How to Manage Remote Teams
Keeping remote teams connected is a challenge for any distributed company, but what if EVERYONE was remote? That’s the case at Invision a 100% distributed company, and their employees LOVE it.
We spent time with some individuals at Invision, to learn about how they keep their teams connected and engaged across the globe. These tips and tricks are a great addition to the list we’ve already shared about managing remote workers.
1) Repeat, Repeat, Repeat
Repeat yourself, because when you have no water cooler or coffee machine to produce spontaneous conversation. You need repetition for messages to land and stick. That will mean repeating what you’ve said in different mediums (Slack, Email, Video calls) as well as overtime emphasizing the same message over and over again to build context.
2) Be HUMAN
Make in efforts to make yourselves ‘human’ to each other at a distance.
To show off their individual work spaces, Invision does a ‘Cribs’ style walk-around your home video stream to build bonds across long distances. Amazingly, 1/3 of the company tunes in each day to see the ‘Cribs’ zoom! I’m sure there have been some very interesting things to see.
3) Coordinate Synchronous Work Time
They do lots of synchronous work by coordinating working hours when possible and utilize Zoom and Slack to do it. That means they try to help collaborative teams not be spread over too of disparate of timezones. If they can’t, they manage expectations about how asynchronous work will happen and utilize the DACI framework for decisions making.
4) Create Knowledge Repositories
This is good practice independent of whether you have remote employees. Having centralized places for anyone to find information is key to any scaling company. At Invision they use Confluence and the to help build corporate knowledge about their product and company history.
5) More Skip Level Meetings
As a manager, one of your primary responsibilities is to conduct 1:1s, but they are are not only for your direct reports. A skip-level meeting allows you to connect with individuals who your team manages and to keep a finger on the pulse of what’s going on on the ground floor. When you don’t see the next strata of employees around the office, you have to set aside time to do so.
Anything you and your remote team do to help stay connected?
Tami Reiss is the SVP of Product Strategy at ProduxLabs and the CPO in Residence at Insight Partners. She writes about how Product Leaders can do more to focus on what’s important for a company’s growth and streamline internal processes to yield results. You can follow her on Medium or @tamireiss on Twitter.
