The Future of Remote Team Internal Communication: 2024’s Most Surprising Trends

Improving Internal Communication in a Remote or Hybrid Team in 2024

Here are several glimpses of 2024’s remote and hybrid workplaces and their best practices in employee comms.

Uphold the digital communication etiquette

For Grant Aldrich, Founder of Online Degree, it’s one of the utmost tactics worth implementing in your 2024 internal communication strategy. He claims, “The number one task for today’s remote teams is establishing and applying digital communication rules (or an etiquette guidebook if you prefer). If you want to hear such words as professionalism, clarity, and mutual respect describing internal comms in your remote team, this is just what you need.”

These are:

• Compliance with time zones (scheduling and rotating meeting times that suit everyone)
• Response times (e.g., respond to messages within 24 hours)
• The use of emojis (emoji-full or emoji-less employee communication)
• Virtual meeting rules (e.g., mute your microphone when not speaking)
• Feedback and constructive criticism (e.g., avoid harsh or negative language)

Inclusive language (e.g., gender-neutral terms like “salesperson” or “sales rep” instead of a “salesman” or “saleswoman,” inclusive greetings like “everyone” or “folks” instead of “guys” or “ladies and gentlemen”)

Of course, you can write your unique guidelines on corporate communication with specific norms applicable only to your remote team.

Enhance cross-departmental communication

Do your remote workers communicate freely and flawlessly across departments in your company? Do they actually know who else works with them behind that virtual department’s wall?

Reyansh Mestry, Head of Marketing at TopSource Worldwide, urges the value of interdepartmental communication and notes, “Sometimes, instant messaging platforms like Slack or Discord and project collaboration tools like Asana or Trello are not enough for achieving team cohesion and teamwork between departments. You might need to gather your cross-functional teams and communicate offline regularly during project meetings or team-building events.”

• For example:
  TopSource Worldwide organized face-to-face interactions between the sales and marketing teams in a physical rather than virtual space to improve team collaboration.

Source

What about you? Have you thought about breaking silos across departments and promoting cross-functional collaboration and communication in your remote team?

Leigh McKenzie, Community Advocate at Traffic Think Tank, points out another tendency concerning corporate events. “Empowering remote workers to take charge of event organization is becoming a normal practice among companies. I believe it’s a great trend to support and follow in the future of remote work. Employee-led virtual events are indeed superb catalyzers of engagement, leading to more active and dynamic internal communications.”

Raise multicultural awareness

In fact, fostering a cultural connection and a feeling of camaraderie is among the top concerns for 34% of managers who oversee remote/hybrid teams.
Albert Kim, VP of Talent at Checkr, knows how to tackle this challenge. He says, “The future of internal comms in remote teams is bound to multiculturalism when, more often than not, employees work from home being dispersed geographically and coming from diverse cultures. Under these circumstances, multicultural awareness becomes the first brick you can lay for a solid foundation when building a bridge to effective remote communication.”

He shares a time-tested plan for laying the groundwork:

• Promote cultural diversity and inclusion.
• Organize classes or training sessions to explore distinct cultures.
• Group members from culturally diverse backgrounds into one project team to encourage cross-cultural collaboration.
• Keep your teammates away from stereotypes. (E.g., “The British people are all obsessed with tea” or “All Japanese are workaholics and robotics oriented.”) 
• Celebrate events from diverse cultures represented in your team.

For example:

The Checkr team celebrates diverse events, such as Juneteenth (commemoration of ending slavery in the US), Lunar New Year (mostly celebrated in Asian countries), and many others to boost intercultural awareness and create a more inclusive workplace.

Source

Cool the meeting fever

Are you still on that “virtual-meeting-above-all” craze?

Then, let these facts sink in. The heaviest meeting users among remote teams waste almost the whole workday (7.5 hours!) a week because of routine online meetups. They also report inefficient gatherings as the most noticeable productivity disruptors at work.

Roman Zrazhevskiy, Founder & CEO at MIRA Safety, believes that a virtual meeting is one of those types of internal communication that remote teams should reconsider today. He says, “Five years ago, online meetings were something like a wildfire caught on in employee communication for an obvious reason—the pandemic. In 2024, it’s time to douse this wildfire. Let’s confess. Nearly everyone secretly hates meetings that, in most cases, are set up for the sake of formality. That’s why we’ve formulated our main principle: No more meetings that could have been an email.”

You have a wide variety of other ideas for employee communication besides email. Try Slack, Google Chat, or Microsoft Teams for quick, real-time communication. By the way, LumApps seamlessly integrates with all of those.

LumApps Integration with Slack