How to use Teamhood for remote teams
One of the biggest challenges in the modern world is maintaining efficient communication and work management levels while working remotely. Many remote teams choose to make use of certain visual or agile tools to help them with this challenge.
Having sufficient knowledge of how to effectively implement the functions of such project management tools in promoting remote team productivity and communication is important. In this article you will find out all about managing your projects with our visual project management tool Teamhood for remote teams in these key aspects: asynchronous communication, visualization of tasks and their progress steps, shorter meetings and avoided waste of time due to more efficiently used meeting time.
Teamhood for remote teams: asynchronous communication
First and foremost let’s take a look at how Teamhood can benefit remote teams by leveraging asynchronous communication to spare time and avoid unnecessary distractions from working schedule.
Asynchronous communication is a term that describes the rather passive exchange of information or inquiries. It is essentially positive in a sense that it allows team members to respond to requests of their colleagues at their own pace and prevents the chaos in their hierarchy of priorities.
As opposed to such direct or synchronous communication methods as calling or meeting, Teamhood offers a solution for implementing company-wide asynchronous communication which is even better than the standard “email instead of calling”. With Teamhood the communication is done via Kanban board – a task management board which in fact can become an all-encompassing platform for remote team communication, performance measuring, collaboration, transparency as well as visualization tool and personal productivity trainer.
This is what a Kanban board example looks like in Teamhood for remote teams and their collaboration:
As you can see in the picture, each remote team member gets a circle-shaped colorful avatar with their initials on it. This way everyone can quickly make out who is working on which task. If you click on a task that a remote team colleague is responsible for, you will see such view:
Here it is important to pay attention to several features that Teamhood for remote teams offers to make the remote team collaboration simpler. First of all, it is the comments below the task. Comments are one of the most powerful tools of asynchronous team communication. They not only allow remote team members to leave their insights, opinions or assertions on the concrete task that these comments are meant for, thus making it really easy to keep track of the new incoming information associated with this respective task.
Due to the highly transparent changelog one can also see the precise time at which a modification was made on this task. However most importantly Teamhood for remote teams allows the remote team members to communicate at their own preferred pace. There is no pressure to drop whatever you are working on at the moment if the colleague leaves a comment on your other task. You can attend to said task when you choose to do so. This of course contributes to increasing the productivity in remote teams.
One more important thing to keep an eye on when discussing the benefits of Teamhood for remote teams in terms of asynchronous communication are the notifications. You receive all notifications to your Teamhood account as well as to your E-Mail when someone makes any changes to the tasks assigned to you or the ones you are watching. What this means is that you have the complete list of things that require your attention right in the notification sector in Teamhood. So you don’t have to worry at all about keeping track of these changes and new information or requirements.
There is no possible way you are ever going to miss something important by accident, because all of the changes are stored in one place for smooth remote teamwork and you can review them anytime. If you need to refresh your memory about what still needs to be done or attended to. In other words, with Teamhood everything is in its right place.
Teamhood for remote teams: shorter meetings
Now you might be wondering if we are not contradicting ourselves speaking of meetings when we just said that Teamhood for remote teams is all about asynchronous communication. However even with a fully functioning asynchronous communication system it is still highly advised or even necessary to hold short regular meetings with remote team members, so that there is an opportunity for live dialogue. Which enables team to immediately exchange their opinions, worries, plans and feedback for certain measures taken and find quick solutions.
One thing that is different with Teamhood for remote teams and their collaboration when speaking of meetings, is that it allows remote teams to spare much time. By using the boards in meetings to transparently review all progress, process steps, prioritize straight on the board and make necessary adjustments.
Teamhood for remote teams makes it really easy to share a computer screen and edit the tasks at hand straight on the board. You can also re-prioritize, add comments, new information, and requirements during this short meeting. All this spares time in the sense that it is no longer necessary to try to remember, crystallize or conceptualize the things discussed in the meeting after it is over. All the ideas are already in their right place on the board and you can start working on them immediately as well as reviewing progress in actionable Agile project metrics reports.
2019 - Present Co-founder and CEO @ Teamhood.
2015-2019 Head of software engineering department at Danske Bank.
2017-2018 Partner Associate Professor at Vilnius University. Lecturer of Software Architecture course
2011 - 2015 Managed numerous smaller IT teams at Prewise.
Co-founder of RaveIT, Eylean, No Brakes Games
Certified Agile product owner and practitioner. Managed large scale enterprise projects as well as launch of small startup products.
MSc of Software Engineering at Vilnius University.
Hobbies: Racing, MTB cycling, Windsurfing
