When collectives work together, they carve out a direct pathway to success. However, when not all members of a team are huddled in the same office, multiple issues arise. Collaboration can become tricky within an online environment.
What exactly are these challenges and how have we worked to resolve them?
Ambiguous Messages
Communication is a vital in a team, but it becomes a problem when projects are conducted online. Emails or texts can easily be misconstrued. Without the help of vocal tones or body language, the messages you send may be ambiguous.
While it’s true that emojis can help, it can only take you so far. Face emojis are convenient, and closely resembles human expression. However, as the internet develops, the semantics behind emojis may evolve. One person may use the “slight smile” emoji with the intention of plainly conveying what it depicts, but others may interpret it as patronising and/or passive aggressive. Static images that mimic facial expressions still lack the nuance that real-life interactions give.
In visual art industries particularly, it’s important to be able to translate your thoughts and emotions when communicating with your team or clientele. Yes, miscommunication could lead to tension with the people you work with—but misunderstanding what the people around you need can set back your progress, creating wastage and delays.
TESSR Solutions
In TESSR, the key features a creative team can use to effectively get their visions across, are the voice message and annotation tools.
Tone of speech makes up for areas where typical emojis lack. You’re able to hear smiles in a person’s voice. Emotions are conveyed much more precisely through verbal speech, and this can simply be done with just one click of a button in our application.
In TESSR review, the section of our app that allows you to check and collaborate on uploaded scenes, you can find an array of size, shape and colour to annotate directly onto your review files. Point out wanted changes by circling, highlighting, or even sketching—we allow artists to communicate the best way they know how to, through visual motifs.
Technological Capabilities
When teams are moved online, chances are that there are individuals who may not have high technological literacy. Members may be incapable of making their way across applications. As technology develops, messenger apps tend to jump into trends to stay afloat in a dynamic market. Interfaces become muddied and convoluted, and this does not help individuals who are already struggling to keep up at home.
This can hinder a group’s progress significantly. It’s important to use software that your team knows how to use or can easily learn how to. Otherwise, less adept members are unable to pull their own weight, which may lead to demotivation and disconnection.
TESSR Solutions
Ultimately, this is an issue that requires team members to seek training. However, at TESSR, people are at the core of all our values. Therefore, a priority of ours is accessibility. We’ve designed our user interface with minimalist principals. TESSR keeps the essentials and rids of the unnecessary. This establishes smaller learning curves with our application—in fact—and to mitigate any risks of confusion, our team provides onboarding sessions with new users.
Lack of Insight
It’s undeniably important to give employees autonomy and trust. It strengthens relationships between managers and employees, while providing the added benefit of motivation to work. However, checking in on employees occasionally to keep track of their progress is important. It ensures that team members are heading in the right direction, as well as identifying the easily overlooked, unspoken challenges individuals may be facing.
TESSR Solutions
Without using a virtual management tool as a crutch, it’s difficult to gain insights into the activity of team members. TESSR has developed a workaround to solve this problem, with our "Insights”. There, you’re able to track progress and productivity by analysing and gaining insight from the provided data. This could help managers reflect on resource distribution. When we have insight into the workload of our collaborators, we’re able to leverage that data to optimise team operations in the healthiest way possible.
There are two ways to view the data:
Tree map: where information is visualised through three colours that represent different statuses: Overdue – Red Due Next – Yellow Completed – Green
Scene list: right next to the tree map, is a list that features the assigned scenes, comments, and achievements of each member a team.
Conclusion
Collaboration, in-person or online can be challenging. However, it is evident that there are ways to overcome the obstacles to healthy and effective teamwork. TESSR, and frankly numerous others, rightfully believe in the importance of it—conveniently, bringing solutions to improve collaboration is a collective effort.
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