Best practices for effective team communication when collaborating remotely – with editor Zack Arnold

Olivia Broadley
Oct 20, 2020
12 min read

Top tips from Editor, Zack Arnold

We’ve come a long way since the pandemic first began from “Can a post-production workflow even function if everyone is stuck at home?” to, “What is the point of ever commuting to the office EVER again?”

Remote real-time collaboration isn’t going away anytime soon, no matter the external circumstances that initially created the inflection point that led us here. But we still have a lot of workflow steps to optimize if the ultimate goal is creating an experience that equals (or even surpasses) the magic that happens when everyone is collaborating in the same room.

Luckily upgrading your remote communication workflow only requires a few simple added tools to keep the ideas flowing seamlessly and to ensure the notes get done right on time, every time.

Collaboration Is About More than Just Your A/V Signal

By and large the conversation about remote collaboration initially began with remote media management. To be clear: Media management and cloud storage is not what this article is about. Working under the assumption you have centralized your media in some fashion, the next most urgent pain point has been finding the right technology that would ultimately create an experience such that your clients felt like they were in the room with you watching the live signal from your system. There are some great technologies providing this service, such as ClearView Flex, read my extensive review here, Evercast and Streambox.

But getting a (near) real-time high quality signal out of your NLE is only one of many battles that must be fought and won before we can declare ourselves winners in the ultimate war over whether or not it’s truly possible to collaborate remotely, and more importantly collaborate effectively.

Below I have outlined four key areas where you should focus your attention next if your ultimate goal is optimizing communication while collaborating remotely.

1. Face-to-Face Communication

No doubt everyone on the planet at this point is intimately familiar with videoconferencing as it has become our new normal. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we’re all tired of being on Zoom calls (“Zoom Fatigue” is very real), but when it comes to real-time collaboration, you can’t beat the value of face-to-face interaction. While it might be tempting to simply jump on speaker phone to walk your clients through an edit session, a lot of potentially vital information is lost. Facial expressions, mannerisms, and most importantly your clients’ unconscious reactions are absolutely vital to the collaborative process. Their words and their notes might say one thing, but their reactions might provide much deeper insights.

Don’t set up another remote collaboration session without first having a tool in place that allows face-to-face interactions. If they use Amazon Chime all day long, conform to their needs and make the process of working with you as frictionless as possible. Once you’ve agreed upon a videoconferencing tool, it’s as simple as having your client’s face front-and-center on your main screen such that you can easily monitor their reactions and have eye contact as you discuss notes and changes.

2. Collaboration Recording & Transcribing

For decades the collaborative and note-taking process has been a simple one: Discuss ideas, write ideas down, execute on those ideas. With endless digital distractions and the speed at which we need to hop in and out of virtual sessions, it’s easy to forget what needs to get done and how. That’s where recording & transcribing comes in handy. Now that you are conducting your calls virtually, it’s very simple to record those sessions to refer to later.

These recordings also become priceless when you want to re-review the reactions of your clients during a playback. While this might seem like a lot of extra work, that’s where transcription services come in. If you are using the phone for your virtual communication, DialPad is a great option that will transcribe your conversations in real-time.

If you want to go to the next level, my go-to transcription service is Otter.ai. I use Otter.ai because it automatically transcribes all of my Zoom calls shortly after your call, depending on the length of your session. Furthermore, Otter.ai allows you to share audio recordings & transcriptions with your clients.

3. Internal Team Communication

When remote workflows first became a reality, we all knew there would be a learning curve and things would move slowly. But unfortunately that bill has come due. With productions returning and the demand for new content higher than ever, delivery schedules thus far are not reflecting an allowance for the remote workflow learning curve. Therefore, you better be fast on your feet whenever your clients need something.

Enter Slack.

I manage my entire life via Slack. If you’re in the middle of a remote client session and they ask for a different shot, you cannot interrupt that session to quickly call your assistant or producer via Zoom or phone. You need your team available at the tip of your fingers in such a way you don’t interrupt the creative flow of your session. Building Slack workspaces allows you to completely avoid your email inbox and instead manage only the most important communication that will help you deliver your clients’ expectations.

Pro Tip: Organize your Slack team with multiple channels such that you can mute all unnecessary channels and only get notifications that are pertinent to the client session at hand.

4. Digital Project Management

I made the decision in 2015 to transform my entire post-production workflow to become paperless.

My tool of choice for virtual project management is Trello. I’ve outlined my entire end-to-end virtual post-production workflow using Trello in my LinkedIn Learning course Trello For Video Post-Production.

If Trello isn’t your thing, my ‘honorable recommendations’ would be Airtable or Asana. But take it from me: Trello is the simplest yet most powerful tool for the job.

Bringing It All Together

Let’s imagine you’re doing a real-time session using ClearView Flex…

Using ClearView Flex you send your real-time signal to your client so they can “sit with you” on their laptop. During that session, you chat “face-to-face” using Zoom so you can monitor reactions and facial expressions. You don’t worry about whether or not you caught everything because you’re recording that session (with your client’s permission, of course).

At one point your client wonders “What happened to that insert we shot?” so you reach out to your assistant via Slack, and before your client even knows you’ve reached out you respond with, “You mean this one?”

Shortly after your session is complete, a card miraculously pops up in Trello via automation that includes the link to your recorded session as well as the transcript.

Having spent decades collaborating the way we have in person, it was easy for us to fall into the trap of “This is just how we’ve always done it.” But now that we’ve been forced to rethink creative collaboration from the ground up, I would argue that in our new virtual world not only can we collaborate as effectively as we used to in-person…I even think we have the potential to do it better.