How To Win At Remote Work

Part I: An operating system for team goals

Working remotely requires placing trust in your team members, clarity of goals and accountability for hitting them, and ownership where everyone knows what they’re on point for and is excited to run hard with what they’re owning.

The following is part of how we do remote work at Peggy. We use what we call a “4DX” philosophy. You can implement this if you’re the CEO, but can also implement this if you’re a leader within a team in your company. It can be used in a startup or a larger org.

Our version of 4DX is modelled after the book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals (McChesney, Covey, Huling, 2012). This translates well to an audiobook as well, if you prefer to listen rather than read.

What is the whirlwind?

Some key concepts of 4DX, and their applications to Peggy, include the following:

• There is a whirlwind of daily activity in the work day
• The whirlwind is reactive, day-to-day stuff
• The whirlwind is important and essential to getting things done, but…
• …it’s very important to step out of the whirlwind and focus on the most ‘thorniest’, high-impact things:
• Some goals require stepping back out of the whirlwind — they require focus and commitment
• We call these “Wildly Important Goals” (WIGs)

How to run a WIG meeting

On Monday mornings, we as a team (or in future as we grow, sub-teams) get together for a WIG Meeting and declare:

1. Last week my WIG was to do X
2. I accomplished this (or not), which achieved Y
3. This week, my new WIG will be Z

What’s the difference versus the Daily Huddle?

• The Daily Huddle is about daily transparency, collaboration, and unblocking — day-to-day stuff (which may contain great whirlwind stuff!)
• Whereas the WIG meeting is about WIGs — the opposite of the whirlwind

In the Monday WIG meeting, everyone declares their WIGs and then disbands. The results are reviewed the next week.

How to set goals

What to select as a WIG is not micro-managed by the team members’ manager: at Peggy, we value autonomy and people who are ‘self starters’. (This is a key structure that enables us to thrive, as a remote-first company).

Therefore, individuals set their own WIGs:

• Each individual determines what is most impactful based on their vantage point in the org.
• Using a Goals Tree (the current tool we use for this is Lattice), individuals have visibility into the overall company goals, starting at the company’s top-most goal, which is broken down into sub-goals, and sub-sub-goals.
• Individuals own areas of the goal tree where they have active influence, and will likely set goals within that part of the tree. Individuals know how making progress on that goal helps the overall tree — this creates a sense of purpose and impact for the individual.
• By setting their own goals, individuals feel a greater sense of ownership and excitement for what they’re working on.
• By declaring their goals in the WIG meeting, individuals are accountable to their peers (and can help and be helped by their peers), not just their manager.

Leading Indicators versus Lagging Indicators

Some goals are “Lagging Indicators”, and some are “Leading Indicators”:

• A Lagging Indicator is something that is important, e.g. Number of Galleries on Platform, but is not in the direct control of a Peggy team member (because it involves the Gallery deciding to join)
• A Leading Indicator is something that a Peggy team members is in direct control of — for instance, List of Gallery Prospects Generated is within one's direct control, and so is Number of Galleries Emailed --> both of these are example drivers of the Lagging Indicator above, Number of Galleries on Platform

The idea is that leadership defines and sets the top of the Lattice Goals Tree (with input from whole team), and then team members can set sub-goals (which can be Leading and Lagging), to achieve the top goals — managers and leaders are there to help coach and guide individuals to set the goals below.

Get out there and win!

This approach has been helpful to us building an autonomous, collaborative and self-reinforcing team at Peggy. I’ve never been a micromanager, it’s just not in my nature, but that would not scale in a remote environment.

Having an “operating system” like 4DX is essential to win in a remote environment. With remote, you can’t lean on the crutch of natural interactions that you might have in a 9-to-5 office environment. However, the beauty of being fully remote is that you’re forced to level-up your communication and processes in a way that unlocks new levels of ownership and collaboration.

Now that you know the mechanisms of this “operating system,” the next step to fully unlock its potential is to infuse a certain spirit to the process, a feeling. How should this feel? We explore this in Part II of How To Win At Remote Work.

I hope you’ve found this helpful, and would love to hear more about how you run your team for remote work!

I am @craigfollett
@peggy co-founder by day
poet by nighttime