5 Common Remote Work Communication Challenges

Remote work communication is happening everywhere, and this is also a must for businesses to stay connected when not working on the same ground. With many forms of remote work taking place, business owners have gradually seen the urgent situation of remote communication, as they stumble upon numerous challenges regarding this matter.

Let’s take a look at the 5 most common remote work communication challenges to find out why are so many people having trouble with this new yet familiar form of communication.

1. Missing direct and emotional communication

Along with loneliness and distractions at home, communication remains one of the biggest challenges of remote work.16%of work-from-home employees say that they find it difficult to properly collaborate and communicate with other team members.

When working remotely, we often see ourselves looking dull in front of the screen with no human interaction or whatsoever around us. We’re alone in our rooms. Sometimes, we’re “woke up” for some online meetings. So excited to talk to your teammates, but we realize none of our teammates open their cameras, so we can’t see their faces. After all, the only “human” interaction you have is through glitched and distorted voices of our coworkers.

Remote work communication challenges – Lack of direct contact

Does it sound familiar to you? If yes, you’ve come across the most common challenge of working remote – the missing of direct and emotional communication.

Co-located teammates have direct interaction so that they can understand the attitude and perspective. These can be acquired through speeches, facial expressions, tones, etc. However, these communication traits are pretty hard to catch, especially through the screen and, in most cases, with a bad internet connection.

The continuity of communication and the emotional interactions can sometimes be considered “minor” when it comes to remote work communication, but it doesn’t mean that they are unimportant. On the contrary, they are the features that decide the work environment.

2. Language Barriers

Cost reduction has always been the top priority for many enterprises, leading to increased demand of offshore development services.For example, Capgemini invested $330 million to expand its offshoring capacity last year. Moreover, CPM Braxis and Hewlett-Packard invested $1 billion in 6 offshoring centers in China, Costa Rica, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Bulgaria.

In this case,language differences becomebarriers to communication in remote working for companies having offshore development teams.This issue can lead to misunderstanding when working with an outsourcing team. Requirements may be very confusing for the tech staff (developers and testers) to understand.

Remote work communication – Language barrier

Especially in IT projects, the number of documentation is huge, which can be very overwhelming and putting pressure on tech staff. Some service providers may recruit language-proficient staff, but even if they can use the language, understanding tech documentation and requirements is another thing.

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3. Poor working environment

When the need for remote work arises, the first thing ever for employers to work on is to prepare a professional environment, including both physical and mental environment. The act of maintaining good working environments is another challenge of working remotely.

For sufficient infrastructure

The first thing that comes to mind when working remotely is perhaps the infrastructure, or we can call it the physical environment. If you’re an employer, ask yourself the following questions:

What requisite technology do your employees need to install or get access to?
Who doesn’t have a laptop?
Is it possible for your employees to work and communicate with you?
For those who don’t have laptops, what is your next action to provide them with the needed devices?
Have you noted the procedures for employees to sign up for devices?
Besides laptops, what other devices do you have to provide to your employees? Are these devices limited to any department within the company?

Remote work communication – Poor working environment

All of these questions should be answered by the direct managers, and then compiled into different categories for the CEO to take a quick look. This process needs to be done quickly, so that everyone in your company has full access to the infrastructure, and no one is left behind.

For supportive environment

When remote teams are at scale, employees are put into a situation that they’ve never been through before. Instead of following work closely and having direct contact with your associates, you are limited to a small area with no one to talk to. And the worst thing that could happen is cabin fever, which refers to the distressing claustrophobic irritability of restlessness experienced when a person is stuck at an isolated location for an extended time.

This cabin fever is becoming an issue of remote teams at scale, requiring employers and CIOs to invest more in a supportive environment. Especially in the IT industry, tech engineers are under great pressure, and venting it out is not only a way to soothe their minds but also a way to boost productivity.

No more direct contact for water-cooler conversation, employers have to create a “virtual playground” for their employees to engage with others. These “playgrounds” can be an out-of-work group chat, a video chat session every Thursday after work, etc. Employees talking about their experiences and sharing is a great way to boost team morale and connect teammates. This will eventually create liveliness in the virtual workplace and improve staff work experience.

4. Lack of training

For IT companies, training is imperative, especially for freshers and juniors tech engineers. At this stage of their career, they need intensive and comprehensive training to acquire domain-specific knowledge and hands-on experience.But technical training can be a challenge to a remote engineer team.

With remote working, training sessions also include a guide on how to communicate and respond according to procedures.With technical training, virtual learning is not always ideal to deliver instruction and practice exercises. The learning process is very likely to be interfered with by network errors, disruptions, etc., which is just cannot be fixed overnight.

Poor working environment – Lack of training

With work process training, since working remotely is a whole new thing to the tech team, the team leaders or even the employers have to come up with training plans to guide the staff about the rules, mindsets, process, channel/platform of communication. If necessary, a handbook of do’s and dont’s, and a list of FAQs should also be included in the training process. With this being done, anyone who has extra questions can look into these documents before asking around the already-delivered information.

Having an effective knowledge transfer and accumulation plan is essential, especially on long-term projects. According to Deloitte’s Global Outsourcing Survey 2022, organizations are turning to outsource to fill human resources and technical gaps, drive value, and provide end-to-end solutions.

If you want to dig deeper into how toget the most valuable return on your investment, not just find the cheapest solution, check out our latestGuide for IT Project Outsourcing in 2023with the best practices to follow!

5. Poor management

Either remote or hybrid work, IT outsourcing, or Offshore Development Center, management is still a major problem, according to a survey of JumCloud with 401 U.S. SME IT decision-makers.

Communication is the key to achieve comprehensive management. People might think of communication in a remote work environment just as conference calls or file sharing. But it is much more than that.

5 Common Remote Work Communication Challenges | Updated 2021 (2024)