Staying connected to your team is a good start, but it isn’t enough. You have to share what you are doing with your team and make them share what they are doing with you. You have to open your team to communication. Creating an open team is always a good idea, but it is essential to succeeding when working remotely.
So what is an open team? Sometimes they are call consensus based teams. Mark Mitchell from Code Sourcery calls them good teams. It is a team where everyone can talk about what they are working on. Have you ever been on a team where there was code you weren’t supposed to look at? Code that was owned by a specific person on the team and everyone else was supposed to keep out? That is a big sign of a closed team.
On an open team you can look at everyone’s code. That doesn’t mean there are no specialities, it just means everyone feels comfortable talking about what they are doing. It also means everyone is happy to ask for help from anyone else on the team.