MC1-10 Leading Remote Teams

Right, who's next? Yes, can I have... Yes, what would you like? Erm, can I get a virtual coffee?

Sorry? Is that with skimmed milk? Erm, just make it a regular Americano. Right, coming up.

Right, yes Maya, my little joke for today didn't work. Let's look for a seat. We have plenty of choice today, we can sit anywhere. That looks like a nice little table.

Right, well, welcome to the management cafe podcast. My name is Pilar Ortiz, I'm Director of Virtual Not Distance, so today I am even more in my element than usual for the topic of today's episode. If you want to check out the full show notes, you can go to managementcafepodcast.com, or if you're listening to this episode in your podcast app, just tap on the artwork. If you want to get in touch at Pilar Ortiz on Twitter, or you can contact me through the website and say again, managementcafepodcast.com.

Well, today's episode, I have enough to say about today's topic to cover quite a few coffees, so maybe I should have ordered an even larger one. I'm going to cover the topic of leading remote teams, and by remote, I mean leading teams of people, mainly knowledge workers who are doing the work physically away from each other. So I could be talking about virtual teams, distributed, dispersed, those with flexible working arrangements, those adopting agile working. We really are at a point in the world of work where we have more and more of these terms, which remind us that there are other ways of structuring how we work together apart from the traditional 9 to 5 office setup.

I mean, while remembering that there might be people who prefer to work 9 to 5 at the office, so they need to be accommodated for as well as possible. Now, what I won't be addressing specifically in this episode is working in global teams, although of course much of what I'll talk about will be relevant to those teams too, but global teams often have an extra challenge to them, and that's the issue of time zones. Sometimes depending on the kind of organization you're working for, you might also have differences in national cultures impacting the work, so in some cases, the corporate culture can be stronger than national culture, and then those differences are reduced. But time zones are the big ones because they can limit the time for synchronous communication, that is real-time discussions.

We can do quite a bit of communication in the written form, yes, notice how the world of work has embraced email and how the social world has embraced Facebook, for example. But there are times when we need deep discussions, and sometimes these are best done using speech in real-time, so the issues of time zones not overlapping during the work day are a big challenge. As technology has got more sophisticated and affordable, and as internet and Wi-Fi connections get more stable, I've really come to think that how we lead a remote team is mainly affected by this time zone issue, whether we can have real-time conversations with each other, whether it's on video, audio, or even on chat, but still real-time asking for clarification really quickly. And leading a team where we communicate mainly asynchronously, that is in the written form with time lapses in between, that will require quite a different strategy and different ways of communicating, then leading a team where we are able to just hop on a call of some kind when we need to.

So in this episode, I'm going to assume that you and your team have a decent overlap in office hours, I don't know about half a day, and I'm going to cover some of the things you might want to bear in mind. This is the case. If you're having a coffee here with me, we could get into how to solve your specific challenges, but seeing as we're not together or even at the other end of a video call, and I don't know much about you, I won't even pretend that I know what you need. If there's something I've learned about this space, pretty much like with leading any kind of team, is that the culture of the organization and the nature of the work will heavily influence how you lead and manage.

But having said that, there are some things to look out for regardless of your situation, and that I'm happy to chat to you about. Here's your coffee, is this what you wanted? Yes, thank you, that's great. Right, let's start.

If you're making the transition to remote team, to a remote setup, think about what the main differences will be in how you communicate and collaborate. The first thing that comes to mind is that most of your communication will be done through technology, but sometimes you're already doing this in the co-located space, think of the common anecdote of people emailing each other across the office instead of walking over to someone's desk. And you've probably already moved on to storing documents online rather than storing paper in a filing cabinet. So I'm assuming that you're already using technology to share information and even some of your work.

Before I carry on, I just want to point you towards a handy PDF you can download, which asks you questions about your current setup. So this will mainly be of use if you are in transition mode, just this piece of information. I've used my framework for virtual teamwork, which there's sex how we work together into seven areas, which are visibility, identity, results, trust, upgrowth, appreciation and leadership. If you put all those first letters together, you get virtual.

So you can download this PDF which has questions about making the transition, how you're currently addressing those areas in your team, so that you can see which areas you can keep, what ways of operating can remain the same and which you need to change. So you can download that PDF from the virtual not distant website. I'll stick the link in the show notes or you can go to the blog on virtualnotdistant.com, and there's a little search bar and search for transition. So have a look at that if you are making the transition indeed.

Now, what are the main differences in how we work together when we are mainly using technology? Well, broadly speaking, I can think of three main areas. One, the way in which we have discussions, for example, meetings or conversations or even how we ask for help. The way in which we interact in an informal way.

So, for example, in the code, look at its space when we have lunch together, if you ever have lunch together, you see, I'm making an assumption. Many team members never have lunch together even when they share an office. So sometimes this is not a problem or you might have informal chats in the corridor or as you're making coffee, not some assumptions here right now. But that is something that might not happen as often in the virtual space or it happens differently.

And thirdly, the way in which we share and gather information about the progress of the work. Again, I'm making more assumptions here, but an example that comes to mind is someone asking across a desk, where are you with gathering those numbers? Oh, yeah, I'm just waiting for Sandra to send me over her final costs. Sandra, have you got those numbers ready?

Oh, yes, sorry. So my list, give me 10 minutes and I'll send them over. So these are the kind of conversations that we might have in the office, which give us loads of information about where people are with their work. So, yeah, and I was making an assumption that the team members are helpful to each other.

So you see, the other way in which we might gather information where we're co-located about the progress of the work is through visual cues and clues that we pick up almost subconsciously as we walk across an office. So for example, you might pick up on someone frowning at the computer and they're having problems or you might go past someone's screen and you see this long report up on somebody's monitor and that gives you an idea of what they're working on. So these are all things that, of course, we're going to miss in the remote space unless we do something about it. And before we start thinking about these specific changes, we need to address the most difficult change of all, which is a change in mindset.

Remote work, if we structure it well, can have many benefits. One of which is that people gain more autonomy over how they do the work. And we can extend some of that autonomy into decision making, for example. Then we can have a more adaptable team, when whether work is not constantly blocked because we feel we don't have the necessary information or authority to push it forwards.

And this autonomy can extend to aspects of teamwork, how we work together, which will probably be outside our formal job description. So we need to be able to take these steps towards improvement if we see an opportunity, if I see an opportunity to improve the process. How many conversations will I need to have with the team leader or manager or my team members to implement an improvement? Or are there small things have I got enough autonomy that I can implement experiments as we as I go?

Or do I have to wait until we're all able to have a meeting or until everyone has replied to my post before I make this small change? How can you do all this when you are remote? Well, as a manager, the focus has to shift from supervisor to enabler, from problem solver to coach. We can't be solving problems for everyone all the time or else what's the point in looking after our own schedules and where we work from, etc.

Every time we have a problem, we always have to go to our manager. The focus is on whether the team process and norms we have enabled us to deliver the best results. The focus should not be on whether people are carrying out their work in the way that we would like them to. And from the place we would prefer them to do it from.

For some people it might be a slight shift, but for some people it could be a very big shift in mindset. It's really rather than overlooking and making sure that everyone is doing things properly, which sometimes might not be in our head. What that properly means is really about making sure that people have the tools, resources, information, whatever it is to be able to do their work. And then we just focus on what the end work looks like.

So at the risk of repeating myself, just highlighting here that every team is different. So your work will be structured differently, your own role will need to be different. But the main thing I'm trying to get across here is that rather than focus on how, where and when a person is carrying out the work, we need to be focusing on whether they've got everything they need to do really good work. On top of this, as a manager, you might be in the best position to be the link between the team and the organization.

To make sure that the team continues to be aligned with the company's goals and that the work stays relevant. And to make sure that the team has visibility and team members have visibility within the company. The advocacy role of the manager becomes even more important in our remote team. You have to make sure that the team stays in touch with the company and that the network keeps growing.

So you never know when people might come in handy in the company. It's not just about being visible so we can have promotions. It's about the fact that the more connected we are within the company, sometimes the easier our job will be. And when we're remote, this might just be a little bit more difficult so we have to be more deliberate about it.

And often the manager's network allows them to do this play this role more easier, more easier, better. But it doesn't only have to be the manager. Of course, there are some people in the company who might be great networkers and they might be the person on whom we rely to help us navigate through the organization when we need to. So with all that in mind, let me introduce you to the concept of working out loud.

It's a term that was popularized by John Stepper in his book by the same name, working out loud. And it involves sharing your work and your thought process in a way that is helpful to you or to others. In remote teams, this can happen on a collaboration platform like Yammer Slack or on a project management tool like Trello or Basecamp or even by email, the tool is not important. It's the fact that you're sharing your work and your process with you to help yourself or others.

So for example, you can share the early stages of a new task you're getting on with so that if somebody else in your team has done something similar before, they can offer some tips or things to look out for. Or you can communicate how you solve the problem in case somebody else on the team comes across something similar at some point. Or the nature of your work might mean that you need to complete a series of tasks that affect other people's work. So that's also a form of working out loud, making that completion or that delay.

The delay is very important, making that completion or delay on a task visible. So these ways of communicating openly and publicly, of course, have two sides to them as managers. We can use them to supervise and control the work or we can use them to help the team stay aligned and hold each other accountable. You know that my preference is going to lie in the second one because making our own work process visible can help others understand our work preferences too.

And this gives everyone an insight into how we make decisions. And yes, ongoing communication about what we're up to can feel like a chore, but it's really useful to know the progress of the teams work as a whole. So again, talking about change of mindset, this might be something that you as manager need to embrace because you'll need to make your own thought process, your own work process also visible. And something that team members might also struggle with.

But have a think. Now, how you and your team work out loud will depend on the technology you have available to you and the nature of your work. But in any case, if you're going to do anything around this, have an agreement, agree on how you will do this. What kind of updates are useful?

How regularly will you update the rest of the team? What platform or tool or technology will you use? You might well have to resort to email if you have huge security barriers at your company. So agree on some rules on how you'll do this.

You're going to say something in the subject. Are you going to not do reply to all of those? Are you going to? No, et cetera.

So just think of what might help you to continue this form of working out loud and to make it useful. So talking of technology, I have a sip of coffee. It's probably time to talk about technology and how it enables us to stay connected. As I said, I know that in many companies, the tools you can use is restricted due to security concerns and other cultural issues.

And in other cases, on the other hand, you might have to overload from having to build yourself for communication infrastructure. I'm not going to recommend any tools to you. I will mention some later. However, I will address how to choose whether to use a tool or not.

So first of all, I've seen tools chosen in two different ways. One, we identify what we need the tool to do and then we look for the tool. Or we pick a tool that looks great or that we have heard is popular, tried it out or looked into it and then evaluated whether it's something that could work for our team. I much prefer the first approach where we identified what we need and then look for a tool accordingly.

But I'm very aware that option to is easier and more fun than it can leave you with plenty of headaches. Whatever your approach, I hope this will help you a bit, these questions. In order to help you without knowing your specific situation, I'm indeed going to ask you a few questions. They are not leading questions.

I'm not looking for specific answers. They're just there for you to answer and come to your own decision. So if you're looking for a communication tool to help your team, what will you need the tool for? Is it for real-time chat communication?

Is it for async or any communication? You need both. Are you likely to share short-shot messages? Will some messages be really long like a blog post?

Will you need a mobile version that works really well and is easy to use? Or is that not as important? What focus might the conversation take? It's going to be casual.

Do you think it'll be informative? Both? Will you be sharing information? Will you need to add attachments to your messages?

Will you be carrying out discussions? What's the nature of your work? Is it very task-oriented? Is it to replicate and can be divided into chunks?

Or is your work creative with every project needing a different process? So all of these questions you need to take into account when you're either trying out a tool or looking for one. Well, I'll drop all these questions now before you choke on your coffee. But I hope that they give you an idea of the kind of questions you and your team need to be asking yourselves.

Sometimes the way of finding out the answers to these questions is to start experimenting with the tools. But before you do that, agree what you will use the tool for. Agree how often you will use it and agree on when you will revise how it's working out for you. There is nothing more frustrating than getting all excited because we finally found a way of collaborating online only to find that at some point, things get difficult, people get bored and the tool goes dead.

Believe me, I have been there. So I'll give you a quick list of tools here. It's going to be very quick and also not going to go into any detail because the tools landscape changes so quickly. But if your company has a Microsoft Office 365 system or the Google system, then check those out because within those ecosystems there are already lots of tools.

And also if your organization is using one of these systems, you might be able to find another team that's already using them and they can help you assess their suitability. So look within your organization, your own organization to see what's going on. Otherwise, take out your pen and you can search online for these tools. Trello, L, Yammer, Y, W, M, Slack, Asana, Basecamp, Hado, Soko, I, Dunvis, Google Drive, and for real time video, check out Zoom.

Check them out and see whether they might be what you're looking for. And there are lots of other tools out there. You just need to look around, shop around and when you can ask, ask around. So yes, it's 2017.

So I hope this podcast will be around for a very long time. So by the time you listen to the some of the tools of names might have gone out of business. That's another reason I'm not going to recommend more specific tools. Now, one final warning, make sure that you don't end up adapting your team process to suit your tool.

The way which you interact with the tool might well start to affect the way in which you interact with each other. It might be good or it might be bad. In any case, make sure it's your decision to change how your work, not some tools decision. So this is something that is often overlooked is how the technology we adopt is going to influence our work.

So look out for that. And we have decisions. Let me address one more thing about managing remote teams. As I mentioned before, autonomy is one of the best things about working remotely.

An autonomy is of course part of motivation, of intrinsic motivation. And within working remotely, autonomy to make decisions about how you work as an individual is important, but also making decisions that affect your team. The last thing you want is for team members waiting around for other people's input or even for your approval for every single decision. I'm not suggesting that you and your team members begin to make decisions that affect your without input from others, but there might be plenty of times when individuals can make a decision quickly, and there is no real need to either consult, get approval, etc.

Basically, when I'm asking you to avoid this to create a culture where every time someone needs to make a decision, you call a team meeting. So once more, I'm reluctant to advise you on this, but let me throw a few questions at you. What type of decisions do you find yourself making individually and as a team? What kind of information do you need to make decisions and your team members need to make decisions?

And how is this being shared or communicated? How do you know who needs to have input into a decision? What's the level of trust in your team? Do you trust each other to make decisions on behalf of you as individuals or on behalf of the whole team?

And by the way, you would like to know more about building trust in any kind of team check out episode 6 of this podcast on trust. So a couple more questions. How are your decisions, your own ones and those of other team members communicated to others? How much of your thought process do you share?

How do you gather input to help you make a decision? Let me just stop here and make a couple of suggestions. You can gather input as comments to a document or you can write an internal blog post and ask for comments. Actually, blog posts are very rarely used anymore as a means of communication, but automatic, who's behind WordPress, they use them all the time and they find them very useful for really meeting conversations.

You can also be asking for input as part of a conversation on an online platform. You can hop onto a meeting, you can use sticking out applications, etc. So there are lots of ways where you can do some groundwork to help people make decisions for you to make decisions for your team members to make your decisions without formally having to meet. So that's all the formal stuff.

So that's all the formal stuff. What about informal interactions? Those are in different conversations. Those times when you just chat with each other to get to know each other better so that when you need help, it's easier to reach out.

That's the business case for chatting and getting to know each other better. It's that it's easier when you then need help to reach out to people because you feel you know them better. Well, the good news is that they can still happen in the remote setup. The difficult news is that you will have to plan for them.

So that might mean scheduling regular virtual coffees, informal meetings, we just chat about whatever, or have a section on your collaboration platform for random conversations. But the most important thing is to build the opportunity for finding each other in the space. So if you have core hours or your type of work means that you all know when others are online, then have a way of signaling that you really don't want to be disturbed. Otherwise, agree that at any point it's okay to reach out to say hello and even to suggest taking a break from work together.

These things need to be made explicit because all of us have different assumptions about what other people want or need. And if you never talk about it, we just freeze. Nothing ever happens. So agree on this.

What, when can we interrupt each other? And when can we just say, you know what, I haven't spoken to you for ages, so we just have a 10 minute chat, see how you're doing. If however, your schedules mean that you are rarely online together and that you don't always know when you're online, then have a way of signaling this. Either make sure you log on to your chat when you're at computer or find an application that allows you to see at a glance whether someone is online and happy to be disturbed.

And you can also get into the habit of turning up a bit early to your online meetings and make use of a cup of coffee. That can also be a nice 10 minutes of informal, the spontaneous chat that might lead to some interesting and even useful conversations you never know. And talking of coffees, well, I was going to say that my coffee is getting cold, but my coffee's disappeared. Maybe it really was a virtual coffee or maybe the waitress took it away while I was deep in conversation with you.

So let me just wrap up today's coffee then. And before I do that, if you want any more information on this, I have tons of blog posts and lots of other episodes from the 21st Century Worklife Podcast that talk about this virtual not distant.com is the website that you want to go to. Or search for 21st Century Worklife Podcast and your podcast app and you can look for, especially the conversations I have with Lee Set. So anything where you say that there's very pillar and Lee Set, that's probably about remote teams.

So to wrap up, I talk about the need to change the management mindset when we're leading remote teams, and this includes communicating through different channels, sharing more of our thought process and changing our role from that supervisor to that of enabler and even advocate for our team. Regarding tools, make sure you're choosing them to suit your team and that they don't end up shaping the team in unhelpful ways. And finally, make sure that you review every now and then how decisions are being made in the team and whether anything needs to change. Now that's it from me, but I want to leave you with a recommended read in case you would like to continue thinking about different ways of managing it while you're here in this cafe.

My recommended read today is Under New Management by David Birkers. I had the pleasure of chatting to David for the 21st Century Worklife Podcast for episode 137. Well, I think it's going to be 137. I haven't published it yet, but it will be around then.

And I reached out to David to appear in the podcast because I found his book incredibly well balanced as in whatever it's in one place, might not work in another. These are things to look out for. This is why it worked here. And this is why it didn't work here.

For example, there's an example of a company that made their salaries transparent. This is one of the things he covers in the book. And they weren't ready for it. There were other things that they should have done first for that to work.

So I really love that balance. And the book stylistically, it's really easy to read. It's full of contemporary examples and stories and I do thoroughly recommend it. So it covers some new and uncommon practices in organizations and coming in 2017.

Who knows what will happen in the future. So these include from moving away from email through unlimited vacation or sorry, having no vacation policy slightly different. And also to abandoning the annual performance review. So really interested.

And in our interview, David mentioned that the different aspects of management he covered in the book, whether it was that could work in any kind of work environment or knowledge workers, factory, anything. So why he doesn't specifically talk about the remote space, because the reason was, well, the virtual work, the remote work is not going to work for every setup. It's a very specific setup. Some people cannot do their work remotely.

So he does use examples from remote companies though to prove a point that what he talks about can be actually an example of a very wide range of working setups. But all the stuff he talks in the book, all the concepts are applicable regardless of where people are working from. So you're still looking for change in mindset and you're working in a remote setup. The book is for you.

And here's one of my favorite bits and then I will leave you to it. So the chapter loses the standard vacation policy when explaining why Netflix trusts their employees to act responsibly. Even though there's not a limited amount of days that they can take off, Vercuss pulls out this quote from Netflix popular culture slide deck. There is also no clothing policy at Netflix, but no one comes to work naked.

What do you think? I'll leave you with that quote. To subscribe to the podcast, you can go to managementcafepodcast.com. My name is Pilar Orte, and I hope you'll have a lovely time.