With so many people working from anywhere, effective remote team communication has never been more critical. But with so many digital distractions and competing priorities, how can you ensure that your team is paying attention to what matters most?

In our leadership development programs, we help managers get better at remote team communication by tapping into four key principles of memory: recency, repetition, recall, and emotion. By understanding and leveraging these principles, you too can become a master in the art of remote team communication.

Recency

Recency is all about sparking memory through recent experiences. By ensuring that your messages are timely and relevant, you increase the likelihood that your team will remember them.

Marketers know the “rule of the 7”  which states that people need to see a message at least seven times before they’re going to remember it. This is why you’ll see the same billboard for ice cream going in both directions on your commute to the grocery store.

Once to inspire you to remember that rocky road, and once to get the kids reminding you about what you “forgot” – an emotional tug that might make you more likely to cave the next time.

What this means for your remote team communication, is if something is important, it’s going to take more than covering it in your Monday morning team huddle, you need to keep those important messages in front of them. If your message is truly important make sure they’ve heard you talk about it recently.

Repetition

The close cousin of recency, repetition is another powerful memory enhancer. The more often you communicate key messages, the more likely they are to stick in your team’s minds. Like a catchy song, hearing the same information repeatedly can make it impossible to forget.

Plus, by repeating an important message you’re differentiating it from the rest of the noise. Your team thinks, “Gosh this must be important if they keep talking about it. I’d better pay attention.

Of course, repeating the same message the same way will get annoying, and your team will tune out. Effective remote team communication mixes it up, more on that later.

Recall

Recall is all about accessing information. When your team members have to recall information to answer questions or do their work, they are more likely to retain it. So, make sure to give them opportunities to use the information you’ve shared.

If you’re familiar with our foundational leadership concepts, you’ll know we’re big fans of a check for understanding. One of the many reasons a “check for understanding” is so powerful is that it requires your team to recall what they heard. You don’t leave understanding to chance.

Emotion

Finally, emotion is a powerful memory trigger. When we experience strong emotions, we tend to remember more about our surroundings. By tapping into your team’s emotions, you can make your messages more memorable.

Emotion is one of the elements missing from most boring remote team communication. And, a message doesn’t need to be emotional to be delivered in an emotional way.

For example, recording a funny video or writing a haiku about a strategic priority is memorable because it contains the element of surprise, and silliness, all of which trigger emotional memories in your team’s brains.

Communicate Five Times, Five Different Ways in your Remote Team Communication

So, how do you put these principles into action?

Using one of our 6 concepts you can’t lead without, five-by-five communication. If something is critically important, you don’t want to communicate it once or twice.

Mix it up using the principles of recency, recall, repetition, and emotion, and communicate five times, five different ways. By using a variety of remote team communication channels and getting creative, you can keep your team engaged and enhance their memory of important information.

5 x 5 in Practice

Let’s say you’re a sales leader and you want your team to remember to pitch a new product to every customer. Sending five emails isn’t that much more effective than sending one.

Way 1

But imagine you start with a big town hall where you bring everyone together in person, with balloons, and tell a few strategic stories about how this new product has helped the customers in your pilot roll-out (that’s way one). This has a bit of emotion because it’s not every day that you ask people to come to the office and dig out the helium tanks.

Ways 2 & 3

Next, you might mix up your remote team communication, by making this the first topic in your virtual one-on-ones. Way two, you change this week’s one-on-one calendar invite to “Bring Your Ideas for Product Launch.” This triggers recall, as they think back and review their notes from the town hall, and then when you actually have your one-on-one, you’re talking about it again.

Way 4

Your fourth communication might be to roll out a recognition program, for the first month’s highest sellers of the new product, which you celebrate with a running leaders board on your intranet.

Way 5

And your fifth way could be another way to ignite emotion like you dressing in a costume and visiting each of your remote locations.  Before you laugh and say, “Who would do that?” Karin did. This is her dressed as Leia along with her direct reports, visiting 110 stores across a nine-hour radius, to get them excited about selling Android phones back in her Verizon days.

As a remote leader, mastering team communication requires a deliberate and consistent effort. By focusing on recency, repetition, recall, and emotion, you can ensure that your messages are heard, understood, and remembered.

Your turn. What are your best practices for helping your remote team pay attention to, and remember important messages?

The post Remote Team Communication: How to Send Memorable Messages appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

The post Remote Team Culture: How to Improve Collaboration appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

If you’re like most managers we talk with, you face the perfect trifecta of remote team communication challenges.

First, you’ve got A LOT to communicate.  With so much change, keeping your team informed can feel like a full-time job.

Second, your employee’s heads and hearts are full. The fast pivot, the emotional strain, and concerns for the future all create distractions that compete with your messaging.

Third,  Zoom fatigue is real. People are tired of all the meetings and are looking for a way to mix it up.

So how do you find more creative ways to improve your remote team communication?

Communicate What’s Important Five Times, Five Different Ways

Let’s start here.  If a message is really important, communicating once on a Zoom call is not enough. To get past the distraction, you want to communicate five times, five different ways.

When we work with managers to build their strategic communication plans, we always start by asking, “What do you want your people to think, feel or do as a result of this communication?”

For example, suppose a key message for your team right now is, “Work-life synergy matters. We need to find a sustainable pace that keeps us all emotionally and physically healthy.”

Note: We chose this example because it’s emerging as a theme in almost every organization we work with (including our own company.)

Message: Work-life synergy is important. I care about you as a person. I don’t want you to work all the time.

What I want my team to think: That I’m serious about this and will put actions behind my words. I am a role model for this.

What I want them to feel: Valued and supported. I want them to feel they can exhale.

What I want them to do:  Talk to me about finding a workable schedule based on their unique needs. Schedule some white space on their calendar between meetings so they have time to think. Find a routine that gives them the renewal they need.

Five-by-Five Communication Plan 

1. Virtual town hall
2. Video message
3. Discuss each person’s approach in their one-on-one.
4. Yard signs (yes, one of our clients actually did this.)
5. Care packages sent to each employee’s home with a note from you reinforcing key messages.

click image to download tool

Help Your Team Find More Creative Solutions: Five By Five, in Five With Five

We’ve been doing a quick exercise in our live-online leadership training to help managers get more creative with their communications. We call it  5×5 with 5 in 5. We break the group into breakout rooms of five people and invite them to spend five minutes to come up with as many “realistic and creative” ways to communicate with their teams.

A spokesperson for each group then shares their ideas, and the other groups cross off anything another group said.  As facilitators, we type all the ideas into the chat box so everyone has a visual record of the ideas.

The group with the most original ideas “wins.” Of course, everyone wins, because they have new approaches to get creative in their remote team communication. And have more strategies to mix into their 5×5 communication plan.

Just a Few of the Fun and Creative Ideas That Emerged From This Process

1. Play “telephone.” Start with a key message you need everyone to pay attention to. Tell one person on your team and then ask that person to call one other person, and then that person to call the next down, etc. Challenge them to deliver the message with no distortion. People will pay extra attention because they don’t want to be the person who screws up the challenge. Then have the final person share the message they received in the next staff meeting. This “check for understanding” gives you another way to reinforce the message.
2. Send a personal note to their home (or a thank you note to their significant other, or kids.)
3. Use topic-based asynchronous communication channels for both work-related and human interest conversations (one team was really digging their “healthy recipe” channel.)
4. Leverage your virtual backdrop to visually reinforce key messages.
5. Turn your message into a song or skit.
6. Use Cameo app to send a personalized message from a celebrity.
7. Send the team a tee-shirt about the key priority.
8. Do a drive-by parade with a sign on the car.
9. Use Gifs.
10. Produce internal podcasts.
11. Conduct weekly town-halls.
12. Recognize strategic behaviors.
13. Host friendly competitions.
14. Make individual phone calls.
15. Write Sharpie messages on your arm to show on Zoom calls, conveying “This is how important it is: I’ve practically tattooed it!”
16. Have another leader share/reinforce the message.
17. Use Peer-to-peer messaging.
18. Give it a theme—brand it.
19. Throw a virtual kick-off party about the message.
20. _______________________ What would you add?

If you want more ideas to enhance your remote team communication, here are 101 ways participants have shared in our leadership programs.

Your turn.

We would love to hear your thoughts. What are your best practices for more creative remote team communication?

Executive Presence in a Virtual World: What Matters Now

Virtual One-on-One Meetings: How to Create a Better Connection

The post How to Get More Creative In Your Remote Team Communication appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.