Make remote work work!
There was a time where I had a team of 80 and only two members of my team were based in the same NYC office that I considered my home base. The other 78 team members were spread across disciplines and the globe, and while a portion worked from home, others worked from long-standing satellite offices. Skype kept us connected and proved a miracle-worker in reducing our communication expense and empowering us to use early video calls. Later, I led a team based in the Pacific Northwest with sales reps based across the US. Technology improved dramatically within those few years, and we suddenly had iPhones with FaceTime and group text chats, plus video conferencing software and screen sharing on our laptops. I’ve said time and again, that in my corporate roles, working remotely was a critical component to success. It gave me the space to get big, strategic thinking done without being interrupted. Over time, I think my preferred situation was a blend of time in the office and time spent working remotely, but that depended a lot on the duties and responsibilities of the role I was in. Managing remote teams, coordinating remote efforts, and working remotely are increasingly common and hugely beneficial to collaborative work. I’ve had the opportunity to both manage remote teams and be a remote worker. I’ve had good experiences and challenging scenarios that came up short under both scenarios, and I thought it was worth a post to explore my observations on managing, leading, or experiencing a successful remote work engagement. There’s no perfect model for co-located teams vs remote workers due to variables like the type of work, the industry, the company culture, the quality of the company processes and procedures, and the ability of all involved to trust and communicate candidly. There is a lot of good writing available on all aspects of best practices for remote workers. Instead of rewriting what’s already available, I’ve included a list of remote worker philosophies and best practices at the end of this post. What’s so hard about communication, anyway? In my experience, one of the great challenges to working remotely or managing a team that isn’t co-located, is an overlooked aspect of communication. The problem to take on is how to foster informal communication among yourself, your remote workers, and your co-located team. It’s pretty easy to set-up formal meetings, check-ins, status updates, etc: be aware of time zones, send cal invite, fire-up Skype, FaceTime, appear.in, Google Hangouts, or GoToMeeting and you’re on your way. What’s much harder though is to create a culture that spurs your remote workers to contact each other in those instances where, if the team were all located in the same building, someone would have popped into her colleague’s office with an idea or an insight. Capturing those ideas and insights is critical to productivity as missing acting on them could prove to have a high opportunity cost. What you want to avoid is developing a culture of I’ll add this point to a list and mention it during our next 1:1 - this is the equivalent of pouring molasses on the gears of your business. Encourage ongoing group chat or leave windows open with private chats with your remote team members. Slack is a fantastic solution for asynchronous communication and will help build a culture of not waiting to act. If you manage a team of remote workers, I’d suggest stealing a best practice from every college professor I’ve ever known and keep an hour open for digital drop-in office hours every other day. Look your company culture dead in the eye. I’ve found company cultures where being a successful remote worker is near impossible. If that’s the case, you should think long and hard before accepting a remote assignment, approving that one of your team members transitions to a remote role, or creating a new role that can be remote. You don’t want to set yourself or your team up for grief and failure. If you’re uncertain whether your company culture might not be right for remote work, ask yourself: is this organization hierarchical or flat, how is power wielded, is the company results-focused or time-focused, are people gossipy, is the organization closed-minded when facing new organization design, does the organization devote time to developing and documenting processes and procedures, and lastly, has the organization historically had a bad experience with field sales reps? Most of these points are pretty straightforward, and a combination of any two or three of them probably indicate that the organization isn’t ready to transition to any specie of remote workforce. That said, I’d like to pick at the last two points in a bit more detail. It may seem contrarian, but process and procedure are actually more important to a remote worker than you might realize. For co-located teams, new processes and procedures are codified and oftentimes the practical understanding of these new rules and regs are disseminated in hallway chatter and socialized among teams over coffee or in quick informal chats in a hallway or an office. For the remote worker, process and procedure represent the substructure of their work experience. Process and procedures are sort of the walls of their experience in the organization. In my experience, remote workers tend to have a higher adherence rate to process and to make that possible, require greater documentation of the same. They want to read the new protocol. Weirdly, it’s like their office getting a new coat of paint. It’s nothing new to have field sales reps based in territory, meaning that for many companies, a field sales team is the organization’s sole experience in having an employee based offsite. For many reasons, it can happen over years or decades that a sales rep becomes less effective than he was in the past. Eventually, the rep and the company part ways and in my experience the false lesson-learned in the unsavvy organizations can be that remote workers fail. Really what happens is that sales is hard, and sometimes sales reps need to move on to selling something else for someone else. But if the organization isn’t careful, an attitude that all employees must be on-site to be successful can take root, making it much harder culturally to move non-sales roles to remote opportunities. Selected Resources on Remote Work Best Practices
Remote Teams: Best Practices and Culture Lessons
How to Manage Remote Direct Reports
The Fundamentals of Running a Successful Remote Team
6 Remote Work Culture Lessons from Successful Startups
How to Effectively Manage a Remote Team
The 5 Best Ways to Make Remote Employees Feel Like They're Part of the Team
10 Essential Tips to Managing Remote Employees
5 Ways to Effectively Lead Remote Teams
7 Best Practice Tips For Successfully Working Remotely
I coach and write about productivity as a force to empower high performers to do more of the higher order work that propels their careers. Contact me with questions or training requests. I’m organizing one-on-one and working group sessions now. If you enjoy these posts, subscribe for email updates and the members-only Friday Top Five selection of the best productivity and creative problem-solving content that I find each week. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Twitter too!
