Building and collaborating with remote teams ⚡️

Nowadays you can do great remote work in many industries. The range of industries that encourage remote teams is growing fast. You can hire the best talent in your field regardless of their physical location.

Building a remote culture within the team and company is imperative for building a team that is not in the same location. Technology has provided us with great tools that allow us to work closer and collaborate as if we were in the same room and even more efficiently. Tools are important but embracing the ideas of communication and collaboration within physical boundaries is paramount to building successful remote teams.

Here are 10 ways to build better remote teams and encourage communication and collaboration to flow:

1. Design a system: When building a remote team it is important to create patterns of how things should work. These patterns will allow you to repeat behavior consistently across team members and avoid uncertainty in new hires. Never take information for granted. Explain in detail everything. Some things you would naturally say in an office environment that will need to be specified in a message through the internet. Setting expectations is key. Some good examples of things that you should describe in detail to establish expectations are: Things to learn, accounts to open, work environment, collaborative tools, hours of collaboration, etc. Having a set of tasks your manager needs to do when a new team member comes onboard is a good idea (accounts to open, documents to sign, etc). Another great idea is to lay out all information the team needs to read and have available at all times in a company wiki. Most of the time the amount of information might be overwhelming and it is good to have it handy for later on as well.

2. Learning environment 📚: When on-boarding new team members to a remote environment there are certain technologies and methodologies that the person will need to learn. Team members should know and understand about the technology stack and the culture philosophy the product or company is built in. Design a basic curriculum of technologies and ideas you would like the team members to read about. A good way of doing this is to create a basic Trello board (or any board) with all the information. These could be customized and off course expected to build upon.

There are great websites in the web where you can learn from the best. Khan Academy, Coursera, CodeSchool, Udemy, Udacity, Platzi, and the list goes on.

3. Collaborative tools: When working remotely you rely on technology tools to communicate and collaborate on ideas. It is important to not only set up the tools but to also develop the habit to include these into your working process. Get your team onboard so that everyone uses the same tools. Establishing consistency in the ways of work is key. Nothing is written on stone, these tools can always change but look at it as if you changed office. There is always a learning or habit curve to adapt to the new tool.

Some collaboration tools I recommend: Slack, Trello, Google apps, Invision, Github.

4. Working results instead of working hours 💪: The most important of a remote relation with a client is to constantly deliver value. It is very hard to build trust (even more in a remote environment), but it is very easy to destroy this trust. Consistent value is very important. Make sure the scope of the work you are being done is trackable. Write down the user stories in the project management tool of your choice and make sure to break down big tasks into smaller ones. The ideal scenario is to be able to deliver one story a day or at least 3–5 stories a week. If the user story takes you much more than that is a sign that the story is written in a bigger scope and it usually should be able to be broken down into smaller stories. Make sure the user stories are written in the same language the team and the client work with. It is important that everyone understands what is happening in the project. It is way more valuable for a client to see working results than to see a working time logs with nothing accomplished.

If you commit to deliver certain functionality in a date, make sure you commit to this date. Don’t be afraid to say no. If there are unrealistic dates being set for delivery it is better to mention the improbability of this outcome early in the planning, than to commit to it and then not make it. It is better to underpromise and overdeliver than the other way around.

5. Delegate iteratively: It is important to have a plan to delegate work when on-boarding a new hire. The sweet spot is to give tasks you are confident they will be able to execute due to their level of expertise and other smaller tasks that will be harder to accomplish but that will keep them motivated in learning more. The more the person responds positively to the assigned tasks, the complexity levels should gradually increase. Be cautious of the amount of work you delegate in the first days of work. You will want to give them a clear path of what the work will be but not so much work that they will feel overwhelmed and helpless. You should be clear on the different levels of expertise and proficiency of your team. Try to have a mix of profiles so they can motivate each other. The new team member should never feel alone. They should be able to execute on their own but also feel the freedom to ask for guidance. The guidance can be provided by you (manager or lead) or a more experienced team member.

6. Team roles and hierarchy: Clearly set roles gives gives guidance and a path to follow for all team members. The idea of setting roles is to manage expectations and efficiency.

Hierarchy is also an important concept, and when I say hierarchy it is not intended to feel superiority or inferiority, a hierarchy is mainly set so that team members know who to ask guidance and also visualize a career path — this is discussed in a later point. I personally believe more in horizontal organizational hierarchies where all teams collaborate and learn from different departments.

7. Team productivity rituals: Once you have designed a system and have all tools to manage the team and project in place, set up rituals. A set of rituals are consistent activities that all team members participate in and execute. These rituals should become a habit among the team.

Set up a project management tool method. Most project management tools lists are adaptable to the team and project’s needs. It is important to set up a flow for user stories so that everyone in the team knows the status of the work without the need to ask for it. For example, you might find helpful to have different lists such as: Information, To do, Doing, Done, Testing, Needs Improvement, Client List, and Approved. The team member working in each stage of the process should be in charge of moving the user story from list to list until it reached the Approved or Merged column.

Have stand up meetings. These are meetings where the team meets for a brief time and everyone shares what they have accomplished the past week and what the goals are for the upcoming week. This way everybody knows what the company is working on and they can help each other. Try to manage all general project conversations in public chat rooms, this way all team members can weigh in a discussion and give their opinion. Most of the time if you have a question another team member might have it too. When it comes to call someone’s attention on something it is better to do so in a private room. When it comes to congratulate someone it is better to do so in a public room.

Have standards in how to write user stories so that all of them follow a specific informational pattern. I call this the user story card anatomy. As tacit as it sounds a user story should describe what a user type should do.

For ex. “As a [type of user] I would like to [do specific action] in order to [achieve certain value or goal]”.

This can be translated into: “As an admin user I would like to log into the admin panel and view my app user visits.”. Other than this information, the user story might be accompanied by a more detailed description of the feature, mockup reference, Pull Request URL, and any other complementary information the team might find helpful.

8. Build a community 🛠: Remote community building can be tricky because team members are most of the time apart. If the team is 100% remote and the members live far away from each other, you can set up weekly meetups where a member prepares a talk of interest for everyone.

Type races are always super fun as well and could give a break to a long day of work. Hackatons could also be a great team building activity and teams can create a useful or product as well.

If it is possible to meet physically. This motivates the whole team and recharges them. This created a big sense of community and belonging. You can organize yearly retreats or if team members are not too far away bimonthly meetups.

On a day to day basis empathize on humanizing communications. Set a casual tone and create empathy between coworkers. Use emojis and GIFs on the company’s chat. Set core company values that resonate with the whole team and that gives them a purpose of belonging more than just having a job.

9. Have a career path: It is part of human nature to always want to improve and be better. Show the team members they can build a career in your organization. Design a clear path so they understand what they need to work on and achieve in order to build the career they long for.

10. Finding new hires: Finding exceptional and committed talent is very hard these days. Hiring and building teams can be a complex process. Having motivated and happy team members evangelizing the organization’s mission and values among their peers and social media is the best way to capture new talent.

In some universities they also have working programs as part of their mandatory credits to graduate. This is also a great program to set up within your organization because you will have new source of talent every semester and the opportunity to train the team members to belong to your organization and hopefully some of them will be a great fit and you can offer them a permanent position. Always keep in mind the level of expertise and expectations for these types of hires as most of them will have limited experience in the work field and will need guidance.

“We like to give people the freedom to work where they want, safe in the knowledge that they have the drive and expertise to perform excellently, whether they are at their desk or in their kitchen. Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.” — RICHARD BRANSON — FOUNDER & CEO OF VIRGIN

Not always the right answer is to scale your team. This depends on the nature of your business and the needs your organization might have. There is always a learning curve, when a new team member joins the organization the productivity and effectivity not always raises in parallel. Sometimes it even slows down up until the new talent is comfortable with the new environment, tools and technologies used in the process. If they are a right fit it will pay off in the long run because the team will have grown in human power and motivation.

There is no right or wrong way of building a remote team. My suggestion is to try different ideas and paths and see what works within your organization.

Have you worked on building a remote team before? What were some of the virtues and challenges you faced in doing so? 👇🏼