With lockdown restrictions coming to an end and the pandemic settling down, the future still holds good for the remote working environment. As per McKinsey & Company, hybrid work environments will persist long after the pandemic is over. As we’re slowly getting used to many aspects of this environment, communicating effectively while working as a remote team is something we are still improving on.

We invited Yaagneswhar, Director of Marketing at Avoma to speak with us and share his knowledge, experience, and anecdotes on how to build and run a remote team effectively.

Here are a few snippets from our How to Collaborate Effectively as a Remote Team webinar, tailored for you.

You can watch the full video here:

Customer intelligence is about gaining insights from your customer behavior. When customers interact with your team, their feedback, reviews, and overall communication tells you a lot about them. This is a goldmine for all the teams in the organization as they can leverage this to give a better customer experience.

Each day we parse through different data points about the users and customers. Not all of these data points are actionable for one team. It should be inferred and the inference should be shared with the right team to take actions. This should be transparent to avoid any duplication of content within teams.

Consider, a prospect and your salesperson are talking, and they answer many questions about the product and the use cases. The result of this conversation will be held between them, and the same is not shared to the team.

If you look into it, the marketing team can benefit a lot from this conversation. They will get to know the pain points of the user base directly, and they can curate content to benefit the same.

When you solve the problem for the specific user, it solves the problem for the similar customer cohort.

The product development team can benefit from the conversation by listening to the same and planning their product roadmap prioritizing on how the customer base wants first.

Democratizing customer intelligence will help align your entire team in the same direction.

The remote work culture has brought the world closer. You are always a click away from your colleague who is connecting from the other end of the world. But with this, comes the problem of quick sync-ups.

Here’s what Yaagneshwaran had to say about online communication – 

Working between different time zones often causes unusual delays. All of us at some point must have faced this problem while scheduling a meeting. The entire leadership team at Avoma resides in the US, and I’m no stranger to timezone management and its issues.

Asynchronous communication concept has helped us to move out of this. It has helped us reduce everyday calls such as daily stand-ups and scrum calls. By going asynchronous, the recorded videos and notes are shared across teams which brings everyone closer to each other’s work.

For example, a salesperson writes about his customer call from the last day — a marketer can share a material related to it which might help the prospect. Similarly, a product manager can share feedback about the demo. This also applies in other scenarios such as learning, onboarding new customers or hires, etc.

Remote working is the future. It is here to stay and asynchronous communication modes have helped to add more clarity to conversations and make the end product more effective. Asynchronous communication does not eradicate synchronous communications, but it makes you more productive, and get things done faster.

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Time management is indeed a challenge. Especially after the pandemic, when most of us were forced to accept a new working atmosphere. There are so many distractions now, and it takes more time to focus on a task. 

There are a few techniques which have helped Yaagneshwar to manage his time. So here are a few of them which you might find helpful too:

i) Prioritize the things you have to do in a day. If you are in a smaller setup, you have to decide what kind of value your activity adds to the overall goal of your organization or team. Based on this you have to do your activities.

ii) You will get a lot of ideas and you want to do a lot of things. Everything needs your time and effort. All of them boil down to prioritizing the activities.

iii) Most of the problems get solved after prioritizing the tasks. Don’t spend too much time in looking for multiple tips

iv) If the activity in your hand adds great value, and you have great clarity over it, then do it. However, if you have to spend time thinking over it, then don’t proceed with it.

v) A checklist is a great tool to put things in order. It guides you through the multiple steps in the process and ensures you don’t miss out on any steps.

vi) Restrict yourself to limited tasks if not it can turn into a hindrance. Taking too many things at the same time will kill the quality of the output, and also lead to burnout.

Remote working has opened up a new channel for interacting with colleagues and co-workers. Earlier, a lot of interactions happened in person, but now we don’t have a choice. Tools are our savior, especially when dealing with processes like hardware procurement automation, virtual collaboration, and even audiovisual setups for remote presentations. Platforms like Audio Visual Nation help organizations create seamless communication environments, ensuring smoother operations in a remote setup.

In this section, we asked Yaagneshwar about his favorite tools, and how it helps them.

1) Slack is the first communication tool for us. For quick updates, feedback, questions, this is our go-to tool

2) Intercom is used for customer chats, and it also helps us in keeping track of conversations

3) Click-up is a great tool for streamlining everything in one tool. We use it for our daily productivity

4) Ahrefs and Avoma are the other two tools I use on a daily basis.

Yaag has promised that he will give Vmaker a shot. If you’re curious about Vmaker and looking to kick start your asynchronous journey, then we can’t wait to have you on board. Here’s the link to get started.

Most of you reading this, Yaag and I were onboarded virtually during the pandemic. The hiring, onboarding happened online. This was the first time for me, and overall it was a new experience. But, I was curious to know what a recruiter has to say about building a team while working remotely. 

Yaag shared some great points with us –

In a broader sense, you need to have clarity over what is expected out of the role. When you are working in a company, you will find a lot of water-cooler conversations that help you understand more about the company. While remote work has helped avoid many unnecessary conversations, automating a lot of manual tasks and prioritizing high-value tasks helps us a lot.

You need to create a knowledge base about the company, the product in the form of videos, and written content to speed up the onboarding. You can use an asynchronous tool like Avoma and Vmaker when a new employee is being added to the team and then listen to the feedback.

It will take some time to be good at this, but with the remote culture all set, we have to work on building a culture on remote onboarding.

Working and collaborating in a remote work environment is tough. There are many pain points that you have to tackle which is a challenge. To make things easy for you, we invited Yaagneshwar from the team of Avoma to share his ideas on the different challenges and opportunities for making remote working more conducive. From customer intelligence to onboarding new employees, the spectrum of insights shared by him will surely help you.

If you miss that, you can check our YouTube channel. We upload the recorded version the next day.

You can also be a part of our Facebook and Slack community to participate in many conversations related to business, productivity, and growth.

It’s a tough scenario as each individual works in his or her own model and the very fact that one has to react to the demands of another person to respond immediately or to enter a meeting at that time is challenging. As we switched to working remotely during the pandemic, one thing that has been commonly talked about is how “Asynchronous communication” can do wonders in improving productivity and also change the way we communicate.

Let’s jump straight into it.

Asynchronous communication is the interaction between two or more individuals, where the one who communicates expresses what they want to share and the recipients process it and reply back as they wish at their convenient time. Asynchronous communication ensures that no two or more individuals will communicate at the same time, either physically or electronically. A little complicated, understandable!

Simply put, communication that happens via e-mails, workplace communication tools like slack, messenger are all examples that constitute asynchronous communication. Whereas physical gatherings, zoom meetings, video conferencing, AI phone calls are all synchronous communication models.

Now comes the billion-dollar question of why we need to move past the synchronous communication model after all these years!

The amount of time spent by employees and individuals to interact with each other during meetings has been growing, particularly in the current work of the home model. Employees spend about 23 hours a week in meetings alone with studies showing that the average meeting lasts one hour, of which 33.4% of the average meeting time is perceived to be unproductive by the attendees.

By now you must have found out the explanation yourself. Through transitioning to an asynchronous communication model, employees and individuals will save a lot of their productive time, not only benefiting them but also the organization as they’ll be spending their time doing meaningful work.

It’s not only the fact that asynchronous communication helps workers and individuals invest their time productively, it definitely helped us alleviate work pressure. As the number of video calls/meetings continues to grow in the new WFH model, workers have started to feel “video call fatigue” or “Zoom Fatigue”

The rise of zoom’s daily active users by 2900% in the 4-month period following the pandemic is a direct indication of how many meetings are scheduled.

Switching to the Asynchronous Communication Model ensures that everyone can get back with an answer at the time we like, which in turn improves efficiency, and workers feel a sense of independence that drives them to perform better. Win-Win to all the parties concerned.

But not all asynchronous communication is really beneficial today. Emails, workplace networking tools, and messaging applications are all productivity killers again. These channels of communication have contributed to a sense of urgency among users to respond immediately when they receive something addressed to them. Thus, in fact, it loses its significance of being the asynchronous communication channel itself.

Slack has quoted users of their app on an average are connected for 9 hours and are active for 90 minutes every day. Emails fare even worse, an average office worker spends roughly 150 minutes everyday reading and responding to an average of 200 mails out of which around ⅔ of them are CCs and BCCs irrelevant to the job.

Mailer response times suggest that emailers have become synchronous as well as the average response time for mails standing at 16 minutes in the 20-35 age group. The answer time in the 35-50 age group is 50 minutes.

Concerning numbers but this is where asynchronous video communication tools come into the picture that helps companies, employees, individuals communicate truly in an asynchronous model. No more traditional synchronous communication that includes video meetings, conference calls or the now out of fashion face to face meetings.

Asynchronous video communication could also reduce if not remove the need to use other asynchronous communication models including emails and workplace communication tools extensively.

Instead of writing an email or typing a big message or scheduling a meeting, these tools let the user share what they intend to share through videos that are engaging.

The tools allow the one recording to share camera, screen or both and not just that do a whole lot of things like screen annotations, virtual backgrounds making it the perfect fit for sharing information with one another asynchronously at the shortest possible time.

Concerning numbers, but this is where asynchronous video communication tools come into the picture that helps businesses, employees, and individuals really communicate in a proper asynchronous model.

No more conventional synchronous contact, including video meetings, phone calls, or the now out of fashion, face-to-face meetings.

Asynchronous video communication could also minimize if it does not eliminate the need for heavy usage of emails and communication tools/apps at the workplace.

Instead of writing an email or typing a big message or arranging a meeting, these tools let the user share what they want to share through videos that are interactive as it allows the one recording to share their camera, screen, or both.

Not just that these tools also enable users to do a lot of things like screen annotations, virtual backgrounds that make it the perfect match to share information with each other asynchronously in the shortest possible time.

Now that the world is increasingly changing, with people operating remotely and teams expanding across the globe. Asynchronous video networking has taken center stage, allowing everyone involved to work flexibly while retaining efficiency at the same time.

Check out Vmaker, one of the best asynchronous video communication tools, and start using it for free(Lifetime!)

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