How Do You Build a Remote Teams Now, in 2022?
Let’s start with something we all know: Almost every organization has had to switch to remote work at some point in the past two years. Some organizations discovered this was better. Others had trouble with it.
So when someone today, in 2022, asks a question like “How do we build a remote team?”, my guess is that they aren’t wondering how to do video conferencing, or how to post an ad on LinkedIn, or whether employees want virtual happy hours.
They want to know how to create a team that works diligently and creatively to serve customers and shareholders better.
I managed many remote and hybrid teams for large brands. And I can tell you this: Every organization will be different…but there are three things that need to be in place, now matter what your organization is like, to make remote teams work.
#1: Culture. It’s everything.
Remember, remote work does not, by itself, create new problems — it just amplifies problems that already exist within the culture.
For a dispersed remote team to work, your organization needs to:
- Create the best new team-member onboarding process possible. Nothing beats a first impression. Working with your human resource partners and hiring managers, invest time in creating a great employee onboarding experience. The first few days of a new employee’s tenure make a big difference to their overall morale and productivity. This is an opportunity for the new employee to understand and experience your company’s strategy and culture.
- Give space and time to connect with teams. Relationships matter greatly when working remotely. It is important for folks to form good rapport outside of priority work projects, like working on creative R&D projects or attending virtual happy hours or other activities that are more fun.
- Prioritize work and manage workload. Most folks are working long hours during covid. The easiest thing you can do as a manager/leader is to prioritize the work and actively manage the workload to maximize employee productivity.
- Reduce meeting overload. Most folks have a love/hate relationship with meetings these days, especially when they happen over Zoom. Serious collaboration requires meeting with lots of folks, but “meeting overload” is real, and it’s counterproductive. Blocking calendars, optimizing meeting cadence, scheduling no-meeting Fridays or simply picking up the phone or sending notes are all ways you can avoid unnecessary meetings and overbooking.
- Value and promote autonomy. No matter what your title is, you still have to get work done individually. It is important to carve the space for it, be disciplined to protect that time, and give autonomy to employees to get the work done.
- Give constant helpful feedback. Should go without saying! Don’t forget to recognize team members for their good work in all settings.
- Repeat it 10 times, if you must! Anything worthy should be said 10 times in different settings and formats, like emails, slack messages, meetings etc. Repetitive? Not at all. For remote teams to align on strategies, priorities, outcomes, decisions, changes, and so on, it is vital to repeat those items 10 times, and make sure the key messages get cascaded to everyone in the organization.
Do these things regularly; every time you do, it is another stone in the foundation that is your culture.
Still afraid that people will slack off? Remember that accountability is a part of your culture, too. Try this: Create a shared calendar and use it to track work progress, then review that calendar at meetings. Make it clear to everyone where the bottlenecks are, and who is being productive. Good employees will quickly fall in step, because no one wants to be the bottleneck.
#2: Clear Policies. They support the culture.
Most discussions of remote work start with a discussion of policy. Culture should come first. The role policies play is to enable and support the culture.
For example, if working remotely allows for more flexible schedules, allow it and let your team members manage their own time (autonomy). Then, to balance that, set up bi-weekly retrospectives to review that shared calendar and see where problems lie (accountability).
Every policy you put in place should have the aim of creating a better remote work culture. It would be good to identify top employee issues every quarter, look at what issues need a clear policy, and then make sure the policy is created, communicated, implemented and measured for desired impact. Recognize the employees who demonstrate desired experiences in a public setting to reinforce the key policies.
#3. Technology. It’s role is to automate and track policies.
Only when you have outlined the culture you want, and the policies that will make that happen, should you look at technology. (In the rush to remote work following the pandemic, everyone did the opposite: They stressed about which technologies to use to get up and running. But which technologies you and your team need depend on policies and culture!)
For example, do your teams need more opportunities for feedback and collaboration? That is when you look into Google docs, or Workday or Jira or Microsoft’s Sharepoint, or other co-authoring tools. These will let you assign appropriate access so employees can connect and keep workflow items moving.
Or maybe you need to focus on keeping remote meetings on task. Then, in addition to meeting software like Zoom or Teams, you need meeting productivity software like Miro, Product Board, Monday.com, OnTopic. This will keep virtual meetings short and make clear what the list of to-do’s is afterwards.
Through my career I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important thing technology can do is relieve your team of busy work. So ask yourself: Is there something you can automate? Or digitize? What tasks are eating up your team’s time, and how can technology free up that time again?
What About Recruitment?
For some folks, the question of building a remote team really is that: How does one find the right people and the right vendors and build the team? That could be a whole article on its own. But I’ll say this: Job seekers ask about culture and opportunities for advancement ten times more often than they ask about salary and benefits. Agencies and vendors, for their part, are looking for partnerships and collaborations, not just easy dollars. So my principles about culture, policy, and technology apply to forming teams, too.
And if you are curious about other ways that technology and collaboration are changing all around us, check out my other Medium articles, or just reach out.
