow">Using a work hub</a> to add a layer of transparency <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-documentation-apps/" rel="follow">to your documentation</a> and daily tasks aids in this process by giving your employees the ability to view their expectations, project details, and more at their leisure.

Scheduling real-time meetings for remote teams can be tricky, which is one reason why many remote teams are converting to async meetings.

Meetings for remote teams | Qatalog blog

Scheduling real-time meetings for remote teams can be tricky, which is one reason why many remote teams are converting to an async majority.

Everything you need to know about meetings for remote teams

In-person retros are becoming, well, retro. Like an old-school flip phone, they have become a thing of the past as teams prioritize distributed work.
You&rsquo;ve been doing retrospectives with your team for a long time now. You know they are effective but what you may not realize is that you can&rsquo;t just plunk the same retro into today&rsquo;s modern workplace and expect the same results. Otherwise, virtual retrospectives become boring. You can start to forget the importance of retrospectives and the purpose behind them. Distributed teams need an approach to remote retrospectives that mixes the old with the new.
In practice, this looks like utilizing all the tools at your disposal: video conferencing, agenda-setting, incorporating games to have some fun in what can sometimes be a tense setting, and dedicated time for reflection.&nbsp;
<h2>What is a remote retrospective?</h2>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/yvILwwyeRs8EFh4Hi1pT" />
A retrospective is based on agile methodology. It typically happens at the end of a sprint and offers an opportunity for a team to reflect on how things went. This evaluation is sometimes referred to as a sprint retrospective and is often used by scrum teams.&nbsp;
Think of the remote retrospective as the 2.0 version for today&rsquo;s modern workplace. It&rsquo;s taking all the things you do as part of your in-person retrospective and pivoting it to a distributed team. This process isn&rsquo;t always seamless, but it is worth the effort to continue to keep your team engaged in their work.&nbsp;
According to <a href="https://buffer.com/2021-state-of-remote-work">Buffer&rsquo;s 2021 State of Remote Work</a>, 41% said the way they collaborate and communicate has changed since they started working remotely. Holding regular remote retrospectives helps to solve any communication and collaboration challenges and reinforces a distributed team&rsquo;s productivity and performance.
<h2>Tips for running a remote retrospective meeting</h2>
The goal of a retrospective is for a team to review a project and pinpoint what worked and didn&rsquo;t work, look for areas of improvement, and create a list of action items. It&rsquo;s not enough to just discuss. The real value lies in taking the steps to do better and enact future change.&nbsp;
For a remote or virtual retro to work you need high levels of participation. Sometimes, these meetings aren't structured in a way that enables everyone to raise their hand. Here, the defaults for in-person meeting interactions don't work. Your team isn't in the same room anymore.&nbsp;
Here are some tips for effectively encouraging retrospective participation:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Meet face-to-face: Video is still the best tool to run any sync meetings. And since the retrospective format is usually pretty thought out and agendas are set ahead of time, you can ensure that this meeting is a priority for everyone involved.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Form breakouts: For larger teams, breakout sessions work best for &lsquo;stop-start-continue&rsquo; types of discussions. Groups then share findings with the larger team.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Use a retrospective tool: At Qatalog, the marketing team uses <a href="https://www.parabol.co/">Parabol</a> to guide our sprint retrospectives.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Rotate the schedule: Especially for global teams, change the meeting time to each participant&rsquo;s time zone. You can also record the meeting and share it on your <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/">work hub</a> for all to view.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Randomize responses: If there is an issue where everyone should voice their perspective, try randomizing the speaking or commenting order. This way, everyone gets dedicated time and it isn't just the same two people leading the conversation.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<h2>Establish team trust and respect</h2>
A remote retrospective should be a safe virtual space where your team can comfortably vocalize their opinions. Retrospectives can quickly become heated and lead to hurt feelings and lower team morale. This is especially true for remote retrospectives when distributed teams are already feeling disconnected and isolated.
Set a respectful and positive tone for your meeting and others will pick up on that and do the same. Here are some ways to accomplish this:&nbsp;
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Greet by name: Make a point to welcome each team member to the meeting and ask how they are doing. This creates a courteous environment from the start and makes them feel seen and heard.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Discuss retrospectives respectfully: Guide your team to interact appropriately and criticize gently. Add elements of positive reinforcement such as a fun ice breaker question or an award for a job well done.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Ask your team to prepare talking points: Promote inclusivity and make everyone part of the conversation by asking each of them to contribute their thoughts on the project.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Allow for anonymity: Conduct anonymous polls or ask for feedback submissions ahead of time.</li>
</ul>
We hope this article has inspired you to run a retrospective on your remote retrospectives. A retrospective can be a fun space to gather your team, learn, and reiterate your processes when they aren&rsquo;t working. These are meetings that are important to invest sync time in, because turning feedback into actionable change makes for a productive team.

Your team retrospectives have likely been remote for a while now. Make sure you're running your remote meetings with a strategy and trust built behind them.

How to run a remote retrospective | Qatalog blog

Reinforce your team's productivity and performance with remote retrospectives.

How to run a remote retrospective

When your company has an entirely remote workforce, the key to effective online team collaboration is good communication.
You may not be able to have a weekly stand-up meeting where you all gather in the same physical location, but remote management tools have made it easy to update your team and make sure everyone&rsquo;s on the same page.&nbsp;
But are these tools and meetings actually effective?
There&rsquo;s no denying that there are more digital communication channels available to us than ever before. But research shows that our tools are <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/productivity-tools-killing-productivity/" rel="follow noopener">actually hindering our ability to get work done. </a>
People are uncertain whether to post an update in <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-team-instant-messaging-apps-slack-teams/" rel="follow noopener">a messaging channel</a>, over email, or within another software tool (like a project management application). In fact, <a href="https://language.work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">around half of workers</a> (49%) say they&rsquo;re concerned that the information they post to their company&rsquo;s online apps and communications channels will get lost in a sea of updates.
Not to mention that we're all tired of synchronous video meetings at this point, so we need to have an async option that provides visibility into our project context.&nbsp;
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/H3tysZjQS6yv0p4CfM4r" alt="undefined" />
So, in a world of synchronous and asynchronous communication channels &mdash; emails, Slack threads, Zoom calls, WhatsApp groups, and more &mdash; let&rsquo;s unpack the tangled web of options for today&rsquo;s remote teams, and look at how a work hub can eliminate the noise that comes with <a href="https://qatalog.com/templates/team-updates/" rel="follow noopener">sharing updates.</a>&nbsp;
<h2>Why are your team updates getting lost?</h2>
The answer is simple: Noise and mistakes.&nbsp;
When trying to access information on their company&rsquo;s online tools, <a href="https://assets.qatalog.com/language.work/qatalog-2021-workgeist-report.pdf" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">56% of people said they found themselves</a> needing to ask more than one person for help. This is what causes the unnecessary Slack pings and pointless Zoom calls. On average, people report that the mistakes they make are the result of difficulties accessing the information on their company's online tools.
With the myriad communication options available through workspace apps, we&rsquo;re no longer dependent on email (only) to share team updates. Email might still get used for the most &ldquo;official&rdquo; communications, but for a quick project progress report, you can turn to a team messaging app like Slack or Microsoft Teams.&nbsp;
Using these apps, you can set up message threads for different teams and topics. For example, your design team can share a project status update about the latest Facebook Ads campaign on one channel, while another channel is dedicated to onboarding new engineers.
The problem is that these threads tend to have a rapid turnover and essential information can easily get lost. Moreover, the ease of communication they provide can lead to a bombardment of messages that will challenge the attention spans of your team members. Imagine that you went on a lunch break and returned to find 200 messages across 3 channels. How do you know which one to read? Where should you start from?
Providing information to employees should be easier than this. Instead of choosing one of the many ways to keep employees in the loop, or choosing all of them and creating a myriad of notifications and distractions, there should be a centralized work nucleus that <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-digital-workspace/" rel="follow noopener">distributes information to everyone.</a>
<h2>Downsides of having multiple communication channels</h2>
<ul>
<li>
Communication blind-spots: When an update is only shared in a certain channel, it may not reach the whole team. If your developers are focused on GitHub or JIRA but you only post your updates in Slack, some team members might not get the update in time or overlook it completely.
</li>
<li>
Chaotic message threads: If your company has a culture of exchanging a high volume of messages, important updates get lost in the various thread streams. One study found that employees at large companies are sending over <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/1/18511575/productivity-slack-google-microsoft-facebook" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">200 Slack messages</a> per week on average&mdash;but even 1,000 in a single day is &ldquo;not an exception&rdquo;.
</li>
<li>
Dysfunctional cross-functional teams: As a cross-functional team, you&rsquo;re reliant on information sharing between different departments. If key updates get siloed in separate messaging threads it&rsquo;s a challenge for team leads to gather reports and funnel them back up the chain.
</li>
<li>
Coordination within a global workforce: Further communication complexity arises when you&rsquo;re working with a global team, transcending different languages and time zones. You can&rsquo;t expect a team member on the west coast of the US to see and respond to an update at the same time as someone in Singapore or Hong Kong.
</li>
</ul>
All of these communication problems come at a cost &mdash; not just to the patience or morale of your team (though these are factors that shouldn&rsquo;t be overlooked), but to the operational efficiency and sustainability of your business.
The costs of poorly managed communication include:
<ul>
<li>
Lack of transparency: Missed updates can lead to certain team members or departments being left out of the loop, resulting in both loss of trust and loss of focus&mdash;if some departments aren&rsquo;t working toward the stated goals of the company.
</li>
<li>
Communication overload: <a href="https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/a-2-year-stanford-study-shows-astonishing-productivity-boost-of-working-from-home.html" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Multiple studies have shown</a> that remote workers are more productive than on-site workers, but this productivity is severely compromised if employees are constantly barraged with messages that they&rsquo;re expected to respond to immediately.
</li>
<li>
Wasted time: Poorly-timed or misdirected communications mean that information often has to be sent out on multiple occasions before everyone gets the message. This is an inefficient use of time that also results in frustration for team members who must respond to multiple information requests.
</li>
<li>
Missed learning opportunities: If project reports aren&rsquo;t getting through, chances are that team members won&rsquo;t be able to learn from what went right or wrong during the previous cycle. Mistakes will be repeated, most likely at a financial cost to the business.
</li>
</ul>
<h2>How to keep your team informed</h2>
Do we truly understand how to work async?<a href="https://language.work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank"> 71% of remote workers say</a> that their organization does a good job balancing asynchronous and synchronous work. But this statement is in conflict with some other responses: 70% of organizations default to tools (video, chat, and phone).
Nearly half (48%) of teams would call a meeting before communicating asynchronously. Only 10% default to a visual collaboration tool, while 19% rely on project and task management tools.
So, maybe we don't know how to share information effectively in a hybrid workplace. These tools we've adopted don't fix our communication balance, they just try to patch the existing holes with more avenues for sharing information. A quick fix, but not one that gets to the root of our issue.&nbsp;
<h3>Here are some ways to keep your team in the loop:&nbsp;</h3>
<ol>
<li>
Put messages into context, connected to the right people, teams, and projects. This makes sure it reaches the stakeholders who need to hear it. Just make sure you&rsquo;re reaching them on the right channels&mdash;Slack and emails at least.
</li>
<li>
Make every keyword in each message searchable. The more communication tools you have, the harder this might become.
</li>
<li>
Label each message to ensure it gets the right level of attention. For example, as an announcement, a blocker, or a milestone. Getting the right visibility is key for information sharing.
</li>
<li>
Cascade information sharing automatically on the right channels and in the right context. Imagine if you could write a project update and share it automatically on the related Slack channel and in the inbox of every project member&mdash;without all the copy and pasting, and definitely without arranging an hour-long video call.
</li>
</ol>
<a href="https://qatalog.com/" rel="follow">A virtual workspace such as Qatalog</a> can integrate your messaging apps so updates are shared in the relevant places, and help you achieve all the points above.
You might use other tactics, such as reducing the volume of messages through processes and rules, scheduling synchronous communication (e.g. video calls) only with an agenda, or using data to determine what is being read and which info your teams are searching for. There might be a better way.
<h4><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener">What is a work hub and how can it help?</a></h4>
Qatalog can bring structure and transparency across teams as all your documentation, updates, and people are stored in one place.
<ul>
<li>Qatalog Posts are made for long-form, context-driven status updates. Critical discussions are tied to the Projects that they drive forward. Comments can be added by Project contributors or anyone else who has access for easy collaboration.</li>
<li>Use short Threads to stay on top of decision-making and gather asynchronous feedback. </li>
<li>With your smart feed, you&nbsp;get personalized notifications of important updates across Posts, Threads, Projects, and related Goals in real-time.&nbsp; </li>
<li>Company-wide information is given a home on a customizable Company page. You can post all company-wide updates, and add important resources or processes, so everything important is available from one central place.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<h2>Async updates, in-sync employees</h2>
So when you share updates with your team, make it count. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-team-instant-messaging-apps-slack-teams/" rel="follow noopener">Cut down on the noise</a> in your communications and deliver messages exactly when and where they will support &mdash; not challenge &mdash; your team&rsquo;s productivity.

Why are your team updates getting lost? How to share information effectively. Read more in Qatalog Collaboration blog series.

How do you keep your team updated? | Qatalog

When your company has an entirely remote workforce, the key to effective online team collaboration is good communication.

How do you share updates with your team?

Everything you need to know about async, or asynchronous, communication - including its benefits, examples of async communication, and more

The definitive guide to async communication | Qatalog

Asynchronous communication offers the ideal framework for remote teams who’re looking to engage team members across time zones, build consensus continuously, and empower team members to work with flexibility.

The definitive guide to asynchronous communication

Work is frustrating. We&rsquo;ve all felt a productivity lag, seen <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-business-process-management-software/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">disorganized processes</a> and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-documentation-apps/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">lost files</a>, been inconvenienced over information overload or inefficiency, experienced an imbalance in <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">communication styles</a> &mdash; the list goes on.&nbsp;
Our disconnect with work didn&rsquo;t appear because of the pandemic, but rather results from a culmination of the tools, processes, and habits we adopted for in-person office work that could not be scaled without a major culture shift.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s frustrating. <a href="https://time.com/6051955/work-after-covid-19/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">And unsustainable</a>. Which is why we need to do something better.&nbsp;
<iframe width="560" height="314" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MlWoAWpLpns" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
<h2>The challenges of work today</h2>
Let's talk about information overload. There will be more data created <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data-created/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">in the next four years</a> than ever before. To make sense of all this information, we adopted a series of tools for organization, collaboration, and everything else we do day-to-day.&nbsp;
The problem is that in creating and adopting an array of tools to manage our information, we've left it up to the knowledge worker to continually work between them. This leads to feeling scattered, lost, disjointed, even chaotic.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;re <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/productivity-tools-killing-productivity/" rel="follow">doing more work than we bargained for</a> because our tools aren&rsquo;t working the way we need them to. Maybe at one point, they did, but today&rsquo;s working environment is completely different and disconnect is at an all-time high.&nbsp;
Qatalog recently released a report with Cornell University that found people are spending <a href="https://language.work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">59 minutes a day</a> looking for information lost within the very applications designed to make work easy. For 44% of workers, siloed digital tools are making it hard to know whether work is being duplicated, and 48% say they&rsquo;re making mistakes simply because they can&rsquo;t keep track of everything going on across their digital workplace.&nbsp;
Asana &mdash;<a href="https://asana.com/apps/qatalog" rel="follow"> a Qatalog integration partner </a>&mdash; found similar results in their <a href="https://asana.com/resources/anatomy-of-work" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">2021 Anatomy of Work Index</a>. They discovered that, on average, employees switch between 10 applications 25 times a day. This leads to fragmented communication, reduced efficiency, and duplicated work.&nbsp;
Our digital environment is noisy and distracting. That&rsquo;s not the way we want to describe the way we work. We want to bring transparency, automate this flow of knowledge, and enable teams to scale effectively.&nbsp;
Additionally, relationships between employers and employees are shifting, and without that transparency and trust, employees are more likely to find a workplace that aligns with their needs. It&rsquo;s the employee&rsquo;s market, and <a href="https://time.com/6082503/bosses-shape-future-work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">surveys suggest about 40% of U.S. workers</a> are open to switching jobs in the coming months.
<h2>What exactly is a Work Hub?</h2>
We&rsquo;ve defined Work Hub to mean a place where the highest performing teams bring their people, work, and tools together to see the big picture and make quality decisions.&nbsp;
A Work Hub is a digital space where you can organize, collaborate, communicate, and get work done. It consolidates your existing company tools, processes, and goals to break silos and keep your team aligned, without extra meetings or constant pings &mdash; allowing your organization to move toward an async-friendly model.&nbsp;
A Work Hub isn&rsquo;t another tool, it&rsquo;s a framework that makes sense of scattered information in one place.&nbsp;
See how work could be used by <a href="https://qatalog.com/for/marketing/" rel="follow">marketing</a>, <a href="https://qatalog.com/for/product-management-engineering/" rel="follow">product and engineerin</a>g, <a href="https://qatalog.com/for/business-operations/" rel="follow">business operations</a>, <a href="https://qatalog.com/for/sales/" rel="follow">sales</a> and <a href="https://qatalog.com/for/people-operations-hr/" rel="follow">people ops teams</a>.&nbsp;
<h2>How a Work Hub works</h2>
A Work Hub eliminates fragmentation and creates a shared perspective. It offers a cohesive digital workspace that connects teams, centralizes projects, promotes discoverability and accessibility, and so much more. How is this achieved? After talking to hundreds of companies faced with the challenges of adapting to modern work, we identified six key ingredients of a work hub.
<h3>Build belonging with a directory</h3>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/R2rxSBRcSQW7l1Uern13" alt="undefined" width="638" height="382" />
Hybrid, remote, and distributed working models are here to stay. As a remote employee myself, I&rsquo;ve only met one of my co-workers in-person, and the others I&rsquo;ve introduced myself to through video conferencing and messages.&nbsp;
However, this doesn&rsquo;t mean a remote or hybrid environment should be any less connected than one where employees work in an office. And it certainly shouldn&rsquo;t diminish the opportunity to see what everyone is working toward.&nbsp;
<a href="https://qatalog.com/directory/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">With a cohesive directory,</a> you get more than employee profiles &mdash; you get to see who is on what team, team members&rsquo; projects, and the goals they&rsquo;re accomplishing. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/employee-directory-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">You can build belonging</a> within your team by showing what you do and who you are, stay updated on individual or team workflows, and see real-time activity. Much like you would in an office, but on your own schedule and in a much shorter timeframe.
<h3>Align on goals</h3>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/4j984O0Tim7gf4tM1BBw" alt="undefined" width="643" height="385" />
The best way to unify your distributed teams is by making goals clear, discoverable, and accessible to everyone.&nbsp;
Let&rsquo;s say it again for the people in the back: if you want to eliminate silos completely, you have to adopt processes that are visible to everyone. And a critical step that most teams and organizations miss is setting visible goals.&nbsp;
Within <a href="https://qatalog.com/goals/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Qatalog&rsquo;s goals</a>, you can set OKRs for your team, your project, and yourself. You can set reminders to update your goals, and attach them to projects within Qatalog or other apps you&rsquo;re using to manage projects. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/work-hub-vs-performance-management-software/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">It&rsquo;s all visible and eliminates the need to context-switch</a> between where your work gets done, your project management tool, and that goals spreadsheet that&rsquo;s bound to get lost next quarter.&nbsp;
<h3>Search across your tools</h3>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/vkOibKJR2GlljiHo9Zkq" alt="undefined" width="655" height="392" />
Most of our productivity tools today have search functionality. Without it, an organization would remain consistently chaotic with no end in sight. Think 2000s style intranet folders, where information is bound to become a jungle.&nbsp;
Imagine if you could connect your tools under one search function. In Qatalog, you can search for anything &mdash; a Google doc, Slack message, or line of code in GitHub &mdash; right from your dashboard.
<h3>Centralize projects</h3>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/OJfsWqVR1q3RkvewYcAA" alt="undefined" width="653" height="391" />
Project documentation is one of the most important aspects of your day-to-day working environment. If your projects aren&rsquo;t organized with relevant resources or don&rsquo;t include all the necessary context it can be easy to get lost.&nbsp;
A work hub provides a global view of all your projects, regardless of what tools they live in. That information can be brought into other workflows, goals, shared between teams, and posted about. No need to switch between tabs. It&rsquo;s a fresh chance to connect the dots.
<h3>See what&rsquo;s important in posts</h3>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/pzl1hsnRjyhFs5NYkI9Z" alt="undefined" width="660" height="395" />
If remote work is the future, asynchronous communication is what will help us get there.&nbsp;
And here&rsquo;s the catch: even if your organization isn&rsquo;t remote, relying on asynchronous communication is what&rsquo;s going to keep your company competitive in the marketplace. Because async isn&rsquo;t only good for producing results, it allows your employees to remain free and lead more fulfilled lives.&nbsp;
With Work Hub posts, you get the right information to the right people, so everyone can discover what&rsquo;s going on. It&rsquo;s easier than scrolling through endless Slack messages or emails to get the information you need &mdash; and much easier than sitting in Zoom status meetings all day &mdash; and acts as a collective, collaborative work newsfeed.&nbsp;
Distributing information is no longer a spray-and-pray effort of blasting updates with the hope that the right people will pay attention. Qatalog makes sure your posts won&rsquo;t get lost in the ether by providing read receipts so you have a view of who read what.
<h3>Automate processes with workflows</h3>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/gRK8QehSbGF8dDTBJVYw" alt="undefined" width="666" height="399" />
Your processes are your company&rsquo;s longest-living legacies. And most of the time, they aren&rsquo;t easy to duplicate or share with the entire organization. That onboarding structure that lives within a million Google Drive files? What if you could automate a new hire&rsquo;s onboarding through a connected workflow?&nbsp;
Creating a workflow in Qatalog is an easy, streamlined process that allows you to add all the steps you need completed and integrate the tools necessary to do so. So easy, your grandpa could navigate it (and Matteo&rsquo;s already did!).&nbsp;
<h2>The future of work</h2>
<a href="https://language.work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Study</a> after <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1007914455/as-the-pandemic-recedes-millions-of-workers-are-saying-i-quit" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">study</a> after <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/08/is-it-time-to-let-employees-work-from-anywhere" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">study</a> has shown that employees are ready for change. We need a new way of working that we couldn&rsquo;t have anticipated, or even imagined, just a few years ago.&nbsp;
What we do know is that our current methods aren&rsquo;t working. Our reliance on old productivity habits isn&rsquo;t making room for the future of work. Plus, our tools don&rsquo;t work in concert with each other, and we don&rsquo;t really know how to work in concert with them either.
A work hub addresses those foundational issues head-on, harnessing the latest research behind modern work to design an entirely new class of software. It breaks down the elements of modern work and reassembles them from the ground up so you don&rsquo;t have to.&nbsp;
Read more to discover how a work hub beats out or works together with:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-company-wiki-notion-confluence/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">A company wiki</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-project-management-asana-trello-jira/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Project management software</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/work-hub-vs-performance-management-software/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Performance management software</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-team-instant-messaging-apps-slack-teams/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Instant messaging apps</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/employee-directory-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Static employee directories</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-business-process-management-software/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Process management software</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/intranet-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Company-wide intranet</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workplace-search-tools-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Workplace search tools</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-digital-workspace/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">...and more</a></li>
</ul>
<a href="https://bit.ly/3rxK5LW" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank"><img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/Aw2P8jrrRjeGl9mtvfxD" alt="Email signature banner-4 (1).png" /></a>

A work hub eliminates fragmentation and creates a shared perspective. It allows you to connect different apps and build a digital workspace.

What is a work hub? | Qatalog Blog

Everything you need to know about Qatalog's work hub.

What is a Work Hub?

When employees with different backgrounds and skills come together to work on the same project, they form what&rsquo;s known as a cross-functional team. Cross-functional teams unite those in different areas of expertise to work toward a shared goal.&nbsp;
Quite common in the workplace, modern cross-functional teams are facing different types of challenges as they collaborate in a hybrid or remote fashion.&nbsp;
Countless companies are ditching the legacy work model and shifting to a remote-friendly or hybrid model, putting pressure on developing async methods to build these cross-functional teams.&nbsp;
In this article, we&rsquo;ll walk through the makings of a stand-out cross-functional team, what their role is in a hybrid workspace, and the best tips for how to build a cross-functional team at your company.&nbsp;
<h3>What does a cross-functional team look like?</h3>
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/jIQS6duJTjSdXetlK5wx" alt="undefined" />
A cross-functional team brings in members of different teams/departments to achieve a shared goal. It emphasizes broad collaboration in the ideation process.&nbsp;
For example, let&rsquo;s say a new opportunity is presented to your company to pursue &mdash; maybe it&rsquo;s entering a new market or territory, or developing a new product for your product suite.&nbsp;
In a project of this size, the work shouldn&rsquo;t be left to one individual &mdash; or even one sole department. For these initiatives, you would probably need:
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Finance employees to plan out the project&rsquo;s budget</li>
<li aria-level="1">Marketers to come up with a strategy for branding and positioning</li>
<li aria-level="1">Salespeople to develop a territory management plan</li>
<li aria-level="1">Human resources professionals to think through a hiring and employee engagement strategy to support new demand</li>
<li aria-level="1">Product experts to think through what should be created in order to capitalize on market demand </li>
</ul>
This diversity of both thought and backgrounds helps break the mold, challenge groupthink, and reach a consensus that is more likely to be successful when implemented. The differing viewpoints allow new challenges and opportunities to be confronted that otherwise might have been ignored or otherwise left unaddressed.
We&rsquo;ve all heard the statement that &ldquo;diverse teams perform better than non-diverse teams,&rdquo; but Gartner specifically found that employee performance was <a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/diversity-and-inclusion-build-high-performance-teams/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">12% higher</a> on diverse teams than non-diverse teams. In particular, Gartner&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/webinars/3984478/covid-19-shatters-deeply-held-work-culture-beliefs" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Bruce Robertson</a> encourages companies to &ldquo;Look for &lsquo;cognitive&rsquo; diversity, which is mixing people together with different thinking styles, habits, and perspectives.&rdquo;
<h2>Why are cross-functional teams important for hybrid?</h2>
When we take a step back, remote and hybrid teams might be the best suited for cross-functional work if we take diversity into account. When workers have complete flexibility to determine how work works best for them, they can bring more to the table. Plus, remote work offers more equitable environments and more geographically diverse hiring pools.
The first step to creating a cross-functional organization within a hybrid model is to establish trust with your team. Enabling a supportive environment by encouraging risks, mistakes, and opinions improves the well-being of your company. And with all those qualities in a workplace, it&rsquo;s hard not to grow.&nbsp;
Companies need to set up these cross-functional task forces for success not just in terms of the final deliverable, but with the resources, processes, and trust the team needs to fulfill their purpose.
<h2>Building your cross-functional team</h2>
Now that you&rsquo;re clear on what a cross-functional team is and why it&rsquo;s important, let&rsquo;s walk through the steps of building one in a hybrid organization.&nbsp;
<h3>1. Begin with clarity &amp; transparency</h3>
When a cross-functional team comes together, its members should be aligned with a common purpose and a common understanding of that purpose. Otherwise, the team could quickly find themselves at odds with one another <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-create-role-clarity-within-your-hybrid-team/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">or lacking role clarity.&nbsp;</a>
Specifically, the team should be informed about the expectations of this collaboration, such as deadlines and deliverables. Any existing resources should also be shared with the team, like a memo on the project&rsquo;s background and purpose.&nbsp;
This level of clarity and transparency should also be maintained for the entire time of collaboration. The team might rely on a shared <a href="https://qatalog.com/directory/">directory</a> to eliminate silos and document role responsibilities for everyone on the task force,&nbsp;
<h3>2. Keep goals aligned</h3>
Goals should be clearly established from the get-go for everyone to know the project&rsquo;s primary goal, secondary goal(s), and measurements of success.&nbsp;
Teams can use the <a href="https://medium.com/@IliyanaStareva/how-to-use-the-darci-framework-in-project-management-694f756680fa" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">DARCI model</a> to rally the team around the person most responsible for each sub-goal, as well as utilizing <a href="https://qatalog.com/goals/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">goal tracking software</a> to share progress with the cross-functional team at large.&nbsp;
<h3>3. Embrace employee autonomy</h3>
It&rsquo;s important to remember that everyone on a cross-functional team has their own speciality &mdash; that&rsquo;s why they were appointed to the team in the first place. For managers, this means embracing employee autonomy, understanding the importance of knowing your employees and their abilities, and trusting them to do the work for which they were hired. Otherwise, you&rsquo;ll risk micromanaging them, which is a leading reason why employees quit their jobs.
For individual contributors, it means living up to your potential as an employee. In a cross-functional group, you might be the only one representing your department, so embracing your autonomy is imperative to the team&rsquo;s success.&nbsp;
<h3>4. Lead with empathy</h3>
Finally, a great cross-functional team needs great leadership. Cross-functional collaboration requires a leader who &mdash; outlined above &mdash; respects employee autonomy, keeps the team&rsquo;s goals aligned, and communicates with transparency.&nbsp;
<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/the-new-normal-is-dead/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Normalcy no longer exists</a>. There is no getting to the finish line, work has become flexible and will remain so until employees feel it&rsquo;s no longer working. Leaders who remain adaptable and empathetic to these changes will gain the respect of employees who know their best interests are in mind.&nbsp;
<h2>Let&rsquo;s put our people first</h2>
The best practice of putting employees first in a job has not undergone a paradigm shift, even though our working models have. Since cross-functional teams are usually formed to tackle new ground, it&rsquo;s important to be patient and transparent with employees when building a cross-functional remote team.&nbsp;
When given the tools they need to trust each other, members of a cross-functional team will be able to collaborate seamlessly and produce high-quality deliverables &mdash; in any setting.
How can a Work Hub help? With Qatalog's Org Chart feature you get a complete view of your company directory, alongside up-to-date information on what teams or individuals are working on, such as key initiatives or quarterly goals. It makes it easy for your team to see who&rsquo;s who, and get details on Projects across teams.&nbsp;

Cross-functional teams are assembled to complete high-impact work, but a hybrid approach to work can add another layer to the process.

4 keys to build cross-functional hybrid teams | Qatalog

4 keys to building a cross-functional hybrid team

Have you ever stopped in the middle of the workday and asked yourself why you&rsquo;re doing what you&rsquo;re doing, what your day-to-day will look like a month from now, or how your work is contributing to your company&rsquo;s overall success?
If so, you&rsquo;re likely suffering from uncertain role clarity in your job.&nbsp;
Everyone on a team needs role clarity. Imagine if a basketball team was composed of players who didn&rsquo;t know their roles &ndash; there would be no shared understanding of who&rsquo;s on offense, who&rsquo;s on defense, or what everyone&rsquo;s skills and advantages on the court are. It&rsquo;s no different for a team of marketers, software engineers, or even a company&rsquo;s entire staff.&nbsp;
Unfortunately, the crisis of lacking role clarity has only been exacerbated as workforces move to hybrid models. Despite the many benefits of remote work, <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-07-14-gartner-survey-reveals-82-percent-of-company-leaders-plan-to-allow-employees-to-work-remotely-some-of-the-time" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">29% of business leaders</a> haven&rsquo;t taken measures to track productivity remotely, meaning employees at these organizations could be unclear about how their work is being perceived, how they&rsquo;re contributing to company goals, or what&rsquo;s next for their roles.
However, the hybrid model is here to stay, with <a href="https://www.hrdive.com/news/gartner-over-80-of-company-leaders-plan-to-permit-remote-work-after-pande/581744/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">80% of businesses</a> planning to allow at least some remote work in a post-COVID world. This new landscape of work and employee engagement means team leaders will have to go the extra mile to establish and maintain role clarity for their employees. Otherwise, hybrid workforces are at risk of leaving employees without a clear purpose or direction.&nbsp;
<h2>What is role clarity?&nbsp;</h2>
In a professional setting, the meaning of role clarity is a thorough understanding of what is expected of you from your role on a team or in your organization. These expectations can be tasks, deliverables, processes, goals, and KPIs, or even knowledge. Role clarity can be maximized by effective training, documentation, open communication, and adopting a work hub.
The opposite of role clarity &ndash; known as role confusion, uncertainty, or ambiguity &ndash; is the lack of this knowledge. Employees who don&rsquo;t have a sense of role clarity typically are (or feel like they are) less productive than they should be.&nbsp;
<h2>Negative impacts of role confusion</h2>
Without role clarity, you could end up lacking the direction you need to do your job to the best of your ability, leading to confusion, unproductivity, or even a level of unfulfillment that could result in you searching for a new job. In particular, remote or hybrid teams have a unique opportunity to document role scope via asynchronous communication.
<h3>Role and organizational conflict</h3>
A lack of clarity for your own role means others may have a different perception of your role than you do. Conversely, being unclear about others&rsquo; roles means you might expect something from a coworker who doesn&rsquo;t know that she is responsible for that task, even if &mdash; in reality &mdash; she isn&rsquo;t.&nbsp;
This role confusion at work serves no other purpose than to create interdepartmental conflict. Role clarity prevents two people or teams from stepping on each other's toes by doing the same work, as well as ensuring no important tasks are left unattended and someone takes responsibility for them.
<h3>Decreased job performance</h3>
Hangups on what to do and how to do it can be a major impediment to workplace productivity. Imagine being told to drive a direct route but not having a map or a GPS &ndash; you may eventually find your way to your destination, but you likely wouldn&rsquo;t do so in the most efficient way possible.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s the same thing at work. Role uncertainty can lead to a state of on-the-job paralysis, where those who are unsure of what to do or how to do it don&rsquo;t put in much effort until they get clarification. It can also lead to workers spending time and energy on tasks that are not within the scope of their role, which simply wastes time and could interfere with another individual&rsquo;s or team&rsquo;s work.&nbsp;
<h3>Work-related stress</h3>
<a href="https://www.gallup.com/analytics/248906/gallup-global-emotions-report-2019.aspx" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">More than half of Americans</a> admit to feeling stressed out daily on the job, with role conflict and role ambiguity among <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1740194/pdf/v059p00067.pdf" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">the main sources of stress</a> and burnout at work.&nbsp;
According to the Mayo Clinic, <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/burnout/art-20046642" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">unclear job expectations</a> and uncertainty &ldquo;about the degree of authority you have&rdquo; or what &ldquo;others expect from you&rdquo; can play a factor in that burnout. Without role clarity, you might have a sense that you&rsquo;re just spinning your wheels, causing you to feel (and potentially be) unproductive.&nbsp;
<h2>How to create role clarity in your hybrid team</h2>
Whether you&rsquo;re a team lead seeking to create more role transparency for your direct reports or an individual contributor hoping to set some direction for yourself, there are proven ways to create more role clarity in a hybrid organization, decrease on-the-job frustration, and maximize productivity.
<h3>Start with role clarity on a team level</h3>
Divide and conquer! When the mission of giving meaning to role clarity seems like a daunting task, the first step is to set role definitions on a team level. It can start with a simple meeting to identify every team member&rsquo;s skills and interests, mapping those to a team goal, and documenting these roles to share with the company at large.&nbsp;
<h3>Advocate for more transparency</h3>
As an individual contributor, it falls on you to manage up by bringing job concerns to your manager. Coming to one-on-ones with direct questions about your role shows your boss how serious you are about role transparency. If you ever feel totally stuck, you can also outline your ideal role on the team and present it to your team manager(s) to see how receptive they are.&nbsp;
These extra steps are necessary in the hybrid workplace.
<h3>Adopt a directory</h3>
<a href="https://qatalog.com/directory/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank"><img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/0mAUzn8KSVWyug4UHsRW" alt="undefined" /></a>
For hybrid teams that want to capitalize on the benefits of asynchronous collaboration, it&rsquo;s worth utilizing a <a href="https://qatalog.com/work-hub/" rel="follow noopener">work hub</a> to clearly communicate who is responsible for which tasks and goals.
In particular, a <a href="https://qatalog.com/directory/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">workplace directory</a> accessible to all team members provides optimal visibility into the projects, goals, and tasks that everyone is responsible for. A <a href="https://qatalog.com/org-charts/" rel="follow">dynamic Org Chart</a> is an easy fix to role confusion at work &mdash; particularly for remote or hybrid corporations where so many coworkers meet and collaborate virtually.&nbsp;&nbsp; 
Related templates: <a href="https://qatalog.com/templates/employee-profile/" rel="follow">Employee profile template</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://qatalog.com/templates/new-team-member-announcement/" rel="follow">New employee announcement template</a>

Role clarity keeps workers clear on their goals and paves the way for workplace happiness and productivity. Here are three ways to improve it.

Role clarity within your hybrid team | Qatalog blog

How to create role clarity within your hybrid team

The cleanest argument for returning to an office-first culture of synchronous and spontaneous interaction is so simple, so sensible, that a handful of executives have recently regurgitated it with signature C-suite conviction: &ldquo;93% of communication is nonverbal; that&rsquo;s how much value we lose when we can&rsquo;t interact in-person.&rdquo;
If this is your leader, please come get them. They&rsquo;re drunk on one of the biggest myths in social psychology.
We&rsquo;re going to break down the fallacy of the &ldquo;93% nonverbal communication&rdquo; rule in two acts: why the number is completely irrelevant to the workplace, and why healthy businesses spend significant resources to reduce whatever the actual number is.
<h3>Nope, 93% of communication is not nonverbal</h3>
First, let&rsquo;s get on the same page about &ldquo;nonverbal communication:&rdquo; the spoken word is obviously verbal, but for business purposes, written communication as a proxy for speech would also be considered verbal. So, <a href="https://open.lib.umn.edu/communication/chapter/4-2-types-of-nonverbal-communication/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">nonverbal communication encompasses</a>:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">gestures, posture, and body movement</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">facial expressions and eye contact</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">pitch, tone, and timing of words</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">touch and other senses</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">&ldquo;proxemics&rdquo; (i.e., how people use personal space to influence communication)</li>
</ul>
The popular 93% figure originated from a mashing together of two studies conducted by UCLA professor Albert Mehrabian, and you&rsquo;ll be surprised to learn just how irrelevant those studies are to this rule we&rsquo;ve since internalized as a standard of human interaction:
In both studies, lab participants were asked to hear singular words several times (the word in the first study was &ldquo;maybe&rdquo;), and then approximate the speaker&rsquo;s underlying emotional state behind each spoken word. Study #1 analyzed how facial expressions impacted the perception of the emotion, and Study #2 analyzed how tone impacted it.
That&rsquo;s it. That&rsquo;s the research.
Neither of the studies analyzed complete sentences, let alone full speeches or conversations. None of the other nonverbal communication variables were analyzed. In fact, the studies didn&rsquo;t even focus on gleaning anything beyond a rudimentary perception of &ldquo;like vs. dislike.&rdquo; In other words, the studies basically created an artificial environment with a 1:1 ratio of words spoken to emotions interpreted. Nobody functions that way in reality.
<a href="http://www.kaaj.com/psych/smorder.html" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Mehrabian himself has since cautioned</a> against taking his research seriously outside of its context, stating, &ldquo;unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.&rdquo;
It goes without saying &mdash; no pun intended &mdash; that your workplace churns out a far more lopsided ratio of explicit-to-implicit communication. Messages, meetings, documents, presentations &hellip; these comms are not only brimming with far more complex words and environments than Mehrabian&rsquo;s studies, but also weighted much more toward objective information like priorities, facts and figures, processes, and schedules. There is simply no significant correlation between the precarious lab findings at UCLA and the constant barrage of complex interactions we experience at work.
Now that we&rsquo;ve dispelled the myth of nonverbal communication, let&rsquo;s squash any semblance of its primitive appeal so leaders can stop fantasizing about <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/remote-work-to-hybrid/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">the way communication works</a>, and start investing in the platforms that actually enable productive communication.
<h3>Nonverbal communication is bad for business</h3>
We mentioned the &ldquo;primitive appeal&rdquo; of the 93% number &mdash; what is that, exactly?
For many, and especially for Type A business leaders, it&rsquo;s the exciting notion that you might be able to gain an advantage or otherwise benefit from gathering secret information that wasn&rsquo;t explicitly communicated. It&rsquo;s the allure of reading &ldquo;between the lines&rdquo; to reach the underlying intent (which, to be clear, is not actually correlated to nonverbal communication in that intent can easily be misinterpreted through non-communication or manipulative communication. Just ask <a href="https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">the people who study polygraph tests</a>).
Perhaps it comes from our prehistoric interactions with potential predators or mates; who knows? Regardless, it&rsquo;s primitive, and that&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s so detrimental to the civilized social structure of a business.
Your coworkers are not threatening predators. They are a curated, incentivized, and managed group of people who share your goals, and whose trust is supposed to be inherent. It shouldn&rsquo;t be your obligation to interpret whether a coworker means you ill intent or is hiding something &mdash; the confines of your organization should be, by design, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">a safe space to cooperate and collaborate transparently.</a>
Ironically, the distinction between explicit communication and &ldquo;secret&rdquo; information is one of the core arguments in favor of building a <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/darren-murph-gitlab-interview/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">remote-first organization</a>, rather than an office-dependent one:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It&rsquo;s neither productive nor equitable to have a meeting presenter&rsquo;s information interpreted uniquely by each coworker based on how sharp their nonverbal listening skills are. Everyone should walk out of the meeting with the same knowledge, and documenting it mitigates much of the subjectivity introduced by nonverbal communication.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Managers who give arcane direction and prioritization will often use the crutch of nonverbal communication to escape accountability, continuing to drag down morale and productivity across the org. Barking at employees, leaning over their desks, showing facial expressions of anger or disappointment when challenged &hellip; all of this is done to push their own agendas through <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workload-management-snowball-and-the-meteor/">the paths of least resistance</a> (i.e., the most easily intimidated employees) rather than be held accountable to any shared task management system or priority list where conflicting work exists.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Many employees lack a natural skill set for presentation and persuasion. Of course, that doesn&rsquo;t mean the employees don&rsquo;t have ideas worth listening to. In an office environment, a junior engineer might sit slumped in their chair, looking at their hands while mumbling an objection to leadership&rsquo;s approach &mdash; as a result, their warning falls on deaf ears. In a work hub-enabled environment, they can take the opportunity to present their opinion more convincingly, even with linked material supporting the case, and have that comment stand equally among the rest of their teammates&rsquo; perspectives.</li>
</ul>
An environment where coworkers don&rsquo;t feel <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/kurt-schrader-clubhouse-interview/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">empowered to communicate transparently</a>, or where leaders take advantage to avoid transparency, is simply a toxic environment. Investing in a centralized digital working space like a work hub isn&rsquo;t just good for operational productivity &mdash; it&rsquo;s medicine for a diseased culture eating away at its own trust and alignment. Nonverbal communication is certainly a part of human interaction, but it&rsquo;s not what we want in the workplace.

Nonverbal communication in the workplace shouldn't impact performance so much that it's an argument to ditch the hybrid model.

Nonverbal communication is an expense | Qatalog blog

Speaking truth to the myth of nonverbal communication

If you&rsquo;ve ever wondered where the product roadmaps of work hubs, collaboration software, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/productivity-tools-killing-productivity/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">and productivity tools come from</a>, look no further than some of your most organized coworkers. The tricks and hacks they implement to optimize communication and collaboration are, unintentionally, the beta tests which often mature into company-wide best practices, which in turn reveal a potential market for features and products.
In short: <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/becoming-a-world-class-knowledge-worker/" rel="follow">effective communication</a> is a user experience, and as your best people outgrow your available tools, they piece together better experiences with whatever they can.
Using a handful of examples below, we can illustrate not only how hacks inform the future of business tools, but why it&rsquo;s crucial for business leaders to be aware of the hacks being used in their own workplace, so that any operational investment in new tools or software actually addresses the current collaboration hurdles.
<h3>Search &amp; information recall</h3>
Few user tasks, if any, launch more new solutions than the task of searching. Before the days of highly discoverable Slack feeds and Gmail inboxes, searching communications tools was technically feasible, but practically infuriating. One solution to this information recall problem was keyword stuffing, and in fact you&rsquo;ll still see co-workers practicing it wherever their tools come up short.
Keyword stuffing is simply adding a pile of useful recall terms to a conversation or document, based on an assumption of how you might search for them in the future:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Find yourself repeatedly hunting down the same slide deck for engineering diagrams? Add an appendix slide stuffed with keywords that provides context to a document otherwise locked out of search due to the visual nature of its content.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Stuck on an email thread vaguely titled &ldquo;Re: yesterday,&rdquo; containing some juicy stakeholder insights about your biggest competitors? Send yourself a reply to that thread with the contents, &ldquo;CI, competitive intel, competition landscape, Competitor X.&rdquo;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Dealing with a spreadsheet full of unstructured data? Add a &ldquo;Notes&rdquo; column where you can plug in whatever keywords make the row easier to recall later on.</li>
</ul>
What&rsquo;s important to note about the keyword stuffing hack isn&rsquo;t just that it motivated office products to build smarter, more reliable search features &mdash; it also emphasized the need for tagging, labeling, and otherwise classifying content. After all, search and classification have a cyclical relationship.
Most collaboration software worth it's salt these days will have tagging or labeling functions, which serve in part to properly locate and classify content. And because labeling information is how we train machine learning, the humble hack of keyword stuffing lives on as next-gen collaboration tools rely on highly-descriptive labeling to automate processes and anticipate information access.
<h3>Meetings</h3>
As a <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/virtual-meetings-audio-insights/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">black hole of business intelligence</a> and the most expensive part of the workday, meetings have always been a place where high performers employ creative communication hacks.
We all know about the best practice of providing an agenda in the meeting invite (even if few of us ever make the effort to do so). But you&rsquo;ve probably seen some teammates take it further:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Providing a shared meeting notes doc where the agenda can be read, where invitees can ask questions, and where action items can be documented and assigned.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Transcribing the meeting (if allowed) using a machine-reading service, and dumping that transcription into the appropriate destination so any non-attendees can read or search the discussion in the future.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Enforcing a culture where participants can comfortably leave any meeting once they feel they&rsquo;re no longer contributing or gaining useful information.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Prefacing meeting titles with emojis (e.g. ✍, 💲, 📣) so attendees with packed schedules can be better prepared at a glance.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Offering a simplified or templated response to invitees so that they can do more than just accept or decline the meeting &ndash; let them downvote the meeting with an explanation as to why, or suggest that the meeting is blocked by X dependency, or that it should be nixed in favor of an asynchronous update, etc.</li>
</ul>
It&rsquo;s rather startling to see just how much ad hoc project management a meeting owner still has to undertake in order to make the best use of their coworkers&rsquo; time. But as we see more advanced, next-gen collaboration tools blend communication spaces, progress is being made towards an environment where teammates get just the right amount of exposure to collaborate &hellip; where two people can record a synchronous discussion, send the recording out to a third who wasn&rsquo;t available, and log the transcript for a fourth who only needed to read a bit of context about an action item they were assigned.
<h3>Participation &amp; accountability</h3>
One of the toughest balancing acts in work is the <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-search-for-files-at-work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">level of information</a> exposure you give and receive. Too little can confuse or misinform accountabilities, while too much can overwhelm users and hurt effective participation. Many collaboration tools try to aid or automate this balance, and it&rsquo;s no surprise these advanced capabilities are inspired by the best practices unicorn employees implement manually:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Maintain a transparent, shareable list of your priorities or workload so stakeholders proposing new work can see what (and who) stands in the way of prioritization.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Give teammates the lightest obligation possible. Start message threads with an indication of the workload it entails (e.g. Review, Decision, Question, FYI) so they can prioritize their tasks as needed.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Set reminders or snooze periods on conversations &mdash; and communicate them &mdash; so your follow-up is timely and nudges don&rsquo;t come across as surprising.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Tag coworkers on the specific sections of a task or document where their participation is needed; avoid forcing them to digest extraneous information just because their role is unclear. If tagging isn&rsquo;t available, bold the coworkers&rsquo; names or add an action item section where participants can see what role they&rsquo;re playing.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Use work hubs to cross-link and cross-reference information between applications, and ensure some macro layer or master document always serves as the source of truth for work that might be splintered or duplicated across multiple applications.</li>
</ul>
Notice how many of these tricks don&rsquo;t simply become individual features of next-gen collaboration tools, but rather that the underlying focus on optimizing exposure drives new user experiences like targeted notifications, activity feeds, and document access history. The continuous optimization of such platforms relies on users to push the current UX to its limits, and then venture forward into experimentation on what a better tool could do. It&rsquo;s a virtuous cycle, as long as you&rsquo;re paying attention to it.
Arguably, the greatest takeaway from watching your best employees work around the limitations of their current tools is the gained understanding of what features you should be looking for in next-gen collaboration tools, and where you should expect immediate performance improvements in your org&rsquo;s communication efficacy once you invest in such tools.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Special thanks to the following experts for contributing some of their best practices to this article: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/abraund/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Allison Braund-Harris</a> at Hardly, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/hallieexall/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Hallie Exall</a> at Remote, and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorraineklee/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Lorraine Lee</a> at Prezi.

The collaboration workarounds great employees invent to save time, and how those tricks end up influencing the market.

How next-gen collaboration tools emerge | Qatalog blog

How your best people accidentally build next-gen collaboration tools

9-5 jobs can get monotonous. With distributed and remote work, teams are uniquely positioned in a way that lets them break up this monotony and see their job in a different light. And with this freedom to work when we please, goal-setting brings us back together &mdash; adding value milestones, improving communication, and establishing a connected purpose.
Very few companies communicate goals effectively. The majority of employees, <a href="https://www.hrtechnologist.com/articles/employee-engagement/effective-communication-in-the-workplace-how-and-why/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">57%,</a> report not receiving clear directions in the first place. Remote work often requires an emphasis on specific and descriptive communication, something that cannot be met with a mountain of video calls to replace in-person check-ins. Successful distributed teams rely on transparency set up by <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-lead-distributed-teams/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=distributed-goals&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">clear processes that grow with their organization</a>. One of the most important processes a remote, hybrid, or distributed company can invest in is goal-setting, and how to encourage <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-big-picture-thinking-can-inspire-innovative-teamwork/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=distributed-goals&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">communication around goals</a>.&nbsp;
<h2>Remote workplaces are outcome-based&nbsp;</h2>
In a remote workplace, you&rsquo;re no longer paying your team members to show up &mdash; you&rsquo;re paying them for the work they do. We&rsquo;ve become a knowledge economy, where actual results are more impactful than time.&nbsp;
When working toward specific outcomes, setting goals can drastically improve performance. According to a <a href="https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-goal-setting/#:~:text=Goal%20setting%20does%20not%20have,a%20sense%20of%20self%2Dmastery." rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Harvard MBA study</a>, the 13% of the student body that had set goals earned twice as much ten years later than the 84% of the class who had no goals at all.&nbsp;
Goals are also a better metric of success than hours logged because they provide results. Simply showing up doesn&rsquo;t dictate success or productivity, as our previous working norms had set us up to believe.&nbsp;
<h2>Make expectations clear</h2>
<a href="https://blog.bit.ai/workplace-communication/#:~:text=When%20goals%20and%20expectations%20are,company%20strategy%2C%20goals%20and%20direction!" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">86%</a> of employees and executives cite a lack of collaboration or ineffective communication as workplace failures, and only <a href="https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236567/obsolete-annual-reviews-gallup-advice.aspx" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">half of employees</a> strongly indicate they know what&rsquo;s expected of them at work.&nbsp;
<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-big-picture-thinking-can-inspire-innovative-teamwork/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=distributed-goals&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Muddling through communication</a> barriers has become commonplace in virtual work. For a while, this was referred to as &ldquo;work about work&rdquo; in the business sphere. Just a few months later, the language has already gotten tired.
Communication failures are often compensated for by micromanaging, which is impossible when managing distributed teams. Instead of compensating for failed communication, distributed teams need goals to clarify expectations and proactively keep their team members on track.
<h2>Goals align teammates for optimal collaboration&nbsp;</h2>
All teams need an end goal for effective collaboration, but strategic goal setting is especially vital for distributed teams that can&rsquo;t feed off the motivation that comes from working alongside teammates in an office space.
Your team members probably have a loose idea of how their work fits into the team&rsquo;s overall purpose, but setting intentional goals with your teammates will help them reach their full potential by providing clarity. They&rsquo;ll understand the importance of their work, as well as the extent of what they&rsquo;re expected to accomplish.&nbsp;
<a href="https://intellihr.co/insights/employee-goal-setting/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank"><img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/qQ0wtptQpizSOwHotPRA" alt="When goals are made tangible, individuals are 42% more likely to achieve them" /></a>
You&rsquo;ll reach optimal collaboration when your whole team knows what they&rsquo;re expected to do and can access their goals and track progress easily. Alignment is crucial to achieving outcomes for a task or project. <a href="https://blog.bit.ai/collaboration-statistics/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">97%</a> of employees and executives believe lack of alignment impedes the outcome of a task or project.
By keeping everyone aware and on track, setting goals will speed up your teamwork.&nbsp;
<h2>Your feedback has value&nbsp;</h2>
When you set goals, you&rsquo;re able to <a href="https://qatalog.com/goals/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=distributed-goals&amp;utm_content=goals" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">track each employee&rsquo;s progress and provide feedback</a>. If you want your team to know where they stand, providing intentional feedback should be prioritized within your distributed team&rsquo;s best practices.
Feedback is vital to a productive distributed team. A team member doing their job well can fly completely under the radar as long as they don&rsquo;t encounter any hiccups. You might think this is fine as long as they&rsquo;re doing their job well. The truth is, it can result in disengagement and attrition.&nbsp;
An engaged workforce can result in <a href="https://emailanalytics.com/51-productivity-statistics-to-improve-your-teams-performance/">202%</a> higher cumulative performance. To keep your top team members engaged and at their best, it&rsquo;s your job to recognize and reward their hard work. Goals result in clear, measurable expectations, making feedback much more black and white. You&rsquo;re able to easily see if your employees are reaching their goals or not. You can congratulate them when they reach milestones or question how you can provide assistance when you see a delay in progress.&nbsp;
<h2>Ready to set goals for your distributed teams?&nbsp;</h2>
Now that you know how important discoverable goals are for distributed teams, here are some tips for implementing them.&nbsp;
Try these goal-setting strategies:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-write-okrs/" rel="follow">Objectives and key results (OKRs)</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-set-smart-goals-in-2021/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=distributed-goals&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">SMART Goals</a></li>
</ul>
You can streamline your goal-setting by using a Work Hub like <a href="https://qatalog.com/signup/" rel="follow">Qatalog</a> to make goals accessible company-wide and connecting them to your team&rsquo;s everyday tasks and tools. Transferring your existing goals into Qatalog is simple. You can add multiple goals using the Bulk Create feature, which uses an OKR framework, then assign them to different people or entire teams.&nbsp;

Learn the 4 reasons why goal setting is important for the success of distributed teams, plus tips on streamlining the goal-setting process.

Set goals for distributed teams | Qatalog blog

Very few companies communicate goals effectively. Make sure your distributed team is on the same page.

4 reasons why goal-setting is a must for distributed teams

Our collaboration habits needed a revamp before the switch to remote work. Many of our tools actively contributed to negative working habits, allowing for an <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workload-management-snowball-and-the-meteor/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">explosion of friction points for distributed workers.</a> And goal-setting is one of those fundamental tasks that, without proper discoverability and contribution, can begin to break an organization from the top down.&nbsp;
We can&rsquo;t keep looking through the rearview mirror. Goal-setting is an entirely new game when it has to align remote workers, and completely unique for hybrid teams. It&rsquo;s up to us to connect purpose with innovative teamwork and transparency. That means getting everyone on board with the bigger picture.&nbsp;
<h2>How we think about the big picture at Qatalog</h2>
Sometimes, the big picture can feel like a moving target between teams. It&rsquo;s the nature of start-up work to ebb and flow, that comes with the territory. And because we have a team that spans 24 languages and 14 nationalities, we had to find a way to keep everyone connected.
This is where our work hub comes into play. When it comes to big-picture thinking, teams need visibility in order to create momentum. Without it, progress remains stagnant and impossible to build upon.
Keeping 30 people involved with big-picture goals may seem like a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but the truth is that when everyone has a <a href="https://qatalog.com/goals/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">designated touchpoint that impacts the company</a>, we all feel more engaged with our daily tasks. Plus, opening big-picture thinking to the whole team allows for new, innovative ideas.&nbsp;
<h2>Involve your team in the big picture</h2>
Big-picture thinking is the bird&rsquo;s eye view of everything.&nbsp;
In a traditional office setting, many companies cover the big picture through face-to-face meetings such as weekly all-hands. Oftentimes, these meetings have to consist of big-picture thinking because of time constraints &mdash; summarizing details is extremely important to keep everyone invested.&nbsp;
With a distributed team, we move from physical space to digital space. Collaboration moves entirely to our tools in a combination of async and sync communication models. Considering these tools, we should be more connected than ever before with fewer communication barriers. Teams should be communicating exactly how their goals fit into the big picture across the organization in a discoverable format that improves upon the way we did things before.&nbsp;
In reality, we have a lot of things working against us: hyper-connectivity that leads to context switching, hard-shelled silos that seem impossible to break through, and a reliance on tools that often contribute to distraction.
Bring the big picture back into this environment, and it&rsquo;s hard to provide visibility to disconnected employees. We need to take a look at the crutches we&rsquo;ve leaned on that are hindering collaboration, and analyze <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow">how to bring our distributed teams together</a> to accomplish these common goals.&nbsp;
<h3>Make company goals transparent for the whole team</h3>
The first step to engage a distributed team in the big picture is to make company goals discoverable to every employee. Company goals are the north star. They inform all teams where they should direct their focus. And as a team lead or manager, it's essential to find tools to help effectively communicate those goals.
Creating company goals in a work hub aligns teams and gives everyone transparency into the "why" for their projects. Anyone can assign goals and track progress, so accountability is evident. And if there are questions, team members know exactly who they need to speak with for clarity.
<h3>Give employees space to push back on big-picture goals</h3>
The days of business leaders getting together behind closed doors to discuss strategy and quarterly goals are over. Modern work has brought with it the expectation of transparent, equitable decision-making. And since we know that <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/business-case-for-diversity-in-the-workplace/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">diverse teams are more innovative,</a> we can utilize this when we think about creating company goals.
Once you've started a conversation about big-picture goals, encourage your team to provide feedback. Allowing your team to share their concerns and ideas will make them feel more connected to the "why" and the purpose of the big-picture goals.
<h3>Communicate across teams</h3>
Disconnected teams wreak havoc on production and in turn produce more work to be done.&nbsp;
Unfortunately, siloes are an all too familiar issue when it comes to remote work. When teams have transparency within them as well as the teams around them, they can fill in the gaps and see how their work plays a part in achieving company goals.
<h3>Collaborate regularly</h3>
Prior to remote work, our collaboration practices didn&rsquo;t have to solve many of these pain points. They were just a regular part of our working day, not a major talking point for fixing work&rsquo;s problems. Today, we look at collaboration differently. Not only is it integral to a company&rsquo;s success, but it&rsquo;s also what holds teams together.&nbsp;
Collaboration is important for every step of setting and meeting goals. If your team is unaware of what you&rsquo;re trying to accomplish, you can&rsquo;t be held accountable for the work you&rsquo;re doing. This works on every level of the company. If teams can&rsquo;t collaborate on company goals, there&rsquo;s no point to having them in the first place. Make sure your big-picture goals are <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">discoverable and transparent</a> with the entire organization to allow for the level of <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow">collaboration you need to succeed</a>.&nbsp;
<h3>Develop OKRs</h3>
OKRs are a basic goal-setting framework. They identify the big-picture goal or objective and use key results to track and measure the goal's status.&nbsp;
Before writing OKRs, hold a brainstorming session to decide what problems or challenges you&rsquo;re trying to solve. Then think about what objective you can create to solve that problem. Lastly, identify the steps or key results needed to accomplish your goal.
Many companies have organization-wide OKRs &mdash; such as what the company hopes to achieve in the quarter or year. Company OKRs are great for employees to see the company's overall health, but it's also helpful to have team-level OKRs. You can collaborate with your team on these OKRs to identify what your team needs to do to contribute to the company's big-picture goals. If you work with a small or midsize team, you can also create OKRs for each person. Giving someone a goal to work toward throughout a specific time helps keep your team motivated and productive.
<h3>Use tech to connect the team around big-picture goals</h3>
Tech is not an end-all, be-all solution for remote teams. We now know that a lot of our work practices were outdated, and reliance on tools doesn&rsquo;t automatically fix the systematic changes that exist. At the same time, tools are necessary to optimize your remote team. Collaboration will be slowed down without them.&nbsp;
This is why work hubs work. A work hub brings all the functionalities of your existing tools together under one roof, minimizing the pain point of adding just one more tool while connecting your team, wherever they are. Once you set up your work hub, you can <a href="https://qatalog.com/search/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">find anything you're looking for</a> with a quick search. You can also set OKRs, assign projects, connect with team members, and organize documents from one place.&nbsp;

How to connect your distributed team around big picture goals

Improve big picture thinking | Qatalog blog

Goal-setting is an entirely new game when it has to align remote workers, and it’s up to us to connect purpose with innovative teamwork and transparency.

How big-picture thinking can inspire innovative teamwork

The workplace is now bursting at the seams with project management software. Tools including Asana, Trello, JIRA, ClickUp, and Basecamp have changed how we work, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=project-mangement-work-hub&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">enabling collaboration and remote project management</a>. Yet, these project tools have brought their fair share of challenges, too.&nbsp;
According to the <a href="https://qatalog.com/remote-work-report/index.html?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=remote-work-report&amp;utm_term=2021&amp;utm_content=report" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">2021 GitLab Remote Work Report</a>, although employees are seemingly satisfied with personal productivity, they report muddling through a labyrinth of tools and uncertainty about what their colleagues are doing. We have so many solutions for remote project management, and all of them are utilized within one organization. The digital workplace is becoming fragmented and harder to navigate, while interdependencies between workers and teams are becoming too complex to follow.
There is a remedy to this fragmented world. Let&rsquo;s look at why project management tools aren&rsquo;t doing all they promise and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-digital-workspace/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=project-mangement-work-hub&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">how a work hub</a> can eliminate the chaos of having too many tools within one organization.
<h2>What is project management software?</h2>
First, what is a project management tool, and why are businesses crazy about them?
These tools help you plan, organize, and execute projects of all different types. They often allow you to <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workplace-search-tools-vs-work-hub/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=project-mangement-work-hub&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">attach documents and resources from other applications</a> in order to streamline a zoomed-out view of your project.&nbsp;
The capabilities of each project management software differ for the teams they are created for. This is the benefit of having a multitude of project management tools on the market &mdash; if you search hard enough, you can find the perfect fit for your engineering, marketing, and sales teams. However, these tools don&rsquo;t speak the same language, spiraling into organizational silos (something we&rsquo;ll get to later).
<h2>Best project management software for distributed teams in 2021</h2>
The best project management software for your team will depend on workflow needs and specific use cases. Each tool offers different functionality benefits &mdash; some with competitors that solve similar friction points.&nbsp;
Before you go on to search &ldquo;Asana vs Trello&rdquo; or &ldquo;Trello vs Jira&rdquo; into Google, here&rsquo;s what our team at Qatalog has to say about our favorite project management tools.
<h3>1. Asana</h3>
<blockquote>
&ldquo;Asana was the glue that held a few of my teams together. It was my favorite of the project management tools I&rsquo;ve used, because it allowed me to see my team&rsquo;s progress and keep up with what they were doing. The interface was very usable, and I always enjoy the ability to color-code my content calendars. For a marketing team, it&rsquo;s an excellent choice for project management.&rdquo;
</blockquote>
Isabelle Hahn, Content Marketing
<h3>2. Trello&nbsp;</h3>
<blockquote>
&ldquo;Trello was the first organizational tool I got introduced to in the workplace. By using lists to keep track of tasks, projects, and goals &ndash; I could see what my team had completed, were currently working on, and what was in the backlog. Its quick access gave me visibility of my team&rsquo;s workstreams and their main tasks of that week.&rdquo;&nbsp;
</blockquote>
Sarah Houghton, Brand Designer
<h3>3. Clubhouse </h3>
<blockquote>
&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think that I&rsquo;d be able to keep up with all requested work and growth experiments without Clubhouse. Being able to quickly set tickets to different projects and see the progression of an epic helps keep my team and I organized and efficient.&rdquo;'
</blockquote>
Kameron Tanseli, Growth Engineer
<h3>4. Jira</h3>
<blockquote>
&ldquo;I had used Jira for more than five years across different businesses I worked with: Spark Networks, Foodpanda, Kayak/momondo. The use cases for me as an SEO manager were limited to raising, prioritizing, and monitoring technical SEO tasks for engineering teams. It served the purpose, and for a long time, there were no real alternatives. When I joined Skyscanner&rsquo;s growth team, we used JIRA in combination with Trello to run sprints. Trello&rsquo;s backlog was groomed and prioritized every month. The process worked but was far from perfect and required a great deal of duplication.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
JIRA is a great tool, but it was built with engineers as its key target audience and despite all the recent innovation, I think remains a fairly complex tool to grasp outside of engineering.&rdquo;&nbsp;
</blockquote>
Liliya Rudakova, Technical Marketing&nbsp;
<h2>Where project management tools are causing problems</h2>
With over <a href="https://learn.g2.com/saturation-saas-industry" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">300 software offerings available</a> in the project management niche &mdash; and with this number <a href="https://www.blissfully.com/saas-trends/2020-annual-report/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">expected to continue</a> its 30% year-on-year growth &mdash; diversity of tools can create massive confusion around accessibility and project visibility.&nbsp;
Within organizations, different teams might prefer various tools. Sometimes to do the same job, but sometimes because different tools offer functionality specific to their role (e.g. JIRA for product and engineering teams). But if the growth team uses Trello while design picks Asana, cross-team collaboration instantly becomes messy.&nbsp;
And if tools can&rsquo;t communicate, teams won&rsquo;t.&nbsp;
Siloed workflows and a lack of cross-functional visibilities are the consequences of crucial project links and resources often slipping through the cracks.
And with project management tool overload, accountability and alignment suffers. 60% of companies report problems with visibility on other people&rsquo;s work. If a single project gets scattered across multiple applications, it can be tough to identify who is responsible for what, and whether the tasks you depend on are done.&nbsp;
<h2>Work hub vs. project management software</h2>
Suppose individual project management tools create and manage tasks. In that case, a work hub is the bridge between projects, people, and teams, giving you a holistic view of everything.&nbsp;
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JhtDKK0AQ2E" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
<h3>1. A work hub increases visibility by finding any task, board, or card from one place</h3>
A work hub is not just another way to visualize to-do lists in Gantt charts or kanban boards &mdash; rather, it connects different pieces of information from various project management tools <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-digital-workspace/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=project-mangement-work-hub&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">to give you the complete picture.</a> When you integrate JIRA, Trello, and Asana under the same roof, anyone in the org can find each ticket, board, or card across all these tools from one place. All that without needing a license for each tool (but you&rsquo;ll still need a license to edit those tasks). You can also use <a href="https://qatalog.com/tasks/" rel="follow">Qatalog Tasks</a> directly. You can assign tasks to your team and project collaborators within Projects, complete with due dates, sub-tasks, and the option to start discussions within them. Tasks within Qatalog are connected to your Projects, so you can also add connected Goals, key resources, and important updates.
<h3>2. Track project activity transparently across multiple project management tools</h3>
Additionally, you&rsquo;ll enable a feed of which activities each member has done across each project management tool. For example, you can track if the design team has created new boards on Asana or if the product manager has moved some Trello cards &mdash; all in real-time. This becomes especially useful when you have cross-functional projects and your teams are fully remote.&nbsp;
<h3>3. Go beyond task management to get a holistic view of every project&nbsp;</h3>
In a work hub, you can also create project hubs. A project hub is a dashboard with all the core elements tightly linked together &mdash; project members, project links, related Slack channel, and project status updates. Asana, Jira, and Trello files live there as project links &mdash; and when you publish an update in a specific project, it gets automatically routed to each members&rsquo; inbox and the connected Slack channel.&nbsp;
<h2>Why you need a work hub to live with your project management tools</h2>
A work hub gives your teams the visibility across projects that they&rsquo;re missing. In one single platform, they get everything they need to collaborate and focus &mdash; and it&rsquo;s all updated automatically. This shared virtual workspace puts all the resources, goals, and project updates within easy reach for the team to deep-dive into the details whenever they need to.
You don&rsquo;t need to start from scratch. Each team can stick with their preferred project management software. Whether it&rsquo;s JIRA, Asana, or Trello &mdash; you can integrate them all into one central hub and achieve total alignment across teams.
&nbsp;
&nbsp;

The best project management software for your distributed team, and why adding a work hub to project management tools eliminates pain points

Project management software vs work hub | Qatalog blog

The best project management software for your team is likely a work hub, whether you realize it or not.

Why hybrid teams need connected project management software

The distributed knowledge worker has taken center stage, and traditional management forms have already made their exit. Prioritizing transparency and alignment across teams has become vital to success.&nbsp;
In this spirit, goals within a company should be discoverable between teams, as they are the glue that brings everyone together toward a common interest. The most important aspect of goal-setting is that whoever is setting the goal is clear about what they&rsquo;re trying to accomplish.
This is why traditional goal-setting methods like SMART goals and OKRs still have a place within our redefined working world. With SMART goals in particular, the format was designed to keep goals detail-oriented and specific. We&rsquo;ll break down how this framework can work for <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-lead-distributed-teams/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=smart-goals&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">your distributed team.</a>&nbsp;
<h2>Example of setting a SMART goal in the workplace</h2>
Taylor has just gotten a new job as an engineering manager for a small startup that&rsquo;s in the middle of fundraising.&nbsp;
She&rsquo;s tasked with increasing her team&rsquo;s output, all of whom work across different project areas and are located in three different countries. Her team lead has also assigned her the task of looking for a solution that improves team communication and reduces context-switching exhaustion.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Taylor&rsquo;s team uses a myriad of apps to collaborate, create, and communicate. It isn&rsquo;t unusual for her to be in Clubhouse, GitHub, Slack, Jira, Zoom, Google Drive, and Google Calendar all in one day. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-lead-distributed-teams/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=smart-goals&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">As she looks for a solution</a> for her team, she is wary of creating more work to sift through and concerned about sharing data with a third party.&nbsp;
It's up to Taylor to figure out what strategy or tool she will use to develop a system that will improve the current one within a short time. She plans on using SMART goals to achieve this.&nbsp;
<h2>What are SMART goals?</h2>
SMART is an acronym that is used to add structure to your goals. The letters in the word SMART stand for Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
Writing down a SMART goal for what you want to achieve means working on each of the five components, one after the other, until you reach your goal. SMART goals eliminate guesswork, track your progress, and provide a clear timeline.
To set SMART goals, let&rsquo;s look at what each aspect of the SMART acronym means. We&rsquo;ll use Taylor&rsquo;s case as an example to elaborate on how you can use SMART goals to your benefit.
<h3>S&mdash; Specific</h3>
Goal-setting helps us to achieve our greatest aspirations. When we set our goals, we need to be specific regarding what we want. The specificity of your goals should include an answer to the following &lsquo;w&rsquo; questions:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Who &ndash; Specify who needs to be involved in your plan to achieve your desired goal. If this is more than one person, make sure they are on board with your goal&rsquo;s changes and progress. You may have to build out an async structure to update stakeholders.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">What &ndash; Understanding what you want to achieve when setting up a goal is crucial to your project's success.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">When &ndash; Answer this question in the Measurable and Time-bound sections of the SMART acronym. Your &ldquo;when&rdquo; keeps you on-track and accountable to deadlines.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Where &ndash; This question may not have been relevant to some business goals in the past, but with today&rsquo;s distributed teams, considering your where will help align communication efforts. If your team is located in different time zones, it will likely impact deadlines and working hours. &nbsp;</li>
</ul>
In Taylor&rsquo;s goal, it would be ambiguous for her to say, &ldquo;I want to adopt a better collaboration system.&rdquo; Collaboration in today&rsquo;s working world can be sync or async. It can happen in <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-project-management-asana-trello-jira/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=smart-goals&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">your project management tool</a>, in Slack, or within the code your team is writing. Getting specific about what she&rsquo;s looking to improve will put Taylor on the right path to solving the problem.&nbsp;
She could change her goal to: &ldquo;I want to eliminate the chaos of collaborating across multiple apps and adopt a solution that allows the team to either connect these tools or provides integrations that assist with communication across them.&rdquo;&nbsp;
She also notes that this solution needs to be user-friendly, offer enough value for her team to buy in, and protect the work they&rsquo;re doing.&nbsp;
<h3>M &mdash; Measurable</h3>
Measuring a goal&rsquo;s progress means you have to identify the outcome when you complete it. Defining an outcome makes it easy to break down your goal into measurable, completable elements before getting to the next step.&nbsp;
Think about how to measure your goals with evidence. Something your team can see as actionable.&nbsp;
How many applications should Taylor and her team be able to integrate into this new system? How will they measure the success of onboarding and implementation? What evidence can she present to the people around her that showcases the value and adoption of a new tool?&nbsp;
One great way to do this is by adding concrete metrics. She could measure the time it takes to complete a project with the new framework and compare it with the time a similar project took without it.&nbsp;
For an organizational goal, qualitative measurement is also actionable evidence. If team members report less context-switching while using a new collaboration tool, that feedback is enough to measure impact.&nbsp;
<h3>A &mdash; Achievable</h3>
A goal needs to be attainable. It needs to be something that is within your reach, something realistic. Factors that go into achievability are effort, time, and any costs you may come across.&nbsp;
In terms of being realistic, Taylor might have noticed that researching and onboarding a new system for her team may take longer than a few weeks. She wants to be sure she makes the right choice and won&rsquo;t have to rethink it when her team grows. Instead of a one-week time frame, she gives herself a month.&nbsp;
<h3>R &mdash; Relevant</h3>
The goals we set need to make sense and have a benefit attached to them. Relevancy allows you to evaluate why your goal matters. Thinking about all the factors that push you to finish your goal is an excellent way to determine relevance.
Taylor doesn&rsquo;t want to find a solution that improves team communication for the fun of it. Her job is to increase her team&rsquo;s output, and communication is a massive blocker for productivity. She identifies a need based on company performance and a solution that is relevant to that problem.&nbsp;
<h3>T &mdash; Time-bound</h3>
Every beginning has an end. Reasonable goals always have a deadline. The final part of SMART goals is that they need to be time-bound.
When Taylor incorporates dates to her goal, she has imposed deadlines to keep in mind. Her goal for adopting a system is a month from now, but setting deadlines for research, demo scheduling, and actual adoption would be a significant next step.
&rarr;&nbsp;Check out <a href="https://qatalog.com/templates/smart-goals/" rel="follow">more examples as well as an easy-to-use SMART goals template</a>.
<h2>Execute SMART goals with the help of a work hub</h2>
When factoring in all of the prerequisites of a SMART goal, Taylor&rsquo;s goal could read, &ldquo;I want to adopt a solution that eliminates the chaos of collaborating across multiple apps and allows my team to communicate effectively. I can accomplish this by researching available options, selecting one that integrates with a majority of our current apps, implementing it within three months, and measuring success when a majority of team members report a positive experience.&rdquo;
Of course, setting a SMART goal is one thing, getting your team involved is another. Visibility is the key to promoting accountability and follow-through. Taylor&rsquo;s next step would be to share her goal with her team and possibly the entire company to enroll support and buy-in.&nbsp;
With a <a href="https://qatalog.com/work-hub/" rel="follow">work hub</a>, you can build momentum with your goals by making them discoverable to your entire organization and connecting them to day-to-day work. This visibility allows for unambiguous ownership, and the ability to track progress the way it was intended &mdash; with people in mind.

SMART goal setting for the distributed worker involves transparency and collaboration.

Setting SMART goals | Qatalog blog

How to set SMART goals

Our meeting habits are outdated. Scheduling another &ldquo;quick call&rdquo; takes seconds and ends up becoming a business black hole. This isn&rsquo;t to say that all meetings are a giant time suck, just that our communication solutions almost always come back to speaking with someone face-to-face.&nbsp;
There exists a disconnect between the working world and the importance of meetings because we all think that ours is the exception. Yet we&rsquo;ve been bombarded with statistic after statistic alerting us to the fact that meetings aren&rsquo;t getting us anywhere.&nbsp;
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">67% of workers say meetings <a href="https://www.kornferry.com/about-us//press/working-or-wasting-time" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">distract them from their ability to make an impact</a> at work.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">71% of professionals <a href="https://www.booqed.com/blog/minutes-wasted-of-meeting-50-shocking-meeting-statistics" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">waste time every week</a> due to unnecessary or canceled meetings.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A study predicted the cost of <a href="https://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/7-critical-ways-productive-people-prepare-for-meetings.html" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">poorly organized meetings</a> to reach <a href="https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/a-new-study-of-19000000-meetings-reveals-that-meetings-waste-more-time-than-ever-but-there-is-a-solution.html" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">$399 billion in the U.S.</a> and $58 billion in the U.K.</li>
</ul>
Effective meetings don&rsquo;t just happen &mdash; they require strategizing and iterating. Just as you would analyze a marketing campaign or a product redesign, your meeting format should constantly be evolving to allow employees to perform better and build successful meeting strategies.&nbsp;
<h2>The secret formula on how to run better meetings</h2>
Meeting management is a skill that everyone has to build, but hardly any of us have formal training in successful meeting strategies.
We&rsquo;ve accepted the norm that most of our meetings aren&rsquo;t going to be productive, yet we return to them week after week. Understanding what makes an effective meeting and how to create one is an essential skill for any employee.
Most effective meetings meet the following criteria:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">There&rsquo;s a clear plan, and everyone has access to it ahead of time</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">There are apparent and attainable objectives</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Everyone is engaged&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">They produce results</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">And have a worthy cause that couldn&rsquo;t possibly be accomplished asynchronously</li>
</ul>
<h2>So, what&rsquo;s on the agenda?</h2>
You scheduled an hour-long check-in with your team to troubleshoot a project blocker. But now it&rsquo;s 11:56, and two people have yet to share anything about the project. You check your calendar and realize that one of those two people has a call right after this meeting and can&rsquo;t stay on past 12. Something went wrong here, and it&rsquo;s critical that this doesn&rsquo;t become a recurring issue for your team.
According to a Better Meetings survey, the number one choice for meeting challenges is <a href="https://bettermeetings.expert/meeting-statistics/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">off-topic conversations</a>. Setting an agenda with a schedule and detailed talking points is one way to ensure the conversation stays on track and relevant to what you&rsquo;re trying to accomplish.&nbsp;<if you="" rsquo="" re="" used="" to="" simply="" sharing="" a="" google="" calendar="" invite="" with="" zoom="" link="" attached="" save="" time="" by="" allowing="" everyone="" come="" the="" meeting="" informed="" and="" prepared="" agenda="" s="" content="" can="" include="" detailed="" schedule="" discussion="" points="" or="" questions="" that="" need="" be="" covered="" objectives="" even="" links="" documents="" your="" participants="" stay="" on="" track="" p=""></if>
<h3>Share your meeting agenda early and often</h3>
Including your meeting agenda in your calendar invite or email is the first step, but you should also make sure it&rsquo;s widely available through your company&rsquo;s work hub. Remind yourself the day before the meeting to send the agenda around again to ensure maximum engagement.
<h3>Effective meeting tip: Schedule your meeting 5 minutes after the hour</h3>
This scheduling trick saves everyone&rsquo;s sanity, allows for a bathroom or coffee break, and ensures meetings begin on time. Instead of starting a discussion at 11:00, schedule it for 11:05. It gives everyone five extra minutes to arrive refreshed and prepared with the correct documents and materials ready.&nbsp;
<h2>Increase meeting engagement</h2>
We all know what video conference fatigue feels like at this point.&nbsp;
Something to consider: if you sent a survey around after your meeting asking your attendees if it was necessary in the first place &mdash; how many would respond &ldquo;no?&rdquo;
If your meeting isn&rsquo;t building forward momentum, you can&rsquo;t expect your coworkers to contribute. It would simply be a waste of their time and yours.&nbsp;
Now that your meeting has a set schedule and concrete objectives, encourage active participation and contribution. These two factors look different for everyone, so it&rsquo;s essential to define them.&nbsp;
An active meeting participant answers questions, takes notes, and follows along. This could look like unmuting themselves in a Zoom conference and answering a question or simply giving a thumbs up with an emoji when asked. While this person has a positive impact on the meeting, they are doing so passively.&nbsp;
Whereas a meeting contributor helps shape the results of the meeting. Contributors can be meeting leaders or attendees who come to the table with data to share, ideas to offer, or questions that help solve problems.&nbsp;
According to <a href="https://www.danpink.com/resources/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Daniel Pink</a>, researcher and speaker on the topic of motivation and author of the book Drive, people need these three elements to &ldquo;buy-in&rdquo; to what you are saying to contribute fully.&nbsp;
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Autonomy &mdash; Give your employees some control over their work, and have them report out on specific findings at your next meeting.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Mastery &mdash; People want to succeed and are driven to help. Call out someone at each meeting who has accomplished something you admire, and make sure to get to everyone eventually.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Purpose &mdash; Do they see the connection to the greater mission and their role in it? Get specific about your &ldquo;why&rdquo; and vocalize it at each meeting.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Effective meeting tip: Everyone&rsquo;s WFH environment is different&nbsp;</h3>
Participation looks different in every meeting, for every knowledge worker. Our <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/new-way-of-work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">work-from-home environments</a> are varied, and keeping this in mind is extremely important for <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-lead-distributed-teams/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">distributed team leadership</a>.&nbsp;
<h2>Run meetings that get results</h2>
Nobody wants to miss a meeting that is integral to their success, or the company&rsquo;s, as long as they understand and expect it to be an essential step toward progress. Create a culture where missing last Monday&rsquo;s weekly briefing means you missed an opportunity to shine, to <a href="https://qatalog.com/projects/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">take on a new project</a>, or to give input that elevates others&rsquo; respect for you amongst your colleagues.&nbsp;
The secret? Take your typical meeting time, consisting of a 30-minute data briefing, and cut that time in half. Use the second half of the meeting to create actionable steps, discuss the best paths forward, and <a href="https://qatalog.com/goals/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">create a clear-cut goal with a deadline</a>.
All employees should leave the meeting with an understanding that includes:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">What next steps will take place to achieve results</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The deadline for these steps</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Who the stakeholders and dependencies are</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">What barriers they might face, and a few paths through them</li>
</ul>
At the beginning of the next meeting, take the first few minutes to praise and acknowledge those results from last time to increase continuity in expectations and accountability. Everyone will know you mean business for next time.
<h3>Effective meeting tip: Assess the value of your recurring meetings</h3>
A lot of meetings have a historical significance to them and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/virtual-meetings-audio-insights/" rel="follow">haven&rsquo;t been assessed for their practical value since inception</a>. That progress report that&rsquo;s been on the calendar since before you joined the company? Maybe that would be better off as an asynchronous meeting.&nbsp;
<h2>A work hub can eliminate the need for meetings</h2>
With a work hub, you can follow updates to projects you&rsquo;re subscribed to without adding sync time to everyone&rsquo;s calendar. Everything is discoverable &mdash; from goal completion to the documentation you&rsquo;ve been searching for.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Meeting agendas, project notes, and the actual work can connect together in a work hub to ensure you&rsquo;re not using meetings as a productivity crutch. Instead, you&rsquo;re giving your team back the time they deserve.
<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-become-async-first/" rel="follow">Read our 12 steps guide to building asynchronous culture.</a>

In a distributed world, effective meetings look a little different. A few of our effective meeting tips to help you run better meetings.

How to run effective meetings | Qatalog

It’s time to makeover your meetings. Check out the traits of a truly effective meeting, including establishing an agenda, engaging all employees, running asynchronous sessions, and more.

How to run effective meetings — and how to know when to share an async update instead

The workplaces of yesterday are gone. Today, teams are made up of individuals who are remote, in-person, or a combination of both. Employees have moved across the country to be closer to family, others have joined your company from across the globe thanks to new remote-friendly policies. Some have stayed right where they are and continue to commute two days out of the week.&nbsp;
Your team is now distributed, composed of employees who work from all over the world rather than being centralized within a physical office.&nbsp;
They are no longer obligated to show up at 9 a.m. but rather asked to engage fully and be productive independently. A manager&rsquo;s responsibility to their team has shifted as well, mainly to make the former possible for distributed knowledge workers.&nbsp;
Maintaining connectivity and context around work are the pillars of a high-caliber distributed workforce. To achieve this, we&rsquo;ve armed our organizations with hundreds of apps &mdash; Slack, Asana, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, etc. However, our technological solutions weren&rsquo;t built by the same teams, and aren&rsquo;t well-adapted to converse with each other.&nbsp;
The way we work needs an upgrade. As we dive further into the future of distributed teams through hybrid models, it's important to acknowledge the areas we still need to improve. <a href="https://qatalog.com/remote-work-report/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">According to GitLab's 2021 Remote Work Report</a>, only&nbsp; 37% of respondents say their organization does a good job aligning work across projects &mdash; making leading all the more difficult.&nbsp;
<h3>What is the difference between distributed and remote?</h3>
The differentiator between remote work and distributed work is that remote work is for the individual worker. Distributed work is a characteristic of the organization. Distributed work contains remote work, kind of like how all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares.
<h2>Challenges distributed teams face</h2>
A <a href="https://lostfocus.eiu.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">study of knowledge workers</a> from The Economist Intelligence Unit commissioned by Dropbox found that distractions take up nearly a third of all working hours in the US, at an annual cost of $391 billion. This directly correlates to the idea of the &ldquo;hyperactive hive mind,&rdquo; coined by Cal Newport.&nbsp;
The hyperactive hive mind refers to the unstructured conversations on messaging apps and meetings that don&rsquo;t allow space for us to get any real work done. These conversations are born from a lack of visibility, transparency, digital dexterity, and effective methods of communication.
Many of these messages also result from siloed information and limited accessibility to tools or documents. Think about the last time you had to ping a co-worker about a project brief or to get permissions into a doc. With mass distributed work, tools that provide context reduce the need to heavily rely on conversational interfaces such as instant messaging, email, and video conferences.&nbsp;
In addition to these challenges, the isolation of a distributed worker directly impacts an employee&rsquo;s experience. Employee engagement can be tricky when teams aren&rsquo;t connected through a mutual space, and preserving company culture often becomes sidelined in order to deal with the previously mentioned organizational issues.&nbsp;
The bottom line is this: As a workforce, we&rsquo;re disjointed and scattered. We spend too much time context-switching and struggle to get a sense of belonging at work. But there are ways for management to address these problems, and they begin here.
<h2>6 tips on leading distributed teams</h2>
<ol>
<li>
<h3>Embrace a combination of asynchronous and synchronous communication</h3>
</li>
</ol>
A lot of the pains we experience with distributed work come from an imbalance of <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">async and sync communication</a>.&nbsp;
Asynchronous communication refers to &ldquo;different place-different time&rdquo; <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/jim-kalbach-mural-interview/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">collaboration where people communicate when convenient</a>. Synchronous communication happens in real-time, where people communicate with immediacy.&nbsp;
Most organizations rely heavily on synchronous communication. It&rsquo;s what we&rsquo;re used to. But this leads to ineffective meetings, responding to instant messages instead of focusing, and prioritizing the speed of collaboration rather than the outcome.&nbsp;
Asking a co-worker to do a quick Zoom sync on the status of a Clubhouse ticket may seem like an effective use of time, but imagine having more calls concerning questions that could have been answered if the task already included the context you were looking for. No matter how &ldquo;quick&rdquo; a meeting is, they require everyone to be available at the same time and interrupt valuable flow time.&nbsp;Here, written status updates are a good solution. This can be done with any async tool, but there are great Slack bots that do just this.&nbsp;
To move your team toward a more async-friendly model, put them in charge of their own productivity and focus time &mdash; and honor it. Establish flexibility with responses, and give people the freedom to return to a message once they&rsquo;ve completed what they&rsquo;re working on. Don&rsquo;t measure who&rsquo;s constantly online, measure what gets done.
<ol start="2">
<li>
<h3> Prioritize transparency&nbsp;</h3>
</li>
</ol>
Prioritizing transparency can mean a lot of things in the business world. A transparent leadership team could keep their revenues, customer expenditures, and venture capital financing information completely open for the sake of transparency &mdash; like Buffer does.&nbsp;
An employee can add their managers and co-workers to any and all docs they&rsquo;re currently working in to allow for <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workplace-search-tools-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">discoverability</a> and reduce sync time.&nbsp;
A manager can prioritize transparency within their team by encouraging them to come forward with issues, roadblocks, and problems to ensure everyone is swimming laps, not drowning in work.&nbsp;
Teams can post project updates, complete with reporting and links to planning documents, on the company wiki or work hub to allow for company-wide visibility.&nbsp;
When it comes to distributed teams, prioritizing transparency is about giving context, encouraging communication, and providing visibility so everyone feels connected within the company. Nobody is left out of the loop or scrambling to find the answer to a question because it&rsquo;s all been made readily available.&nbsp;
As a team leader, giving your team the bigger picture is a good place to start. Make sure everyone on the team knows what each person is working on and how they fit together to make one giant puzzle.
<ol start="3">
<li>
<h3> Establish engagement practices</h3>
</li>
</ol>
HubSpot&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.hubspot.com/careers-blog/future-of-work-hybrid" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Katie Burke</a> said it best, culture is not tied to location. It&rsquo;s rooted in your values, employees, and mission.&nbsp;
For a long time, employee engagement practices and culture-building were built around what amenities an office could offer you, especially in tech. And yes, free catered lunches, a gym, and fantastic swivel chairs are all things that make going to work a little better. But in today&rsquo;s world, we have to create that environment without having a physical location to lean back on.&nbsp;
This comes directly from how people-first your culture is. If your employees sense that they aren&rsquo;t valued, they aren&rsquo;t going to actively participate in ways that allow them to grow. The value you place in your employees comes back through a feedback loop, so here are some tips to establish engagement practices from the top down.&nbsp;
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Offer great benefits. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/flexible-workforce-flexible-benefits-packages/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Budgeting for competitive benefits</a> shows that your company is ready to put their money where their mouth is. Investing in your employees&rsquo; health and happiness from the start is an important impression to leave. </li>
<li aria-level="1">Establish a calendar for virtual employee experiences. You can either pay for virtual experiences for your team (The Qatalog team recently did a coffee masterclass through <a href="https://www.airbnb.com/s/experience" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Airbnb</a>), or ask your employees to volunteer. If your co-worker has perfected their shakshuka recipe, have them walk through a masterclass of it and provide a list of ingredients for everyone to purchase beforehand.</li>
<li aria-level="1">Start employee resource groups. ERGs are employee-led groups that empower and support community groups within a company. Building ERGs directly impacts your culture by supporting the diverse makeup of your organization and giving power back to your employees on policies that impact them directly, like hiring and community issues.</li>
</ul>
<ol start="4">
<li>
<h3> Celebrate the small (and big) wins</h3>
</li>
</ol>
One of the best practices for increasing engagement and retention is making sure your team&rsquo;s work is appreciated. And when leadership is focused on the wins, there&rsquo;s likely to be less micromanaging &ndash; which can be detrimental to a knowledge worker&rsquo;s remote experience.&nbsp;
Making sure the wins on your team are noticed will also enhance ownership of projects. Here at Qatalog, we post a lot of our projects on the company&rsquo;s work hub, so that everyone can see what everyone is up to. Not only does this allow us to celebrate the wins across teams, it increases company-wide transparency.&nbsp;
Here are some actionable tips for celebrating your team&rsquo;s wins:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Showcase your team&rsquo;s work, or give them the opportunity to do so in company all-hands meetings.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Save time each month to go over what the team accomplished, and any constructive criticism that enables them to grow.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Send a quick message if someone&rsquo;s work has been impactful.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Give your team space and resources they need to celebrate and support each other. On the Qatalog marketing team, we have a standup Slack bot that we use to shout out team members&rsquo; work on Wednesdays and Fridays.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<ol start="5">
<li>
<h3> Adapt to team needs</h3>
</li>
</ol>
A team is a collective built of diverse individuals. Every person has a different style of working, communicating, and relaxing, which can make leading them difficult if you&rsquo;re also spread across time zones and languages.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s a challenge. But it also leads to greater diversity. Teams aren&rsquo;t made up of cogs in a machine that produce great work every minute from 9-5. What could be considered disrupted operations and fragmented environments are actually enriching to the work experience, and providing your company with different outlooks and perspectives that it could have never accomplished if everyone was hired from the same neighborhood.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s up to you to adopt a more personal approach to management in order to have a greater awareness of the personalities on your team. Identifying each individual&rsquo;s habits and routines will help you to build meeting schedules that work for everyone.&nbsp;
Identifying habits will also help you discern when an employee is having a difficult time. If their video camera is off for conference calls more than usual or they&rsquo;re having a hard time focusing, ask them if they need help without making assumptions or judgments.&nbsp;
<ol start="6">
<li>
<h3> Find tech that works for you</h3>
</li>
</ol>
The tools you use to communicate and collaborate with your distributed team shouldn&rsquo;t add stress or chaos to your workday.&nbsp;
In 2019, the average office worker had <a href="https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/embargoed-til-6-26-the-average-office-worker-has-this-many-programs-open-at-once">5 or more</a> apps open at any given time. In 2020, many workplace apps saw an increase of over <a href="https://www.toolbox.com/collaboration/productivity-software/news/10-workplace-apps-that-grew-the-fastest-in-the-remote-work-era/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">200% YOY</a> including Figma, Miro, and Amazon Business. It&rsquo;s safe to say that workplace apps are the cornerstone of workplace productivity and yet, going back to that hyperactive hive mind idea, they aren&rsquo;t working for us.&nbsp;
There are apps for creating projects with teams, for managing those projects, for messaging and video chatting about progress &mdash; and no underlying connection or language between them.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s why distributed teams need a work hub, a place where people, work, and tools connect in a transparent and complementary way.&nbsp;
At Qatalog, our work hub is at the center of everything we do. We log projects, progress, attach documents, schedule meetings, and outline goals from one place. It&rsquo;s hard to believe that at some point, we all worked in a completely different way.
<h2>Wrap up: How to lead distributed teams</h2>
We&rsquo;re all learning as we go. Managing a distributed team is <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/new-way-of-work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">new territory for most of us</a>. And while distributed work has provided a lot of flexibility, it&rsquo;s also led to a lot of siloed work and disconnect that can feel unsustainable long-term.&nbsp;
Here&rsquo;s the thing, distributed work is here to stay. And according to <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work?ranMID=24542&amp;ranEAID=nOD/rLJHOac&amp;ranSiteID=nOD_rLJHOac-zb09bf8fPs0IADqBU30DMg&amp;epi=nOD_rLJHOac-zb09bf8fPs0IADqBU30DMg&amp;irgwc=1&amp;OCID=AID2000142_aff_7593_1243925&amp;tduid=%28ir__ki0otlzuvokfq2vykk0sohz3132xpqdrcffxcfel00%29%287593%29%281243925%29%28nOD_rLJHOac-zb09bf8fPs0IADqBU30DMg%29%28%29&amp;irclickid=_ki0otlzuvokfq2vykk0sohz3132xpqdrcffxcfel00" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Microsoft&rsquo;s survey</a> on hybrid work, leaders are out of touch with their employees and need a wake-up call. The way out is through authenticity, acknowledging the struggles your team is facing, and connecting with each other on a human level to create an environment where everyone thrives.&nbsp;

Leading a distributed team comes with its own set of challenges. Six tips for leading a distributed team in 2021.

How to lead distributed teams | Qatalog Blog

Employees have moved across the country to be closer to family, others have joined your company remotely, others adopting a hybrid model. Your team is now distributed, composed of employees who work from all over the world rather than being centralized within a physical office.

6 tips on effectively leading distributed teams

Welcome back to our Future of Work series, where we speak with influential business leaders to learn about new ways of work. We spoke with Kurt Schrader, CEO and co-founder of Clubhouse Software, who built Clubhouse to make product collaboration easy for teams and organizations. 
<h3>Qatalog: What "future of work" trends are you following closely?</h3>
Kurt: Once we get through the pandemic and everything that's going on now, I think we're going to see many, many companies move to a fully or mostly distributed way of working. The toolset for that had already been growing in recent years, but things have obviously accelerated. Teams need a better way to asynchronously talk about their work and get that work done together, but also need to be able to identify points where finding times to sync is necessary. 
<h3>Q: According to Asana's Anatomy of Work Index 2021, distributed teams found they were using 60% of their time doing work about work. What do you think of that?</h3>
K: A meta survey about doing work about work feels a bit like work about work about work, but let&rsquo;s put that aside.
Any time spent doing work about work is ultimately not getting you to the finish line. I&rsquo;d think that a big driver of this is just time spent finding things and trying to track down where an important conversation is happening. This creates a lot of overhead and the easier we can make it to put key info directly in front of people, the better and more productive teams can be.
The other piece is I don't know exactly how they're defining work about work here, but we think it's very important that there is conversation. The conversations that you would have been having before in-person in a meeting room now could happen, I think, in a better way, in a more thoughtful way inside some of these tools. I think we're learning that there need to be better signals that let people know their feedback is important and needed.
I think what a lot of organizations struggle with in getting to the finish line is simply saying, "This is what we're going to do. The work about work has come to an end and the actual work of execution has started."
I think there can be a real lack of clarity in a lot of organizations about when we should stop or put aside most of the work about the work and actually do the work.
<h3>Q: What's your collaboration tool stack?</h3>
K: For most of our collaboration at Clubhouse, you may not be surprised to learn that we use Clubhouse. It&rsquo;s the focal point all our collaboration revolves around. We also use Slack. Engineering uses GitHub. Product uses Miro. Design uses Figma. Support uses Zendesk. We do some of our prototyping and documenting in both Google Docs and Coda. A lot of stuff we do eventually makes its way into Clubhouse as we naturally evolve and improve it to meet our own needs as well as our customers&rsquo;. 
<h3>Q: What is the biggest challenge for you and your team and how do you work on overcoming it? &nbsp;</h3>
K: The biggest challenge is the same one a lot of companies are facing: The inability for us to ever get together in person. It's hard to have those human moments that you had a year or so ago, and your entire lifetime before that, and figure out a way to connect with people. All that stuff's really hard right now, and I say that as the CEO of a company that has always been about half remote. 
<h3>Q: What challenges do you expect Clubhouse Software will be addressing for its community a year from now?</h3>
K: Right now we&rsquo;re focused on helping product led teams collaborate better in this new remote environment that we all work in now.
A year from now, this way of working will probably broadly continue, but there'll be an emerging challenge where some people will be back in their offices while the majority of their teammates will still be working remotely. We're thinking about how to continue to really enable collaboration in this model where small groups of people are together and they're working with people who are remote.
What's the best way to make people most productive in those hybrid models? I don't think we have a lot of data points there yet, but I think we will soon. We want to be the best tool for not just distributed teams, but for these hybrid teams too. 
<h3>Q: The rise of distributed work has given rise to the introduction of additional workplace tools. How do you support your new customers to ensure successful use of Clubhouse Software?</h3>
K: We&rsquo;ve worked to build great integrations with the tools that our customers are already using, as well as with tools we think they might be using in the future, while centralizing the communication for all the work they&rsquo;re doing with those tools in Clubhouse.&nbsp;
We look to hook into these tools to show the work that's being done, show how things are moving forward within that tool, and then bring the discussion and collaboration and feedback within Clubhouse. 
<h3>Q: What do you think will help teams transition from surviving to thriving when it comes to distributed work?</h3>
K: Being able to go outside and see their friends. Have a beer with someone you like, who's not your significant other, who I'm sure we all also like. Even if it was just a random longshoreman at a bar, it would be nice to talk to people without a mask on, to interact with them without sounding like Bane in the Dark Knight Rises. 
<h3>Q: If you could read an interview of anyone about the future of work, who would it be?&nbsp;</h3>
K: Dylan from Figma. I don't know him, but he does a good job of talking about work, at least from the design perspective. Which is a perspective I like to hear.
<h3>Q: Finally, Kurt, tell us what work-life balance means to you today?</h3>
K: Absolutely the wrong person to put this question to right now. There's so much overlap between our work and home-life and work-life for everyone right now, that it&rsquo;s hard to disconnect. It certainly is for me.&nbsp;
Making sure that you explicitly set aside time to connect with the people that are important to you because it's way too easy to always be working on something.&nbsp;
Let's be honest, there's less and less of that other life out there than we've ever had before, at least in the modern era. You gotta make sure, in a very explicit and deliberate way, to disconnect from work and make that part of the thing you do, every day and every week.

Next up in our Future of Work series: How Kurt Schrader balances remote work and focuses on collaboration.

Kurt Schrader on remote collaboration | Qatalog

Kurt Schrader, CEO and co-founder of Clubhouse Software, has been working to make product collaboration easier for teams and organizations.

Kurt Schrader on collaborating in a remote world

Work communication and collaboration will always be a challenge &mdash; no matter what tools you decide to use. There will be moments you need information as soon as possible and times that you don&rsquo;t mind waiting hours for a reply.
Differentiating and balancing between the two can be a significant pain point for distributed teams.&nbsp;
How do you create a system that allows your team to balance between asynchronous and synchronous communication?
Let&rsquo;s start by defining these two communication types.&nbsp;
Synchronous communication happens in real-time, usually over Zoom, Teams, Slack, or email.&nbsp;
Asynchronous communication happens using tools like Google Docs, Asana, and Dropbox. These are the less immediate forms of communication that allow you to take a step back from the constant wall of notifications.&nbsp;
Rather than relying on one communication style or the other, more and more companies are moving to a model that combines the two. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurelfarrer/2020/12/10/the-art-of-asynchronous-optimizing-efficiency-in-remote-teams/?sh=c7473b9747c1" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Blending both</a> collaboration styles is the ideal way to ensure your team always has the information they need whenever they need it. You just need to find a software that makes room for both.
<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-digital-dexterity/" rel="follow">&rarr; Learn how to develop digital dexterity in your organization</a>
<h2>Understanding effective remote collaboration</h2>
The best place to start understanding your team&rsquo;s communication needs is by reviewing your collaboration tech stack to ensure every app you use fits with how you envision workplace collaboration, whether it&rsquo;s asynchronous or synchronous.
<h3>Should asynchronous communication be the default?</h3>
Asynchronous communication is rising in popularity. It enables teams to grow across borders and time zones without worrying about people not being online at specific times of the day.&nbsp;
The key benefit of asynchronous communication tools is that they allow teams to collaborate without being in the same time zone. It also pushes team members to document everything they do and ensure essential information is readily available for team members and not just stored in their heads.
<h2>Everyday use cases for asynchronous collaboration and recommended tools</h2>
A completely asynchronous company would be a challenge. There will always be specific tasks you can&rsquo;t do entirely asynchronously, such as 1:1s, candidate interviews, or real-time collaboration in the early stages of designing a new feature.
Several ways to use asynchronous collaboration include:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Allow access to files and company documentation using tools like <a href="https://docs.google.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Google Docs</a>, <a href="https://www.notion.so/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Notion</a>, or <a href="https://dropbox.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Dropbox</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Give the team clarity into tasks and projects with <a href="https://asana.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Asana</a> or <a href="https://trello.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Trello</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build standard workflows and processes Creating a team directory and bring everything together using a <a href="https://qatalog.com/company-section/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">work hub</a></li>
</ul>
Your asynchronous tools should allow team members to find critical resources as and when they need them, without relying on messaging or emailing another team member.
<h2>Synchronous collaboration still has a place in remote teams</h2>
Synchronous collaboration tools are just as crucial as asynchronous tools in a fast-growing company. For example, if you urgently need information from a colleague, you&rsquo;ll need to get in touch with them quickly.&nbsp;
Real-time feedback and interaction can help you quickly iterate on ideas, provide fast feedback, and build relationships with your team. These are the core benefits.&nbsp;
<h2>Use cases for synchronous communication and tools to help</h2>
When asynchronous doesn&rsquo;t cut it, you need to collaborate in real-time to get the results you need. Here are a few use cases for synchronous collaboration:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Make meetings more effective with whiteboards like <a href="https://miro.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Miro</a> and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/jim-kalbach-mural-interview/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=collaboration-software&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow">MURAL</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Improve social interactions with team get-togethers on <a href="https://zoom.us/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Zoom</a> or <a href="https://whereby.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Whereby</a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Hold efficient retrospective meetings with <a href="https://www.parabol.co/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Parabol</a></li>
</ul>
With this many communication tools, ensuring nothing gets lost can be a huge hurdle. Did you leave your last note on a project in a Google Doc, or did you send a Slack in the #product channel?&nbsp;
Luckily, there&rsquo;s a simple way to bring together all of your communication across all of your tools.
<h2>How a Work Hub facilitates remote collaboration</h2>
Instead of adding more tools to hold your company together at the seams, a work hub brings your existing tools together, giving you more visibility into what&rsquo;s really happening in your team.
<a href="https://qatalog.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Work Hubs</a> give your remote team a central place to stay up-to-date on projects, tasks, and tools.<here are="" some="" of="" the="" key="" benefits="" a="" work="" hub="" for="" team="" collaboration:="" span=""></here>
<ol>
<li aria-level="1">A Work Hub provides clarity into every project. No need to send Slack or Teams messages every time you need an update. A work hub syncs all of your tools so you can instantly see what other team members have done in the projects you&rsquo;re involved in and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/limited-visibility-at-work/" rel="follow">keep every project visible</a>.</li>
<li aria-level="1">A Work Hub allows more time for deep work. Instead of being disrupted continuously, your team can stay focused on tasks that matter &mdash; asynchronous becomes the default because information is always synced and current.</li>
<li aria-level="1">It brings teams together. Every department can instantly see what other people are working on through <a href="https://qatalog.com/org-charts/" rel="follow">dynamic Org Charts.</a> Find recent activity, important projects and goals through searchable, detailed people and team profiles.</li>
<li aria-level="1">You can find the information you need across any tool. Instead of jumping from Jira to Slack to Github just to find one snippet of information, search in a work hub lets you scroll through files across any tool you use. You can surface information within seconds, allowing everyone to work effectively, even when you&rsquo;re not in a meeting.</li>
<li aria-level="1">A Work Hub makes your current tools speak to one another. Rather than always searching for the next tool to level up your collaboration, a work hub brings the best out of your existing tools.</li>
</ol>
Whatever the makeup of your toolkit may be, a balance of asynchronous and synchronous communication across them will help keep your distributed team aligned, connected, and productive.&nbsp;

Collaboration software helps remote and distributed teams communicate, but work hubs bring teams together across these different tools.

Collaboration software vs work hubs | Qatalog

The best place to start understanding your team’s communication needs is by reviewing your collaboration tech stack.

How to determine the best collaboration software for distributed teams

At Qatalog, we&rsquo;re fundamentally redesigning modern work with the promise of bringing people and teams together to do their best, most satisfying work &mdash; without all the noise. We&rsquo;ve created a brand system, which embodies what we stand for. The brand system is much more than a logo. It&rsquo;s how people experience our team and Qatalog. 
<h2>We&rsquo;re making tech human</h2>
Qatalog is empathetic to people&rsquo;s challenges in their work lives and puts people first. Always. We believe the future of work is personal. It&rsquo;s about flexibility, individual choice, and architecting how and where you work. It's about elevating employees and helping companies think beyond the status quo.
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/PtCPmpwS2a7Plr8uC2pA" alt="Making tech human, yellow background" />
Our illustrations are key to shedding light on the human side of our (tech) product. Our bold editorial style is full of warmth and personality, which creates a more emotional way to connect with our customers. We aim to build more genuine relationships with our customers and connect deeper with their feelings, while making tech more human.
<h2>We&rsquo;re bringing order to the chaos</h2>
Real talk about work today: it&rsquo;s disjointed and scattered; people feel stressed and isolated. We spend too much time context-switching and struggle to get a sense of belonging at work. Our brand system addresses our customers&rsquo; pain points in a relatable, visual way. It visualizes the frustration of too much noise in an organization, too little alignment, and the loss of focus. 
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/ccG4vGhMS6alRqQAXcsj" alt="Qatalog brand system" width="800" height="450" />
We use our graphic system to visualize how Qatalog brings order to the chaos by aligning disconnected individuals and silos in an organization &mdash; and working in harmony.
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/NZDK12WdTa4FmMK5Rpkg" alt="Qatalog ads on black background" />
The bound shape becomes united and full of potential. And bringing all of the brand elements together creates unlimited possibilities of execution. From the highly graphic system to the bold color palette, our brand system is ownable, memorable, and slick. 
<h2>We&rsquo;re different, consistently</h2>
Qatalog stands for a new way of work, and our brand system is a manifestation of our bold point of view. It cuts through the noise and helps us to differentiate in a market with lots going on. We aim to also inspire customers by demonstrating our willingness to go against the grain.
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/SKPYwkPTxaW5BIcyXWgM" alt="Qatalog product design" />
Our brand system translates into a powerful product design system. The consistent experience across our marketing touchpoints and the product itself builds trust. Throughout, we champion authenticity, originality, and expressiveness because it's what helps us &mdash; and our customers &mdash; stand out. 
<h2>We&rsquo;re design-obsessive</h2>
Design is one of Qatalog&rsquo;s superpowers. Our product user interface is carefully crafted to lower cognitive weight and create effortless experiences. Qatalog has a design-forward culture, with a team obsessed with the design and science of work. Whenever we talk about design, we&rsquo;re not talking about making things look pretty. We mean taking a designer&rsquo;s approach to product development that ensures everything we create responds to real human needs and truly serves to make work, work. 
<h2>We&rsquo;re always making improvements</h2>
Design work is never over. Our brand system gives us guidelines, but our customers are who we prioritize over everything else. Once we launch a design into the world, whether it be a paid Facebook ad or an update to our user interface, we sit back, watch, listen, and learn to figure out what could have been done better. We&rsquo;re always listening to feedback and looking for ways to advance our system, so let us know what you think.&nbsp;
Note: Our in-house design and brand team collaborated on the brand system together with <a href="https://www.metalab.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">MetaLab</a>.

At Qatalog, we have a design-forward culture, with a team obsessed with the design and science of work.

How Qatalog built a brand system | Qatalog Blog

How our design team built Qatalog's brand system

The distributed working model is here to stay, even if working from home may not be. With the Covid-stimulated shift to working from home came a need for companies to immediately change how they work across their people, tools, and processes. And even if companies go back to an office, a lot of the changes they&rsquo;ve made will remain.&nbsp;
Supported by a flood of distributed working content, tools and resources over the past few months, these changes will have a long-term effect on creating healthier organizations. The fundamental issues companies have with communication and collaboration have existed for years. The distributed model has just accelerated their exposure, magnified their impact&mdash;and forced companies to address them. The muscles being built to strengthen communication and collaboration will be net positive whether companies stay the course or go back to their cubicles.&nbsp;
When change is in the air, so is new software. For every pain point created by today's environment (I will not say &ldquo;the new normal&rdquo;) a new software product launched. The velocity of this innovation has been nothing short of incredible. As for the actual impact on productivity&mdash;the jury is still out.
We may have a window into someone&rsquo;s home office or wall art, but we&rsquo;re actually losing visibility at work with this influx of new noise. The large number of tools approaching visibility through their own lens is actually creating increased opaqueness around who people are, what they&rsquo;re working on, and on productivity.
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/Eo9rBe4FRVSFeOSSCZGO" alt="undefined" />
<a href="https://www.blissfully.com/saas-trends/2019-annual/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Blissfully SaaS Trends 2019</a>
There is a significant cost to productivity when people spend time dipping in and out of various tools and communication channels to find what they need. The distributed work environment presents this challenge: the information is there, but the distributed model makes it tougher to find.&nbsp;
Understanding this is actually a huge opportunity, companies should take this moment to reset how they share and provide visibility, and to rethink the ways to provide access to what&rsquo;s needed, keeping it easily available and up to date.&nbsp;
<blockquote>
&ldquo;If only HP knew what HP knows.&rdquo; Lew Platt Former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard
</blockquote>
One approach has always been the <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-company-wiki-notion-confluence/" rel="follow">internal Wiki</a>. Wikis are great, but in a lot of cases they require someone to manage the content and keep it updated. That impacts both the speed of being able to execute on projects and the speed of decision making. Speed (more specifically, lack of speed) kills organizations, and in a distributed work environment that momentum becomes even harder to maintain with multiple disparate channels for approval and documentation.&nbsp;
Similarly, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-project-management-asana-trello-jira/" rel="follow">project management</a> tools are great, but are often isolated for use within specific teams. What happens if you&rsquo;re not on that team? Not part of that project? You may need information on the project, but don&rsquo;t even have access to the tool managing it.&nbsp;
Products that are narrow and deep add a lot of value to specific teams, but lack the connective tissue to other parts of the organization, and often require education, onboarding, and licensing. Team specific tools require other parts of the organization to &ldquo;push&rdquo; into those platforms to find the information they need. There needs to be an inherent pull from these tools to provide visibility into what is most important, to the right person, at the right time.
So how do you <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/lost-in-the-jungle-of-workspace-apps-2020/" rel="follow">manage all the noise</a> to maintain momentum and get things out the door?&nbsp;By giving people the visibility they need at the time they need it. Here are a few tips to enhance productivity by focusing on visibility.
<h2>First, understand your goals and where they stand. </h2>
Always. So often teams have limited visibility around the impact of their daily work to a company's overarching goals. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-write-okrs/" rel="follow">OKRs are a great vehicle</a> but (let&rsquo;s be honest) they&rsquo;re usually updated about an hour before the quarterly review meeting. Goals need to be a living and breathing part of a distributed organization.&nbsp;
Make them clear and vibrant &mdash; goals around principles and behavioral expectations, goals around activities and how people should be spending their time, and overarching business goals of the company. OKRs can fall short by not specifying behaviors and activities that are expected to support the broader goals. Define your goals, break them down, and manage them&mdash;weekly.
<blockquote>
&ldquo;We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.&rdquo; Robert Brault
</blockquote>
<h2>Second, understand your organization.</h2>
It seems obvious, but simple things like org charts are an underserved and underutilized tool in most organizations. And they are a tool. Especially in a distributed world, it is increasingly important to understand who people are, where they sit in an organization and who they report to. Heck, even understanding where you need to go when there are issues, and who can help you to unblock or fix a situation can hugely increase productivity.&nbsp;
And with new employees coming and going, it&rsquo;s powerful to be able to maintain orientation around the people and teams involved with certain initiatives. Now it&rsquo;s even more important to get context around the individual when you don&rsquo;t see them in a physical world. Your org chart needs to be personal and a resource to build connections across a distributed organization.&nbsp;
<h2>Third, create a source of truth to centralize what people are working on.</h2>
Everyone starts their day in a different way, looking at different tools and communication avenues to understand where they should focus their day. Think about the number of places people go to start their day&mdash;email, Slack, project management tools, Salesforce, etc.&mdash;how do you prioritize? How do you get that finger on the pulse of where things stand? Communication tools are great (for communicating), but starting your day in email or a chat tool creates more noise and leaves it up to the user to distill what&rsquo;s important and where they need to focus.&nbsp;
Make it easier for people&mdash;especially managers. Good managers and leaders should operate at 100 feet, and then know where/when/how to dive deep into a particular issue. Create a compass through a central view that highlights where they need to spend their time at the 10 foot level, and provide feedback. And it needs to be the right feedback at the right time, given the stage of the project.&nbsp;
<blockquote>
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s really important, if you&rsquo;re not on the (project) team, knowing where they&rsquo;re at can help you adjust the feedback you give.&rdquo; Jean-Michel Lemieux, CTO of Shopify
</blockquote>
<h2>Fourth, distill the noise. </h2>
With so much communication through so many tools, you need a way to cut through the noise associated with your people and projects across an organization in order to understand what&rsquo;s important and updated.&nbsp;
The communication vehicles in a distributed world are almost too good. There are so many ways to connect with people and get updates that it creates clutter and chaos. Distributed companies <a href="https://qatalog.com/templates/ceo-company-update/" rel="follow">need a way to cut through that noise</a>, limit the distractions and prioritize. And they need to create a way to reward people for knowing that their message was received. This enhances a culture of progress and accountability, versus purely reporting. Who has read your update, when, and what is their reaction?&nbsp;
Companies need to move away from this concept of using communication tools to create a digital watercooler. Things move too fast and in too many directions for a messaging tool to be a true forum for innovation and collaboration that is vibrant, accessible and updated. Rethink how you manage communication and drive a culture that is based on focused feedback and engagement on what people are working on.
The gift of the current distributed world is the proliferation of so many tools to communicate and collaborate. It&rsquo;s also the challenge. The sheer number of touchpoints and resources that require human interaction to derive value can undercut the worth of each one. When companies are evaluating their &ldquo;new way of working&rdquo; they need to evaluate the work required to make their tools valuable in terms of providing visibility, while limiting the need to update and connect, so that people can focus on what they need to do. The work.&nbsp;
<blockquote>
&ldquo;You cannot mandate productivity. You must provide the tools to let people become their best.&rdquo;&nbsp; Steve Jobs
</blockquote>

How do you manage all the noise to get things out the door? By giving people the visibility they need at the time they need it. Read in our blog.

Four ways to enhance visibility for your teams | Qatalog

The distributed working model is here to stay, even if working from home may not be. With the Covid-stimulated shift to working from home came a need for companies to immediately change how they work across their people, tools, and processes. And even if companies go back to an office, ...

Four ways to enhance visibility for your teams

As of early 2020, remote working is no longer a privilege, but a necessity. With only <a href="https://www.capterra.co.uk/blog/1471/key-takeaways-from-uk-going-remote" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">31% of UK businesses</a> having the right technology and tools to start working remotely, the remainder 69% had to figure out overnight how to move their operations off-premise.
This is no easy feat.
How can businesses manage the shock of an entirely new way of working, while keeping performance, productivity and collaboration high?
In this article, we will discuss the capabilities your team needs to successfully work remotely.
<h1>How efficient is remote working?</h1>
It&rsquo;s hard shaking off decades of office-based work. When you&rsquo;re used to having an office culture and building relationships through informal discussions, it can be difficult to adapt to remote working.
As such, it might be counterintuitive at first to learn that there are more benefits to remote working than downsides. A number of pre-COVID studies highlight some impressive numbers:
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Cost savings:fewer and smaller offices can bring costs down considerably by lowering rent, maintenance staff, utility bills, and taxes. A study concluded <a href="https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/a-2-year-stanford-study-shows-astonishing-productivity-boost-of-working-from-home.html" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">a $2000 saving</a> per remote employee.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">No more commute: workers gain back <a href="https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/a-2-year-stanford-study-shows-astonishing-productivity-boost-of-working-from-home.html" rel="follow">a considerable amount of&nbsp;</a><a href="https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/a-2-year-stanford-study-shows-astonishing-productivity-boost-of-working-from-home.html" rel="follow">time</a> which is no longer spent in traffic. Lower transportation costs, accident risks and emissions are also beneficial.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Higher productivity: Remote employees work <a href="https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/a-2-year-stanford-study-shows-astonishing-productivity-boost-of-working-from-home.html" rel="follow">1.4 more days </a><a href="https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/a-2-year-stanford-study-shows-astonishing-productivity-boost-of-working-from-home.html" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">per month</a> compared to their office-based counterparts. They also take shorter breaks, fewer sick days and less time off.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Fewer distractions: <a href="https://www.business2community.com/human-resources/25-key-remote-work-statistics-for-2020-02299342#:~:text=75%20percent%20of%20people%20who,their%20company%20lower%20operating%20costs." rel="follow">75% of people</a><a href="https://www.business2community.com/human-resources/25-key-remote-work-statistics-for-2020-02299342#:~:text=75%20percent%20of%20people%20who,their%20company%20lower%20operating%20costs." rel="follow noopener" target="_blank"> who work remotely</a> have fewer distractions and focus breaks to deal with,&nbsp; so they can concentrate more without being interrupted.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Reduced stress: <a href="https://www.business2community.com/human-resources/25-key-remote-work-statistics-for-2020-02299342#:~:text=75%20percent%20of%20people%20who,their%20company%20lower%20operating%20costs." rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">86% of people</a> feel that working remotely reduces stress. This leads to better employee retention and increased productivity.</li>
</ol>
The list goes on.
However, simply becoming remote will not bring about those benefits. You will need to make a deliberate effort to become high performing and to compensate for those built-in benefits of office-based work.&nbsp;
Productivity takes work. Otherwise, you will face plenty of challenges which can cause remote teams to fail.&nbsp;
After we spoke with over 100 software companies, we found that over 70% of respondents did not have a process in place for documenting information. A similar number of respondents said that they faced considerable challenges knowing what other teams are up to in cross-team projects.&nbsp;
If you don&rsquo;t set your team up with good remote work practices first,&nbsp; there&rsquo;s no tool or system that you can buy that will save you.

<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/ZUERWzER0mm6sg27vMw2" alt="work from home set up " />
<h1>Remote team management principles</h1>
Most advice available around best practices for remote working are quite vague and generic. These go along the lines of &lsquo;communicate regularly, use the right tools, maintain company culture&rsquo;.
These high-level recommendations become much more useful when they are looked at through the prism of your company. Variables such as company size, number of teams and functions, and complexity of your productivity stack will determine how your teams share knowledge and create relationships.
For example, a 10 people, early-stage startup could have a daily stand-up call, a weekly team update and communicate mostly via Slack. On the other hand, a 400 people&nbsp; mid-market software organization operating across 4 offices in 3 time zones might need a more structured mix of regular Zoom calls, employees 1:1s, cross-functional catch ups, and asynchronous reporting&mdash;and a much more complex company stack.
Once you identify your teams&rsquo; specific requirements, you should look at implementing these principles:
<h2>1. Promote radical transparency on every project and team</h2>
Make full visibility over projects, team goals, responsibilities, and related documentation a default for every team. When everyone is aware of other&rsquo;s roles, skills, and tasks, it becomes significantly easier to engage in productive conversations.&nbsp;
When you remove the need to ask questions such as &ldquo;What are they working on?&rdquo;, &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s she reporting to?&rdquo;, or &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the latest with that project?&rdquo;, you&rsquo;ll free up a lot more time on actual, constructive collaboration.
<h2>2. Encourage asynchronous communication</h2>
Enable your employees to focus on value-creation activities by minimizing time spent on video calls and endless Slack chats. Instead, promote written documentation and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-share-updates-with-your-team/" rel="follow">asynchronous updates</a>, so you can nurture a culture of thoughtfulness and intentionality.&nbsp;
After all, the more you write, the better you can articulate your thoughts, the more you will build conviction to get where you need to be.
<h2>3. Create a cross-team collaboration system</h2>
Create a single source of truth that can pull knowledge from various sources where all employees can refer to and be kept in the loop. This is only possible when making a conscious effort to store and organize information surrounding people, teams and projects, with shared updates, resources, and workflows&mdash;all-in-one place.
<h2>4. Gather shared protocols and processes</h2>
Define boilerplate remote team processes to maximize team consistency and alignment, and promote a culture of transparency and feedback. These could include company-wide back-office operations such as onboarding new joiners&rsquo;, hiring process, and expense reporting. It can also include team-specific practices like starting a new marketing campaign, customer onboarding, design briefs, or placing and approving an equipment request.&nbsp;
The more you have these processes in one place and readily available to everyone in the organization, the more team members will provide feedback to improve them.

Let&rsquo;s look at a few remote teams who seem to be doing all the right things.
<ol>
<li><a href="https://zapier.com/blog/remote-work-communication/">Zapier</a> have employed a &lsquo;default to transparency&rsquo; company value. It helps them communicate in a way which helps others do their work more efficiently. They promote specificity and clarity, disencourage jargons and acronyms, and also use hashtags and communication channels that are easily searchable.</li>
<li><a href="https://weworkremotely.com/day-in-the-life-of-a-remote-company-buffer">Buffer</a> ensure their teams&rsquo; productivity by cascading goals from a company-wide level to team-specific levels and to the individual. This makes sure that all the work which takes place within the company will be aligned with the wider company scope.</li>
<li><a href="https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/tips/">Gitlab</a> have implemented detailed collaboration systems such as preparing for every meeting with a Google Doc agenda. The agenda is used for documenting discussions, decisions and actions. This works for two reasons. Firstly, being intentional on what is expected out of each meeting. Secondly, they&rsquo;ve chosen a single company-wide tool for managing the meeting agenda&mdash;Google Docs, which is easy to use, applies to every team, and can be viewed and edited asynchronously, without the need to share screens.&gt;</li>
</ol>
<h1>Build your remote collaboration toolkit</h1>
Now that we&rsquo;ve pinned down the core principles of remote collaboration, let&rsquo;s look at which tools you need to make it happen.
There&rsquo;s no one-size-fits-all remote collaboration tool that can be used across functions&mdash;yet. Each tool is great at something, depending on the specific problem they&rsquo;re solving.&nbsp;
Let&rsquo;s have a look at what the modern productivity and collaboration toolkit looks like:
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Collaborate synchronously with <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-team-instant-messaging-apps-slack-teams/" rel="follow">instant messaging apps</a> (Slack, Microsoft Teams) and asynchronouslywith emails or wikis (GitHub, Confluence)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Track your work with <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-project-management-asana-trello-jira/" rel="follow">project management software</a> (Asana, Trello, Jira, Monday.com, Basecamp)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Create, store and collaborate on files with <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-documentation-apps/" rel="follow">documentation and file sharing apps</a> (Google Drive, Dropbox Paper, Notion)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Create an org-wide knowledge baseof shared protocols, policies and processes with <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-company-wiki-notion-confluence/" rel="follow">company wiki software</a> (Notion, Confluence, Github)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Set, track and cascade objectives with <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/work-hub-vs-performance-management-software/" rel="follow">goal tracking apps</a> (Lattice, 7Geese, GtmHub)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Visualize org charts, book holidays and track team performance with HR Tools (Charlie HR, HiBob)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Build, automate and scale internal processes with <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-business-process-management-software/" rel="follow">business process management software</a> (Process Street, Tonkean, Next Matter, Kissflow)</li>
</ol>

A diverse portfolio of tools will ensure that your team covers all the use cases you really need to be productive and collaborate effectively as a remote team.&nbsp;
On the other hand, creating a system with many moving parts also has its drawbacks. How many tools are too many? Can you save money on tools that integrate more than one use case? What happens with cross-functional projects and teams, where different teams use different tools?&nbsp;
Imagine you are a product manager leading a project which involves software engineers, designers and growth marketers. They all depend on input from each other and they use different tools. It becomes very easy to get <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/lost-in-the-jungle-of-workspace-apps-2020/" rel="follow">lost in a jungle of workspace apps</a>.
Different teams using different tools might contribute to <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-align-your-team-with-goals-remotely/" rel="follow">organizational silos</a>. This simply means that people in different teams do not communicate enough with each other leading to the following drawbacks:&nbsp;
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Breaking focus: people having to ping their colleagues asking where they can find information</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Wasted time: when a piece of information is not found, and then work has to be duplicated</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Knowledge silos: If there&rsquo;s only one person who knows something, and that person leaves, the information leaves with him</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Misalignment: goals are not aligned between teams, resulting in wasted effort and delays</li>
</ol>
What if there was a better way to cross the bounds of workspace apps?

<h1>The all-in-one work hub that brings all your teams under one roof</h1>
In an ideal world, teams would enter an online workspace that gives them the context to work smart by finding information quickly, tracking and sharing their work effectively, and connecting with their people remotely&mdash;regardless of platform, format, or account permissions.
What would it take for anyone to instantly aggregate all the information they need in one place?&nbsp;
<h2>1. A central directory of every person, project and team</h2>
You&rsquo;ve noticed that as your company grew, everything got harder to track. New projects, new hires, new clients. Wouldn&rsquo;t it be great to have an automatically updating dashboard with org charts, responsibilities, live projects, and document repositories&mdash;<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-keep-track-of-project-links-and-info/" rel="follow">everything tightly-linked together</a>&mdash;in a single work hub?
<h2>2. Search files, messages and projects across tools with&nbsp;</h2>
Imagine a &ldquo;Google of the organization&rdquo; where you can type in &lsquo;product go to market plan&rsquo; and get a list of results that pulls from across Google Drive, Slack, Trello, Notion, Confluence, Jira, and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-documentation-apps-gdrive-dropbox/" rel="follow">more</a>. Each list item comes with a short description and, when clicked, opens the app right where the document is located. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-search-for-files-at-work/" rel="follow">How much time would that save you?</a>
<h2>3. A consolidated channel for asynchronous updates</h2>
The software engineers have completed testing for the latest feature. They can share an update in their team space, and marketers and designers working on the same project are notified <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-team-instant-messaging-apps-slack-teams/" rel="follow">without creating noise</a>. They can then find back the right update without scrolling through endless threads and cutting on unnecessary video calls.
Bonus: the update is clearly labelled as a blocker, so the problem can promptly get escalated to the right person. How many more hours of deep work you'll get instead of unnecessary meetings?
<h2>4. Company-wide workflows</h2>
Imagine you are <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-onboard-new-joiners-remotely/" rel="follow">onboarding a new hire</a>&mdash;you would have to explain your repositories and&mdash;oh...did Jim from the HR team already cover that? 
Wouldn&rsquo;t it be easier to<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-business-process-management-software/" rel="follow"> write down your process once</a>, and have every new hire go through the process autonomously? That&rsquo;s a powerful way to increase transparency of the processes and set better expectations with team members&mdash;while gathering feedback to actively improve your shared protocols.

At Qatalog, we&rsquo;ve developed <a href="https://qatalog.com/work-hub/" rel="follow">a work hub which brings together all these core capabilities</a>
Our platform acts as a single pane of glass for all the integrated workspaces, giving you the required control to manage your remote teams.

How can businesses establish the principles, capabilities and tools to become a successful distributed team? Read more in Qatalog Distributed work blog series.

Become a high-performance distributed team | Qatalog

As of early 2020, remote working is no longer a privilege, but a necessity. With only 31% of UK businesses having the right technology and tools to start working remotely , the remainder 69% had to figure out overnight how to move their operations off-premise. This is no easy feat. ...

How to become a fully remote, high-performance team

<h1>Why teams are still trying to break organizational silos</h1>
Welcome to the new normal. Distributed teams separated by thousands of miles and several time zones, brought together by virtual meetings, asynchronous collaboration, and a myriad of productivity software.&nbsp;
But with clusters of designers, engineers, growth marketers and other team members spread far and wide, there&rsquo;s a very real danger that their goals will become scattered, too. These goals are tracked on different tools at different times, or they&rsquo;re stored somewhere hidden in an Excel spreadsheet.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s too easy for fully distributed and hybrid teams to end up in bubbles, using their own tools and systems and pursuing their own objectives. And this isn&rsquo;t something they&rsquo;re altogether crazy about, either. In fact, 73% of knowledge workers we spoke to have complained about getting stuck in organizational silos.&nbsp;
It is, therefore, your job as a leader in your organization to pop those bubbles, knock down those silos, and build something that will bring your teams and goals into alignment.
So, how do you do it? Well first, let&rsquo;s answer the question on everyone&rsquo;s lips:
<h1>Why do silos keep happening in organizations?</h1>
We hear you. Remote or not, why are teams still trying to break free from these silos? Don&rsquo;t project management tools and goal tracking apps make a positive difference?
The way we see it at Qatalog, there are three main culprits&mdash;and they transcend tools:
<h2>1. Organizations are still taking the wrong approach to goal-setting</h2>
Most organizations take a <a href="https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/top-down-vs-bottom-up-management">top-down or bottom-up</a> approach to setting goals. However, the top-down approach often fails to consider the team&rsquo;s everyday priorities, and the bottom-up approach can&rsquo;t always account for uncommunicated high-level strategy.&nbsp;
These approaches also encourage teams to motor full-steam ahead, in whichever direction gets them to the goal first. This results in silos, because there is misalignment in where each team is along their journey to the goal, and how they&rsquo;re getting there.&nbsp;
The alternative is a sideways goal-setting; <a href="https://www.whatmatters.com/faqs/cascading-top-down-okr-examples/">cascading vertical</a> and horizontal goals. This gives visibility, and allows individuals and teams on cross-functional projects to know the true impact of their work, and it allows team leaders to link their work with objectives.&nbsp;
<h2>2. Setting narrow goals and creating conflicting teams (or people, or projects)</h2>
When separate goals are pursued by separate teams, you can unwittingly allow an &ldquo;us vs. them&rdquo; attitude to manifest. But this simply won&rsquo;t work&mdash;especially in a remote setup.&nbsp;
You need to make sure the goals that you set are intertwined with the right people, teams, and projects at various levels of the organization. That way, you can encourage teams to be aware of&mdash;and incorporate&mdash;one another&rsquo;s objectives. This pushes everybody towards success.
<h2>3. A failure to clearly track goals in cross-functional teams</h2>
As teams become increasingly cross-functional&mdash;but keep using their own tools and systems&mdash;it becomes more challenging to track and measure progress on goals.
Today every growth team is made of engineers, product marketers, growth ops, PMs&mdash;each of them using their own set of project management, wikis, and different synchronicity preferences for collaboration. Given the pace and interdependencies these teams work with, goals could end up easily tracked in silos.
<h1>What are the costs and consequences of goal-setting in silos?</h1>
You can use all the great goal-setting tools (like <a href="https://lattice.com/">Lattice</a> or <a href="https://www.perdoo.com/">Perdoo</a>), but software won&rsquo;t fix a broken goal-setting process. Silos are the enemy. By allowing them to persist, you risk:
<h2>1. A loss of transparency</h2>
Teams will begin to wonder why they&rsquo;re pursuing these goals, and where they fit in the overall company vision.
For example, if a team lead is prioritizing a top-down goal for a product manager, but it has no clear link to the next two sprints of their cross-functional project, that will quickly cause frustration. 
<h2>2. A loss of accountability</h2>
Without a joined-up approach, it&rsquo;s harder to keep teams and people accountable. When the engineers are using GitHub and JIRA and communicating to the product team on a Slack channel, while marketing is deep into Notion or Coda, milestones get lost and goals are harder to track.
And when objectives are met (or missed) due to this complexity, who is held accountable?
<h2>3. A loss of momentum, alignment and commitment</h2>
There are simply too many opportunities for bottlenecks, duplication, and information being missed (or getting lost) when teams operate in silos. 
And if teams feel disconnected from each other and the overall mission, they might not feel quite so committed to the cause. During these turbulent times, it&rsquo;s important to keep the morale high.
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/Thx3oJX6SIC0l3I0bL6i" alt="bruno-cervera-azsk_6IMT3I-unsplash.jpg" />
These issues can translate into significant costs to the business:
<ol>
<li>Fewer projects get completed, on time or at all;</li>
<li>Opportunities for growth are missed, time and again;</li>
<li>And you also miss opportunities to improve the goal-setting process, leading to the wrong types of goals being pursued once more. It&rsquo;s a vicious cycle.</li>
</ol>

<h1>How can you get to a better place with setting goals?</h1>
Before you start setting goals, you need to knock down these silos and build bridges between your teams. To do this, you need to set about connecting the core entities of your workspace: people, teams and projects.&nbsp;
The right tools help, but they need to exist in a virtual workspace that provides visibility, context, and a centralized way to work. This workspace can become one central hub for your people&mdash;a place to share and follow key files and team updates.
How does a central productivity and collaboration hub help you set, and meet, goals?
With a central, shared hub for all your teams, you can bring together key information about your teams and the work they do, giving easy access to messages, documents, and apps.
Naturally, this helps productivity. But it also helps goal-setting, because you can:
<h2>1. Put goals into context</h2>
Everyone&rsquo;s singing from the same hymn sheet, teams can easily search, communicate, and share&mdash;and decisions are made on up-to-date data.&nbsp;For example, imagine joining a 500-people company, and on the first day you have total visibility on the goals of each person, team, and project.
And you can see how the goals interrelate without having to be briefed by your team lead. That&rsquo;s powerful.
<h2>2. Improve transparency</h2>
Nobody&rsquo;s left in the dark about their role in the broader vision. They can clearly see where their role fits, and how their activities (and achievements) are contributing to the organizational goals.&nbsp;
And this is a big plus for productivity, too. When teams understand why they&rsquo;re being asked to do something, they <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245461">tend to be more motivated and engaged</a>.&nbsp;
<h2>3. Increase visibility and accountability</h2>
Despite continuing to use the tools they know and love, your teams are now working within a truly shared environment. Leadership can keep tabs on everyday work, monitor objectives, and hold teams to account.&nbsp;

<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/RNPvcxkvTDeHbblgWk9n" alt="undefined" />
<h1>Grab your sledgehammer</h1>
As we dive deeper into the new normal of distributed working, setting the right goals is an&nbsp; issue that will become even more prevalent and challenging. To set goals for your teams in the right way, you first need to reconfigure how people work with one another.

So grab that sledgehammer and <a href="https://qatalog.com/?utm_medium=organic-content&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=series-2-footer-cta&amp;utm_content=how-do-you-set-goals-remotely" rel="follow">start swinging</a>. Raze those silos to the ground, and make meaningful connections within a central work hub of activity for people and work.

What are the costs and consequences of goal-setting in silos? How do you align your teams around the right goals? Qatalog Distributed work blog series.

Setting goals for distributed teams | Qatalog

Why teams are still trying to break organizational silos. Welcome to the new normal—distributed teams separated by thousands of miles and several time zones, brought together by virtual meetings, asynchronous collaboration, and a myriad of productivity software. But with clusters of designers, engineers, growth marketers and other team members...

How do you align your distributed team around the right goals?

<h2>Why teams need better and quicker access to their files</h2>
In recent years, project management tools and applications have multiplied. Hundreds are now on the market, with workplaces, teams, and employees often working across various platforms to manage and share files, to track project links, and to check project status.
Despite the wealth of tools on offer, 60% of software companies we spoke to still have no visibility on their colleagues&rsquo; work. The same research shows that 7 out of 10 software companies spend too much time searching for information. Links and files are falling through the cracks between tools and teams&mdash;at significant costs to organizations.
The shift to remote working means there&rsquo;s greater urgency to keep track of project links across teams. In this post, we&rsquo;ll look at why easy access to these resources isn&rsquo;t a luxury&mdash;it is a central element of efficient project management in today&rsquo;s workplace.
<h2>Why too many project management tools hinder workplace collaboration</h2>
Project management software was designed to make sharing information and tracking projects easier. Yet, the rapid growth of these services in the past decade can actually threaten how smoothly your team operates.
<a href="https://learn.g2.com/saturation-saas-industry">There are now over 300</a> SaaS tools in the project management space alone. Asana, Trello, JIRA, and Basecamp, to name just a few. And there are a whole bunch of connected tools, such as Google Drive, Notion, and GitHub. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/04/16/a-brief-history-of-it-management-how-saas-has-changed-everything/#542080f532dc">According to Forbes</a>, the average company is now using over 30 SaaS tools&mdash;and often with some overlapping functionalities.&nbsp;
The decentralisation of IT budgets is the main driver of this, with more than half of this budget now managed by individual teams in most organizations. While this gives them a greater freedom, teams are investing in their own tools and software for tracking projects&mdash;without knowing what other teams are using.
As a result, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/productivity-tools-killing-productivity/" rel="follow">a fragmented work environment has emerged</a>. Product leads can&rsquo;t find the engineers&rsquo; task lists and the growth team doesn't have easy visibility on the UX designer&rsquo;s progress.
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/ck03EJc5S8GXrmKhkLqm" alt="startae-team-7tXA8xwe4W4-unsplash.jpg" />
<h3>1. Collaborating within a new work environment</h3>
Unfortunately, cross-functional collaboration already has enough on its plate. Research in the<a href="https://hbr.org/2015/06/75-of-cross-functional-teams-are-dysfunctional"> Harvard Business Review</a> found that 75% of cross-department teams are already suffering, due to difficulties in communicating the roles, needs, and priorities of others.&nbsp;
At the same time, cross-team collaboration is on the rise&mdash;and remote work is adding to the complexity of relations between functions. In this environment, a fragmented workflow caused by competing tools and processes will become even more of a problem. And the need for a more holistic project tracking will become more important than ever.
<h3>2. Cluttered workflows disrupt productivity, focus, and efficiency</h3>
The diversity of project management tools isn&rsquo;t simply an abstract problem. Rather, orienting yourself in a cluttered work environment is a genuine drain on energy and time. By using bandwidth keeping track of files, documents, and project links, you&rsquo;re diverting attention from more productive work, interrupting focus, and disrupting flow.
And employees don&rsquo;t always succeed, either:<a href="https://warekennis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/bridging-the-information-worker-productivity-gap.pdf"> even back in 2012, when we didn&rsquo;t have this many productivity apps and we were consuming less information in the workspace a survey found</a> that two hours a week are lost per head in searching for digital documents that are never located.
As a result, employee time is spent building their own landmarks on this terrain. They create expensive and tailor-made workarounds&mdash;like bookmarks and links lists&mdash;to locate documents across project tracking tools. But these navigation options aren&rsquo;t always shareable, scalable, or even comprehensible to others. Within one context, they may make sense. But when project links are loose from that context, information soon becomes confusing.&nbsp;
This problem becomes more significant as workforces shift to remote. When links can&rsquo;t be found, it&rsquo;s natural to ask someone. But message pings are disruptive, and according to our research, half of employees we spoke to think there&rsquo;s too much noise in the team comms already.
<h3>3. The costs of inefficient project management</h3>
It&rsquo;s not just individuals that are impacted by this sort of inefficiency. Organizations as a whole suffer from the friction in their project management structures and processes.&nbsp;
More time and money gets wasted with every workaround that gets developed and with every band-aid that gets applied. Often, an organization will build their own infrastructure from scratch to link up different platforms and tools&mdash;which means yet more energy (and budget) is distracted away from developing the products and features that are meant to build instead.&nbsp;
And these band-aid solutions tend to miss the deeper point: project links and other resources should be managed better from the start, with quick access to them built into a <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-digital-workspace/" rel="follow">virtual workspace that promotes transparency and collaboration</a> between your teams.
<h2>How can organizations improve tracking of project links?</h2>
The future of work is remote. And, in this new paradigm, the organizations that thrive will be the ones that collaborate and communicate smoothly online. Quick access to shared resources can&rsquo;t be a luxury. But as SaaS productivity &amp; collaboration tools continue to gain a foothold, we need new ways to manage proliferation of project links, documents, and resources across software.
The answer is to use a <a href="https://qatalog.com/work-hub/" rel="follow">central work hub</a>&mdash;a virtual workspace that forms the single source of truth for all projects, connecting tools and people in one place. Having a searchable environment means project links don&rsquo;t get lost in silos, and your teams can focus on the vital tasks that impact your growth.&nbsp;

Software companies spend too much time searching for information. How can organizations improve workplace productivity? Read more in Qatalog blog.

Too many collaboration tools problem? | Qatalog

Hundreds are now on the market, with workplaces, teams, and employees often working across various platforms to manage and share files, to track project links, and to...