Five Tips for managing remote teams
Mini guide for managing a virtual team in a covid world
As the world becomes more and more digital, long-distance communication is no longer an obstacle. Many companies choose to extend engineering teams by building R&D centers abroad or hiring individuals in remote regions. Based on my experience, I have summarised my five tips for managing a virtual team successfully.
Working with globally distributed teams has many advantages. For example, it can help your company be flexible and fast with hiring or reducing engineering costs. It may also bring higher value to customers by providing a localized service or 24/7 support. Another advantage might be by increasing the organization’s diversity resulting in new ideas and innovation.
But managing a globally distributed team is not only roses and sunshine. It comes with challenges. In this story, I will list potential issues and some solutions that worked well for me.
Disclaimer: there are many organizational structures for managing global units. In this story, I am referring to a mixed teams structure, also known as virtual teams. In this structure, the manager and other team members are located in one location while the rest work remotely from one or many other sites.
Tip #1 — Asynchronous Work
The Time Zone Problem
The first problem you might face is the different time zone challenges. Imagine a scenario where a manager is located in the US while the rest of the team is in India. The timezone difference is 14H, So it practically gives an overlapping time of only 2–3 hours. That’s not much.
My first tip is to respect the time zones differences. But, especially if you are the team leader, don’t try to enforce your time zone over your team member. The reason for this is simple, in the long run, remote team members will get exhausted.
You might ask yourself now, “then how can I manage like that with minimum overlapping hours ”?
The answer is to start working Asynchronously.
The idea is simple, keep meetings time only for kickoffs or periodical(short) sync meetings. All other communication should be using IM, Slack and shared docs.
Let’s take, for example, a scenario in which the team has a new feature or service to develop. The first meeting is essential; goals and background usually will be introduced and explained in detail. Make sure you schedule it in the time zone overlapping time.
- Before the meeting starts, send the agenda and materials, prepare an online Kanban board, break down the different tasks that might come up.
- Make sure this meeting is recorded and shared!
- At the end of the meeting, tasks must be assigned to one or more of the participants. Make sure team members understand what they need to do.
- From now on, daily communication should be done via a dedicated Slack channel (or any other IM) and shared doc.
- Has a manager or tech lead, you will need to stay tuned to those communications and help when needed.
- Tasks progress should be reflected in the online Kanban board.
- Instead of having a daily meeting, each team member can send a quick summary of their current status either on the kanban board card or slack (or both)
- Start adding more automation in the code review process. I have already written in the past how to manage an effective code review. Try it.
- Create a “To Do” list of tasks with prioritization for the team members to pull when they complete the current tasks.
If you followed the above, you might be left with plenty of time. So what should you do with it? Focus on building personal relationships!
Tip #2 — Build Remote Relationships
In most workplaces, the interaction of people working together in the same office creates a strong connection. Those connections are getting stronger with every shared experience or personal conversation. But when working remotely naturally, there are fewer opportunities for creating shared experiences.
Good work relationships are crucial for any team member. Gallup found that people who simply have a good friend in the workplace are more likely to be happy. What’s more, good work relationships are linked to better customer engagement and increased profit. It is also one of the main factors for building a high-performance team.
So how do we create good work relationships within remote teams?
The practical and relatively easy thing to do is to build personal relationships between team members.
As a manager, creating personal relations between team members is your duty, as you would in a physical office. Break down the ice, lead by example.
Be the owner of creating the atmosphere for those connections to be established.
Share with your team members personal stories. Share some facts and stories of your city or hometown and hear out other team members’ stories. Share your culture, tradition, or hobbies. You might find similar unexpected interstates with other team members. Share some pictures from your last trip or achievement.
Find out what kind of things team members have in common, and build events around it.
It might feel unnatural in the beginning. That ok. Most people get used to it after some time.
In addition to the above, Don’t forget to build your personal connection with all your team members as you would if they were sitting next to you.
You can read more about the importance of building remote team relationships in this article written by Milan Kordestani.
Tip #3 — Understand Culture Differences
Understanding cultural differences is not trivial. Although we live in a global world, team members from different countries might react to the same situation differently. For example, in some countries asking questions is considered rude, while in others, not participating in a discussion is disrespectful.
Each culture has its nuances of communication. In a cross-culture team, you need to be aware of it. Especially when giving feedback.
Spend time to understand those differences before an unpleasant incident happens. Personally, I have been using Globe Smart and personal trainers.
Talk with the team about cultural differences. Again, awareness is a crucial factor.
Tip #4 — Mix Team Members
The default choice for team members will be to work with another team member from the exact location, and I get it. Working with someone that speaks your language is much easier. But you are also risking creating a siloed team. That’s is a bad situation for both the manager and employees. It might create frustration and a feeling of neglecting the siloed team’s “us vs. them” issues in the long run.
To avoid those situations, I suggest assigning some of the tasks to teams members from different locations. Working together and facing a shared challenge will create trust, bonding, and better communication. that is another excellent opportunity for those team members to know each other and experience cultural differences. Having said that, team members’ expertise and ambitions must be suitable for the tasks. Don’t force mix teams. Only if you see an opportunity, use it.
An article named “What Great Managers Do,” published by Harvard Business Review school, suggests the same: know your team members’ strengths and weaknesses and assign them to the relevant tasks based on their skills and motivations.
Tip #5 — Treat team members equally
Treating all team members equally is imperative for building a good team. I am referring to full equality. Unfortunately, I have seen companies hiring remote team members to work on “second-grade” tasks. Either task that is in less priority or ones that are more repetitive. Other organizational structures might support that strategy of task allocation. But it won’t work if you intend to build a long-running, high-performance, globally distributed team.
The second topic to address will be promotions. Remote team members should get the same opportunities for promotions or salary raises and equity as local team members.
In this model, a manager cannot disqualify one team member for a leadership position because he works remotely. Trust me; if you followed previous tips, a remote manager is not an issue from a professional perspective. However, a remote manager will require broader organizational support of HR, IT, and accounting. Therefore, if your organization decides to work with remote team members, they should address issues before forming the distributed team.
One Note regarding salary raises and equity. Different locations have different currencies and standards. Treating the team members equally means that pay raises and equity should be primarily based on merit. I am not saying market adjustment should not be taken into consideration, it definitely should, but that should not become the primary factor. Your best engineer should be in the most higher salary percentile in his location.
Local events. Celebrating local events is natural but “showing off” this event to your remote team members is a bad idea. Nothing good will come out of it. I also do not recommend having an event with virtual and local participates when local team members are in one room. Instead, ask local team members to find a quiet place and join from Laptop.
That’s it. Those are my five tips for managing distributed teams. I would like to hear your tips. Feel free to share in the below comments
