“Communication is key” applies to any business, but it’s especially important when working in remote or hybrid teams spread across different countries. If you’re not in the same office with your colleagues, seeing them face-to-face when talking to them, you have to make sure to adapt your communication methods.
Working across different countries or locations means you have to think about when you want to communicate, over which channels, and how you want to get your message across. That's why we want to share 3 tips with you on setting and implementing an internal communication strategy that leaves no room for misinterpretation.
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#1 Be aware & respect timing
If you are working remotely or hybrid, or your company is operating from different locations, that means you might be communicating with colleagues that are sitting in different time zones. The most important thing here is to make sure everyone is aware of the time zones and working hours of your colleagues, and also to respect them. If you want to schedule meetings, Google Calendar makes it easy to toggle on time zones for other locations. If you schedule an event, you can see what time the meeting would start in a different time zone, so you can make sure to only invite people at appropriate times.
Of course, meetings with your colleagues are important, but scheduling them is already enough work in the same time zone, let alone across different countries. audvice helps you move meetings to well-structured playlists. You can asynchronously record, structure, organize and share with anyone in your company. All of these playlists are kept and stored in your company's audio library. If you need to deliver a message to one of your colleagues that is too long for Slack or e-mail, you don’t always have to set up a meeting: an Audvice playlist is just the perfect in between format so your recipients can listen in when it is best for them, and if there is a need for it, send you a playlist back, for you to check at your own pace.
#2 Leverage fitting tools
Collaboration tools are your best friend when it comes to remote or hybrid work. What’s crucially important is to find a toolbox that suits your company's needs. The products you use should complement one another and fit your use cases. That’s why we created playlist templates for various scenarios where audvice can be the most useful, such as for:
Meetings
Remote Teams
Sales
Marketing
Product Design
Reporting
Leadership
Training
Using Audvice in combination with other tools is the best way to optimize international communications. Here are a few that we use:
Slack for quick internal messages
Notion as a collaborative, customizable workspace, to connect your teams, projects and tools
Personio, a people operating system, that keeps all your HR processes in one tool
Google Workspace to coordinate calendars, files, e-mails
1Password, to keep all of your passwords safe and stored in one place
Miro, a collaborative whiteboard platform, to ensure productive virtual team work
#3 Don’t underestimate the emotional layer
When communicating across countries mostly via e-mail or video chats, the emotional context gets blurry or tones are misunderstood or lost in translation. There are a few things that help improve the emotional connection across countries: for example, mood check-ins at the start of a meeting. Of course, this takes up a few minutes, but you can keep it short, e.g. by inviting your colleagues to send 2 emojis in the Zoom chat and explain their current state of mind in 2 or 3 sentences. Knowing how the others are feeling today, having a little more knowledge on the context of their mood, can work wonders. Try it out, you will see that the quality of meetings will increase and working together will be easier, no matter where you are.
But the emotional layer is not only important when it comes to meetings. Especially nowadays, with most communication being exchanged in writing, the power of voice can add that special emotional connection. Hearing another person changes a lot in the perception of the content compared to reading messages from another person. audvice helps you to do exactly that, by leveraging the power of voice. Sharing information with your voice enables you to add the right context to any message, because your recipient is listening to a real person. Internal communication will therefore become more efficient, as ideas are less likely to be misinterpreted and listeners can fall back on playlists any time if they want to freshen up their memories.
Finding the best way to communicate across countries is a trial and error process, and you will let go of and implement new tools and processes on the way. But if you consider the 3 tips above, you are already well on your way to make sure you get your messages across. For more details on how audvice can help, get started for free.