Leading a Distributed Remote Team Pt. 2: Pros and Cons

Managing Remote Teams: The Pros and Cons

Photo by Alex Bachor on Unsplash

This is part 2 of Leading a Distributed Remote Team.

In part 1 we talked about successful companies using the remote work model. Also the challenges I’ve faced as a remote product manager.

Leading a Distributed Remote Team Pt. 1

Now that we’ve talked about the challenges, let’s review the pros and cons of building a distributed team.

Managing Remote Teams: The Pros and Cons

What are the pros of having a distributed team? Well, there must be something positive because by 2020 50% of the US workforce will be remote. Including the UK.

The Pros are:

1. It’s a nice perk for employees — a healthy work-life balance;
2. You save money as a company mainly by not having to pay expensive offices; and
3. Access to global talent.

If we expand the pros then:

Drive Employee Productivity: As I mentioned in Part 1, letting your team set their own hours. Some will work early in the morning, others late at nights, so each member is working at their peak performance.

Higher Talent Retention: If a key member needs to relocate no problem, there’s flexibility for it. I know some Paybookers have been there for more than 7+ years, and they love the work-life balance.

Diversity: Access to global talent comes with different opinions, cultures, viewpoints and work styles creating a stronger, anti-fragile organization if it’s done properly.

Build A Strong Culture: It’s hard to explain but working remotely is like loving someone it’s binary or you love it or you don’t. When everyone understands the trade-offs and is invested then there’s a connection of belonging to a mission bigger than yourself doesn’t matter the location.

“Saving Money”: The saving money aspect depends on how you want to build your company, and the quality of talent you want. World-Class teams will demand great salary packages. You must have in mind:

Are you going to give work laptops? or tell them to use theirs?

What perks are you offering? If you are in a regulated industry like Fintech, how would you address security issues and proprietary information?

Are you sponsoring co-work spaces to help them socialize?

What breaks the routine between work and life? How can you support free time to empower creativity and motivation?

Will you have an open office anyone can pop-in meet others?

Are you doing yearly meetups/trips?

The Cons are:

1. Current tools aren’t ready for fully distributed teams.
2. Lose the Interaction Effect: Communication is difficult
3. Payment tools aren’t ready for global hires — Full employees vs contractors.
4. Innovation vs Iteration
5. A small community to learn from, lack of validation from many companies. Investors could disagree with distributed teams.

At first glance, you might think, well, there are more Cons than Pros! But it’s not, I’m just dividing them to expand on them at the end are three areas: Tools, Communication, and Experimentation.

Let’s expand them:

Tools: In Part 3 of this series I’ll explain the tools I used, but yes tools aren’t ready for remote work. The challenges you will find:

1. Meetings: A tool that helps to arrange a meeting for multiple people in multiple locations.
2. Video & Voice: My experience with Meet, or Hangouts or Zoom, you can’t see everyone at the same time, there’s no way to “raise your hand” and any sound will give the mic to someone.
3. Messaging: I love Slack, but if you are away for a holiday, good luck getting back on track.
4. Payments & Legal: We need a TransferWise + Gusto + Atrium for remote hiring. I was losing so much money in currency fees, and the legal structure wasn’t optimal.

Communication: There’s a direct relationship between the communication issues and the tools you use.

1. Isolation and stimulation: I lost a great team member because he was feeling lonely. I felt bad, I offered the option of paying for a co-work, I increased the frequency of meetings by adding demo days and sharing your screen. It didn’t work.
2. One-on-Ones: When I joined Paybook I started having weekly 1:1s. It was difficult to bond and create trust through video conference. I pushed it to every 2–3 weeks, and things improved.
3. Morale & Energy Levels: Ironically, just as I had a team member with low morale, I had other team members thinking they had low morale, but they’d always over-delivered. They just hated physical/video interaction, keeping things short and direct at meetings, or Slack. Very subjective to each personality.

The way I improved as a manager was by ignoring the limitations and showing I cared.

I would ask about the time the grandad had to go to the hospital by DM him on Slack or when the dog got lost, follow up early the next morning. I used Slack and video conference as my mediums just as if I was at the office.

4. Innovation vs Iteration: Co-location is great for collaboration, serendipity happens when smart people are in the same room. Remote teams can become very transactional meaning, tell me what to do and I’ll get it done. Also, is not the same 1-hour brainstorming with beer and pizza all together than 1 hour staring at your screen alone.

You need to create a virtual playground for innovation.

Small Community & Lack of Validation: We know that the future of work will be called “Just Work” doesn’t matter in what time zone you are, but today we are still in the development-learning stage.

There’s a debate with distributed remote teams. If successful tech companies have a “proven recipe”: have a small team, get traction, open an office in San Francisco, get the best talent, and scale. What makes you think that you can scale a team differently and be successful?

I don’t have the answer to that, but I do believe it’s possible. From first principles, businesses get disrupted by innovating in one or both of the following:

• 10x product(iPhone);
• Shifting the business model (AWS), or
• Through distribution (Slack/Airtable).

Thus, if you have a 10x process for scaling a global remote team, then you have a lot of advantage.

Tweet me on DanielYubi, for feedback, and to geek out any of the above subjects. 🤝

In part 3, I’ll elaborate more around tactical processes, tools, and solutions for leading a distributed remote team.

This post appeared first on my blog.