How improve communication between AU, UK and US teams?

I’ve been promoted to manage 7 engineers in Australia. They are electronics, FPGA and software engineers that are assigned to 5 different projects, working with engineers in the UK and US. In the past we haven’t done a good job of communicating across company sites and projects were typically contained to a single office location.

I’ve been asked to improve things with weekly project conference calls with useful minutes distribution and to request weekly status update emails from each engineer. Any tips or recommendations on training for me or my engineers?