We’ve got plenty of collaborative technologies to empower remote teams.  Some of these technologies function as beefed-up intranets while others offer more targeted functionality.  While I’m not a luddite, I do think that in the case of keeping digital nomads connected, we have an abundance of technology.  The most pressing issue is preparing our teams to effectively communicate.  We’ve moved beyond empowering communications; we’re overwhelmed with email, twits, facebooks.  We need protocols to help us sort out our pressing tasks and prioritize our responses to clients and peers.  We also need to consolidate and keep focused.

I’m not a purist — while in a best case scenario, technology should merely service the needs of its users but in the case of digital nomads, we frequently need to work around the technologies and optimize our processes via the software because we lack the resources and time to develop these tools from the ground up.

Choking on communication volume

Trying to manage all my various communication channels has become an impossible task.  My team’s messages get lost in the flood of everything else I’m receiving. Here are a couple of field-proven techniques we use to help sort out the clutter.

1. Use a separate email address to communicate with your team than you use on social networks/twitter/etc.  This ensures that important work messages don’t get swallowed up in the sheer volume of total pings we receive.
2. Be precise with subject lines in email.  If things are urgent, make sure that that’s know to the recipient of the email right away.  Being concise and targeted with email subject lines is kind to your team and allows for easier searching through emails for retrieval purposes.
3. If things are really important, pick up the phone.  It may sound obvious but emails get lost, ignored or just swallowed up.  Nuances get misread via email.  The tone of a short email blasted off a BlackBerry may sound overly curt.  Pressing or personal issues can be cleared up quicker and easier over the phone.  Teams frequently fall back on an overuse of email and issues fester or aren’t sufficiently addressed.

Hosted Apps

I’ve used Salesforce.com frequently on small sales/marketing teams and it’s extremely powerful and cost effective.  For a small team of reps, though, I’ve stopped using it.  It’s overkill — it may sound ridiculous but for a variety of vertical applications, we’ve backed out of using such hosted software and have cut down on the headache of merely managing the software.

1. It may sound silly but shared Google Apps like Spreadsheet and Docs work really well in certain cases.  For a sales team, instead of collaborating over Salesforce and getting sucked in, we input data into our shared, hosted spreadsheet and collaborate on that document.  You can easily see revised versions of the doc to see first derivative-type info.
2. While we’ve opted out of most other hosted apps (save Google Docs), I like much of what 37Signals is doing.  From Basecamp to Highrise, the software is so simple to use that it’s been a winner for keeping track of projects or contacts for the team or just chatting.  Google Chat has been a winner for us to communicate over chat.  Make sure you have the “Save chat history” function turned on.  It allows you to store chat transcripts in the Gmail GUI which makes retrieving an old conversation a snap.  We stopped using Skype which has a very nice conference function on chat but the software proved to be to big and clunky to use with everything else we’re working on.

Face Time is underated (sometimes)

It’s great to be untethered most of the time.  I’ve worked with people for years whom I’ve never met.  In fact, I’d describe these people as friends.  Close ones, too.  There is no substitute, though, for some good face time.  If teams are local, get together over lunch once a month.  If teams are scattered, try to get together once a year.  It builds morale and lowers barriers and puts a face behing the chat window.

Summary

While the software industry continues to churn out very useable and affordable software to help empower teamwork for digital nomads, virtual teams still struggle with implementing work processes to enable them to truly use such software.  In turn, the software isn’t fully implemented and frequently becomes “just another” thing to manage.  Future teams must figure out how best to communicate working either via or around existing technology packages.  We’ll figure it out but ultimately, nothing truly changes.  Pick up the phone once in a while.