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If remote teams are going to work, it’s because your managers are awesome.
There’s no other way around it. The success of your transition to remote work depends on how well managers perform.
On one hand, managing remote teams and managing co-located teams are very similar. But remote teams present unique challenges, and just because someone was a great on-site manager doesn’t ensure they are going to pull off this new role.
The first law of managing remote teams
Pim de Morree of Corporate Rebels says the ultimate remote work policy is “We trust you.”
If you don’t trust others, you can never succeed at managing a remote team. By nature in a remote setup, you aren’t checking up on people throughout the day, and you need to trust them to get their work done.
In his book, Do Better Work, Max Yoder, CEO of Lessonly, says that trust on teams is built through clarity and camaraderie.
On a co-located team, clarity might come from checking in with other people throughout the day, and having impromptu meetings. Camaraderie can be built by chatting over a coffee break, or a shared experience in the office.
But clarity and camaraderie are built differently when you manage remote teams. Let’s look at the core ways that remote managers can build both.
8 awesome ways remote team managers build clarity
1. Set the ground rules
You need to start off with some basic rules around how you operate. Ground rules are much more important when managing virtual teams. You must be explicit about what everyone should expect.
Some rules about…er…ground rules.
- It’s best to have a very thin level of best practices across an organization, but each team should be able to set their own specific rules.
- Each team needs to have written rules. Spending time thinking about these things brings a lot of clarity and security to remote teams.
- The rules will change over time. You won’t get it right the first time.
So what do you need ground rules about?
Availability. Co-located teams are constantly available to each other and must plan for alone time. Remote teams are the opposite. They must plan for availability and have alone time as default.
Don’t expect everyone to be available constantly over an entire shift. And PLEASE, PLEASE DO NOT MAKE PEOPLE SET UP A CONSTANT VIDEO FEED TO PROVE THEY ARE WORKING. Please. Let’s not go there.
Remote team members usually have some kind of flexibility around their schedule. They can alter it depending on their energy throughout the day or their family schedule.
When managing remote teams, establish some common overlapping hours when everyone is on and quickly responsive. In addition to your daily standups (more on that later), you might pick a two to three-hour window when everyone can expect to get a quick answer for any question.
Response times. This is how quickly someone should expect a response to a message. It changes depending on the type of communication and the time of day. For example, you might say that during your overlapping hours, instant messages should be responded to within 15 minutes. However, emails that come outside of this time can take 24 hours.
It’s easy to get crazy specific with these rules but just set some basic guidelines for folks so they know what to expect. Remote workers can have a problem with being “always on”. Establishing and sharing response times means your team member who works in the early part of the day can ignore the message that comes in at 4pm until the next day.
Default to video. Most chat conversations that go back and forth more than three times should have been a quick video call. Seeing other people’s faces increases the quality of communication, helps you pick up on non-verbal cues, and also decreases loneliness. Require everyone to have their video on during meetings. But there are appropriate times to turn it off.
Tools. When you start managing remote teams, you’ll quickly realize the chaos that exists around all the tools you use for remote work. Slowly try to add some structure by saying, “Ok, let’s only use XXX for chat conversations.” Similarly for projects, processes, and discussions, start to pick a single place where everyone knows they can look for the most up-to-date information.
2. Communication is everything
As you learn how to manage staff remotely, one thing you discover very quickly is how important communication is. Every decision and discussion needs to be shared for everyone to know how they can move forward. Good remote team communication provides a lot of clarity for your team.
Claire Lew from Know Your Team says that remote team communication is more about good management practices and less about the tools. She tells managers that they need to learn how to write very well and get used to maximizing asynchronous communication.
3. Help control distractions
Dealing with distractions is an ongoing battle when managing remote teams. Some of your team may find it difficult to do any deep work because of so many distractions around them. Others may live alone, but have to face the challenge of internal distractions.
Remote managers need to give tips and tools to their teams to help them know how to deal with distractions. Nir Eyal says we need to think about internal triggers, make time for traction, and hack back external triggers.
Good remote managers shouldn’t make distractions worse. Give your team the freedom to schedule their time optimally, and be concerned if people are responding too quickly.
4. Get that daily standup going
The daily standup becomes even more essential when managing virtual teams. On co-located teams, the standup often happens once at the start of the day. But as a remote team, you may find that it’s more effective to have two check-in points during the day, or maybe one in the middle.
The GitLab remote manifesto says that the standup is for three things: bonding, blockers, and the future. “Don’t talk about what you did yesterday, this is not a reporting moment where everyone tries to look busy. Rather, kickstart the day with some bonding, solve anything blocking and share future plans so people can plan and act and ultimately save time.”
Use the standup to make some human connections and make sure that everyone is clear on what needs to happen.
5. Schedule your 1:1s now
If you are an awesome manager, you already have scheduled time for doing one on one meetings with your team members. Going remote means that you need to stick to these no matter what. That 1:1 time may be the only time someone has a chance to talk openly about work with someone else.
Even if you are experienced with 1:1s, you can always get better. Claire Lew from Know Your Team has some of the best resources out there.
6. Have hard conversations quickly
On co-located teams, sometimes little rubs between people can be naturally worked out through the course of a day or two. But in a remote team, these things stick and fester longer.
Awesome remote managers need to jump in quickly if there are any issues that need to be dealt with.
7. Work in public
Clarity increases when everyone knows what others are working on. When managing remote teams, find tools that help people share updates of what they are working on. Use public boards and other asynchronous tools to make sure everyone can see the status of what you are working on.
8. Level up your systems
Remote work tends to expose and amplify the existing chaos in your current systems. Leaders who manage virtual teams need to be great at thinking about how they can provide more structure to their processes.
Wes Winham from Woven points out that as a remote team, your communication methods, processes, and concept of productivity must level up to a company that is bigger than your size. A remote team of 20 often has the habits that a co-located team of 200 must develop. Being remote forces you to grow up faster.
Chat conversations can grow into managed projects, which can grow into automated processes. A great remote manager is always on the lookout for how to bring clarity by eliminating unnecessary chaos and improving the systems.
4 ways awesome remote managers build camaraderie
Co-located managers don’t have to put as much work into building a sense of camaraderie amongst a team. A lot of things happen for free just by being near to each other.
People who are leading remote team culture need to be extremely proactive at building that feeling of tightness back into the team.
1. Introduce friction
When designing the Pixar office, Steve Jobs was against remote teams because he wanted to create a space that “promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations.”
When you are leading remote teams, you have to plan for these moments of friction. That means having meetings without a clear business purpose. It means starting your remote meetings with casual conversations before you get into the specifics.
On the other hand, if your team is constantly on chat all day, your entire work experience is friction. Find the right blend to make sure that your team has time to connect beyond just exchanging information.
2. Give public praise
Praise becomes much more important when managing remote teams. Without it, someone’s work may never be seen by anyone else.
As a remote manager, you need to elevate your praise of your team members. Consistently post work that others have done and celebrate individuals and teams. Others should be able to see what has gone into the work.
In co-located teams, many people advance in their careers because other leaders have visibility into what they are doing. If you have someone with great talent who is appreciated but never praised publicly, other people in the organization may never hear about it and that team member’s value may be stunted.
3. Watch out for mental health struggles
While they often find stress reduced in some areas of their lives, remote workers can be hit hard with mental health struggles. Especially with the fear of a deep recession, job cuts, flu pandemics, and much more, EVERYONE has some sense of heightened stress.
Communication and connection can lower the risk greatly. As a remote manager, if you know someone lives alone, make sure you do a video call with them on a daily basis. Don’t put all the pressure on yourself. You have other people on your team that can also carry the weight. Encourage your team to connect with each other often or set up a buddy system.
As Cheryl Kerrigan points out, It can be much harder for remote managers to detect when their team members are going through a mental health struggle. Remote managers need to watch out for the early warning signs and know how to act.
4. Set an empathetic tone
When your entire team switches from primarily verbal communication to primarily written communication, you lose a lot of context. That can set the stage for misunderstandings and conflict.
Remote managers need to lead the way in showing empathy for others. If someone writes something that appears very cold, callous, or hurtful, always assume ignorance before malice. Make sure everyone knows the context first before correcting others.
Managing remote teams isn’t as easy as you think
It’s hard to learn how to manage staff remotely if you’ve never done it before. You are suddenly responsible for your team in a much different way than before. Leading a team remotely means you have to do extra work to make sure everyone has clarity and camaraderie.
Thankfully, there are lots of good resources out there to help you get all the benefits of remote work.
Check out guides from Zapier, Know Your Team, Buffer, Basecamp, GitLab, and Automattic.
You aren’t alone. You can make the transition. You can be awesome again.
If remote teams are going to work, it’s because your managers are awesome.
There’s no other way around it. The success of your transition to remote work depends on how well managers perform.
On one hand, managing remote teams and managing co-located teams are very similar. But remote teams present unique challenges, and just because someone was a great on-site manager doesn’t ensure they are going to pull off this new role.
The first law of managing remote teams
Pim de Morree of Corporate Rebels says the ultimate remote work policy is “We trust you.”
If you don’t trust others, you can never succeed at managing a remote team. By nature in a remote setup, you aren’t checking up on people throughout the day, and you need to trust them to get their work done.
In his book, Do Better Work, Max Yoder, CEO of Lessonly, says that trust on teams is built through clarity and camaraderie.
On a co-located team, clarity might come from checking in with other people throughout the day, and having impromptu meetings. Camaraderie can be built by chatting over a coffee break, or a shared experience in the office.
But clarity and camaraderie are built differently when you manage remote teams. Let’s look at the core ways that remote managers can build both.
8 awesome ways remote team managers build clarity
1. Set the ground rules
You need to start off with some basic rules around how you operate. Ground rules are much more important when managing virtual teams. You must be explicit about what everyone should expect.
Some rules about…er…ground rules.
- It’s best to have a very thin level of best practices across an organization, but each team should be able to set their own specific rules.
- Each team needs to have written rules. Spending time thinking about these things brings a lot of clarity and security to remote teams.
- The rules will change over time. You won’t get it right the first time.
So what do you need ground rules about?
Availability. Co-located teams are constantly available to each other and must plan for alone time. Remote teams are the opposite. They must plan for availability and have alone time as default.
Don’t expect everyone to be available constantly over an entire shift. And PLEASE, PLEASE DO NOT MAKE PEOPLE SET UP A CONSTANT VIDEO FEED TO PROVE THEY ARE WORKING. Please. Let’s not go there.
Remote team members usually have some kind of flexibility around their schedule. They can alter it depending on their energy throughout the day or their family schedule.
When managing remote teams, establish some common overlapping hours when everyone is on and quickly responsive. In addition to your daily standups (more on that later), you might pick a two to three-hour window when everyone can expect to get a quick answer for any question.
Response times. This is how quickly someone should expect a response to a message. It changes depending on the type of communication and the time of day. For example, you might say that during your overlapping hours, instant messages should be responded to within 15 minutes. However, emails that come outside of this time can take 24 hours.
It’s easy to get crazy specific with these rules but just set some basic guidelines for folks so they know what to expect. Remote workers can have a problem with being “always on”. Establishing and sharing response times means your team member who works in the early part of the day can ignore the message that comes in at 4pm until the next day.
Default to video. Most chat conversations that go back and forth more than three times should have been a quick video call. Seeing other people’s faces increases the quality of communication, helps you pick up on non-verbal cues, and also decreases loneliness. Require everyone to have their video on during meetings. But there are appropriate times to turn it off.
Tools. When you start managing remote teams, you’ll quickly realize the chaos that exists around all the tools you use for remote work. Slowly try to add some structure by saying, “Ok, let’s only use XXX for chat conversations.” Similarly for projects, processes, and discussions, start to pick a single place where everyone knows they can look for the most up-to-date information.
2. Communication is everything
As you learn how to manage staff remotely, one thing you discover very quickly is how important communication is. Every decision and discussion needs to be shared for everyone to know how they can move forward. Good remote team communication provides a lot of clarity for your team.
Claire Lew from Know Your Team says that remote team communication is more about good management practices and less about the tools. She tells managers that they need to learn how to write very well and get used to maximizing asynchronous communication.
3. Help control distractions
Dealing with distractions is an ongoing battle when managing remote teams. Some of your team may find it difficult to do any deep work because of so many distractions around them. Others may live alone, but have to face the challenge of internal distractions.
Remote managers need to give tips and tools to their teams to help them know how to deal with distractions. Nir Eyal says we need to think about internal triggers, make time for traction, and hack back external triggers.
Good remote managers shouldn’t make distractions worse. Give your team the freedom to schedule their time optimally, and be concerned if people are responding too quickly.
4. Get that daily standup going
The daily standup becomes even more essential when managing virtual teams. On co-located teams, the standup often happens once at the start of the day. But as a remote team, you may find that it’s more effective to have two check-in points during the day, or maybe one in the middle.
The GitLab remote manifesto says that the standup is for three things: bonding, blockers, and the future. “Don’t talk about what you did yesterday, this is not a reporting moment where everyone tries to look busy. Rather, kickstart the day with some bonding, solve anything blocking and share future plans so people can plan and act and ultimately save time.”
Use the standup to make some human connections and make sure that everyone is clear on what needs to happen.
5. Schedule your 1:1s now
If you are an awesome manager, you already have scheduled time for doing one on one meetings with your team members. Going remote means that you need to stick to these no matter what. That 1:1 time may be the only time someone has a chance to talk openly about work with someone else.
Even if you are experienced with 1:1s, you can always get better. Claire Lew from Know Your Team has some of the best resources out there.
6. Have hard conversations quickly
On co-located teams, sometimes little rubs between people can be naturally worked out through the course of a day or two. But in a remote team, these things stick and fester longer.
Awesome remote managers need to jump in quickly if there are any issues that need to be dealt with.
7. Work in public
Clarity increases when everyone knows what others are working on. When managing remote teams, find tools that help people share updates of what they are working on. Use public boards and other asynchronous tools to make sure everyone can see the status of what you are working on.
8. Level up your systems
Remote work tends to expose and amplify the existing chaos in your current systems. Leaders who manage virtual teams need to be great at thinking about how they can provide more structure to their processes.
Wes Winham from Woven points out that as a remote team, your communication methods, processes, and concept of productivity must level up to a company that is bigger than your size. A remote team of 20 often has the habits that a co-located team of 200 must develop. Being remote forces you to grow up faster.
Chat conversations can grow into managed projects, which can grow into automated processes. A great remote manager is always on the lookout for how to bring clarity by eliminating unnecessary chaos and improving the systems.
4 ways awesome remote managers build camaraderie
Co-located managers don’t have to put as much work into building a sense of camaraderie amongst a team. A lot of things happen for free just by being near to each other.
People who are leading remote team culture need to be extremely proactive at building that feeling of tightness back into the team.
1. Introduce friction
When designing the Pixar office, Steve Jobs was against remote teams because he wanted to create a space that “promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations.”
When you are leading remote teams, you have to plan for these moments of friction. That means having meetings without a clear business purpose. It means starting your remote meetings with casual conversations before you get into the specifics.
On the other hand, if your team is constantly on chat all day, your entire work experience is friction. Find the right blend to make sure that your team has time to connect beyond just exchanging information.
2. Give public praise
Praise becomes much more important when managing remote teams. Without it, someone’s work may never be seen by anyone else.
As a remote manager, you need to elevate your praise of your team members. Consistently post work that others have done and celebrate individuals and teams. Others should be able to see what has gone into the work.
In co-located teams, many people advance in their careers because other leaders have visibility into what they are doing. If you have someone with great talent who is appreciated but never praised publicly, other people in the organization may never hear about it and that team member’s value may be stunted.
3. Watch out for mental health struggles
While they often find stress reduced in some areas of their lives, remote workers can be hit hard with mental health struggles. Especially with the fear of a deep recession, job cuts, flu pandemics, and much more, EVERYONE has some sense of heightened stress.
Communication and connection can lower the risk greatly. As a remote manager, if you know someone lives alone, make sure you do a video call with them on a daily basis. Don’t put all the pressure on yourself. You have other people on your team that can also carry the weight. Encourage your team to connect with each other often or set up a buddy system.
As Cheryl Kerrigan points out, It can be much harder for remote managers to detect when their team members are going through a mental health struggle. Remote managers need to watch out for the early warning signs and know how to act.
4. Set an empathetic tone
When your entire team switches from primarily verbal communication to primarily written communication, you lose a lot of context. That can set the stage for misunderstandings and conflict.
Remote managers need to lead the way in showing empathy for others. If someone writes something that appears very cold, callous, or hurtful, always assume ignorance before malice. Make sure everyone knows the context first before correcting others.
Managing remote teams isn’t as easy as you think
It’s hard to learn how to manage staff remotely if you’ve never done it before. You are suddenly responsible for your team in a much different way than before. Leading a team remotely means you have to do extra work to make sure everyone has clarity and camaraderie.
Thankfully, there are lots of good resources out there to help you get all the benefits of remote work.
Check out guides from Zapier, Know Your Team, Buffer, Basecamp, GitLab, and Automattic.
You aren’t alone. You can make the transition. You can be awesome again.
