There are already hundreds of articles focusing on what tools to use, but not enough talking about the less obvious issues remote and distributed teams are facing. Since we’re also a distributed team and we work with remote teams all the time, we do have some tips to share and we hope you’ll find them to be useful.
The building blocks of an incredible remote team should be known and understood by someone who wants to build and maintain a successful, high performing company. Here are the ones we identified:
1. Oversharing is good. Hire those people that enjoy talking and writing about their work.
When people work remotely, good communication is essential and sometimes this will not happen by itself. You’ll have to integrate communication, working-out-loud as John Stepper called it, in your company’s work process. If you hire people that are actively searching for human contact and they enjoy calling others just to see how they are doing, you’ll increase your team’s chances of making remote communication work.
2. Build a cross-functioning team.
Job diversity also translates into diverse experiences, backgrounds, cultures. When you have people that usually focus on different things working together to solve your company’s problems, they progress faster, they find innovative solutions.
3. Offer autonomy and privacy.
If you focus on monitoring work and not people, you’ll have a better understanding of how well your team performs and which are your best employees. Remember, “bodies in chairs” was not a real performance metric, and neither is “eyes in front of screens”. You should want a team that gets work done, not one that is constantly online, and achieves almost nothing.
Allow people to work when they are most productive. Offer them enough space to encourage them to experiment without making them feel guilty they wasted their “work time”.
4. Level the playing field.
If you have a team in which 2 people are working from the same city you live in, and two others are working from two different countries, don’t meet with those close to you and Skype with the ones 4,000 miles away. You’ll build trust and improve communication if you use the same communications protocol for everybody.
5. Compress routes for decision-making.
Don’t waste time on making decisions by going back and forth between time zones. Find the best way to make decisions fast and implement a system in which you can accelerate the rate of approval and implementation. One way of doing this is by delegating the responsibility for decision-making based on expertise and not shared consent.
6. Offer trust, assume the best intentions.
If you’ll let people think that some of your team members aren’t as trustworthy or competent as the rest of the group, your remote team will fail. You and all your staff need to offer your entire trust and assume the best intentions, which means that when something goes wrong, you’ll communicate the problem and do your best to understand why somebody made a certain decision or why they dropped the ball.
Understand what happened, learn from it, forgive, and also learn how to apologise. Do your best to make sure you are not letting someone great go because of miscommunication.
