How to Harness the Collective Intelligence in Remote Teams?

jaro education
18, September 2023
1:06 pm

When employees work collectively on a common goal, it is called team management. To make team management a success, individuals must have similar knowledge, skillset and data as a whole. This is called collective intelligence which is a crucial factor for the success of every business. . With the rise of remote work, it is crucial to harness collective intelligence in remote teams as well. This can only be done with solid leadership skills and the use of different interactive events.

Team management requires strong leadership qualities, skills and business acumen. If you want to be a team lead, go for Wharton Interactive’s Advanced Strategy & Leader Program. You can enrol into this program and develop leadership skills. The programme provides experimental learning of team building, practice strategies and pitfalls. Wharton experts coach on the team handling with their own leadership experiences so that aspirants can get a 360-degree idea regarding the same. To know more about the course, register with Jaro Education.

What is Collective Intelligence?

When a large group of people come together and share common skills, data and knowledge to develop creative ideas and address common issues, it is called collective intelligence. This concept is based on the idea that when individuals work together as a team, the organisation can achieve more goals than a single individual could ever achieve independently. In the workplace, collective intelligence has made a profound impact.

When establishing collective intelligence in the workplace or remote work, certain factors are to be considered. These factors aid the efficient team leaders to harness collective intelligence in remote teams.

Factors that Enable Companies to Build Remote Teams

The number of remotely working organisations has increased since Covid-19. To make the teams work collectively, it is important to harness collective intelligence. Here are some factors that allow remote teams to harness collective intelligence.

Sharing Knowledge

Diverse teams are guaranteed to have varying abilities and IQ levels, along with varying acquired knowledge and social networks. Working collaboratively allows team members to share their talents and information, which increases the aggregate understanding and ability of the team to create and develop better solutions. This, in turn, can help to improve team performance. It is thus the managers’ responsibility to create processes and measures that encourage remote teams to share experiences and knowledge actively. By encouraging brainstorming sessions and open debates, everyone will get a chance to talk, thereby establishing collective intelligence. Individual team members must also be enabled and empowered to do research and seek out vital information to share with the group.

Employees With a Positive Mindset

An organisation must ensure that the staff they are hiring are not self-centred, dominating, non-collaborative and negative. A workplace should always have a positive and collaborative environment, even if it’s remote. Companies must hire employees who will get along with the rest of the team and contribute to a positive team dynamic and culture. These individuals should further be receptive to working jointly, optimistic, open, and team players.

Team Diversity

Companies must have diverse teams with different knowledge and experiences. This way, they could tackle every problem with unique and innovative strategies. Diversity boosts collective intellect while attracting many social networks and relationships that may be valuable in business. Gender diversity, particularly the presence of more women in a team, can help to boost collective intelligence.

Focused Group Work

Teams may generate collective intelligence by encouraging and enabling team members to contribute their thoughts, views, and ideas about how to solve problems or execute certain activities or responsibilities. Instead of working individually, teams can achieve better results when they work as a group by discussing and collaborating on concerns and tasks.

Social Perceptiveness

Emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness are connected with how people receive and respond to nonverbal cues from others. Team leaders must identify and eliminate people who want to stand out and continually steal