4 EASY Practices of High-Performing Remote Teams
Your company has suddenly gone from a completely or mostly in-person workplace to a totally remote, work-from-home policy. Some people are flourishing. Some people are flailing. And many are reckoning with this adjustment at the same time as managing increased levels of anxiety due to the coronavirus.
Having worked from home two or three days a week since 2015, I know small shifts can make big differences. Below are 4 simple, actionable, high-yield practices that you can implement immediately to make the most of your remote setup and meet people where they are. Perhaps you will find yourself thinking that most or all of these apply to in-person work too. I agree! The chief difference in remote environments is that the effect of not doing them is more pronounced (e.g. the delays longer, the loneliness lonelier, etc).
Per Buffer’s timely publication of The State of Remote Work (February 2020), the 3 recurring challenges remote workers cite most often are communication, collaboration, and loneliness. Given today’s context, I’ll add a 4th challenge I keep hearing: always-on overwhelm. While each challenge below has a corresponding primary practice, these challenges and practices are obviously related (e.g. it would be hard to collaborate well without communicating well, which can address some loneliness).
1. Clean Handoffs
Challenge Addressed: Communication
If there were only one practice I could recommend to teams in any setting to decrease friction and increase quality, speed, and motivation, it might be Clean Handoffs, which provide crystal clear, shared understanding of work being passed from one team member to another. Lack of clarity in communication always delays and often demotivates people; when remote, these effects are amplified. A host of research from the likes of Google, Atlassian, Wharton and others shows that clarity is one of the most influential practices in high-performing teams.
Consider a task or project you would like to hand off to someone. Take 60 seconds — time it — and answer the 5 questions below.
Now ask yourself how much time it would save that person versus a typical, perhaps more incomplete handoff. In workshops with managers, the typical range of estimates I get is 2 hours to 2 weeks. One person recently answered “infinity” (couldn’t proceed without all this info). That’s not a bad ROI on a 60-second time investment. Yes, these are the question words, and they exist for a reason (you’ll note the absence of clarifying “how,” the definition of micromanagement).
Take one more moment and ask yourself how much time and frustration you might have been saved if, the last time a colleague handed you a somewhat ambiguous task or project, they’d filled in all these blanks. Do your colleagues that service!
2. ABQ: Ask Better Questions
Challenge Addressed: Collaboration
Clean Handoffs can spare us unnecessary meetings so that when we do communicate in real-time, it’s for something that requires collaboration. This is why we meet. In-person meetings are painful when the meeting leader asks a question and…crickets. In an online setting, the crickets can be even louder. Instead of imploring or incentivizing people to speak up, as meeting facilitators we can shape that response by asking better questions. This has the transformative effect of engaging people and increasing the Ideas and Questions they ask (aka “increasing Team IQ”).
The beauty of this practice is that it doesn’t take any extra time. As you plan or lead your next meeting, pick 1 or 2 of the reframes below when you ask questions. Since you are leading from your computer, you can have it right there for reference. If you hear crickets when you ask a question, just reframe and ask again! These questions are also great for using in conjunction with Zoom Breakout Rooms, which people LOVE. (Email me if you want a pdf version: jack@brainbasedworkplace.com)
3. Team Touchpoints
Challenge Addressed: Loneliness
Okay, we aren’t literally touching each other right now, but human beings are social animals — yes, introverts too. We yearn to connect and, for better or worse, work now serves as a primary source of belonging and connection for many of us.
While the first two practices support taking effective action, that rests on a foundation of team connection.
When working remotely, the casual contact we get from having lunch together or chatting at our desks requires more intentionality to set up.
Tips:
- Start each meeting with a quick round-robin check-in. Ask a real question (see here for examples), give people 20 seconds to think of an answer, and then everybody check in. Make sure to timebox it (e.g. 2 minutes total) so that it doesn’t take over the meeting.
- Connection Huddle: At a set time every week, have a meeting just for connecting, even if for 15 minutes.
- Virtual Hangout: Set up a daily time and Zoom room where people can drop in (e.g. at 12pm for lunch) to see each other and connect around whatever is going on for them today (including non-work-related thoughts and feelings). Or open a zoom room where people can turn on their cameras and do their individual work in the “presence” of others.
- Integration Meetings: It’s easy — especially if you are a manager — to focus in on just your team, yet if you want to avoid silos (and loneliness), it’s crucial to integrate with other managers and key collaborators across the org. Similar to above, make sure to schedule regular touchpoints with these folks too.
For more ideas, from .gif battles to team playlists, see here for a dozen suggestions from Atlassian.
4. Boundaries AND Mode-Switching
Challenge Addressed: Always-On Overwhelm
The first three practices focus on working with others. This one addresses working — and being — on your own .
Yes, boundaries are essential and often referenced, even as something difficult to maintain, but many fewer people mention the latter part, what I call mode-switching. In our brains, the focused attention we use during work operates like a muscle, and if we don’t let it rest and recover, we suffer directed attention fatigue. In other words, when we don’t allow ourselves to be fully off during break time, it’s next to impossible to be fully on during work time.
So what boundaries do we create? And once we have created some boundaries so we aren’t working all the time, how can we stop thoughts about work from taking over?
Boundary: Teamwork vs Individual Work
Without the visible signs of working, people often feel a pressure to show that they are not slacking off at home. As such, they check email and Slack almost constantly, at the great cost of being able to do any focused deep work and make progress on important projects. Research shows that, contrary to this pattern, one of the defining qualities of the highest-performing distributed teams is “burstiness,” or “bursts of rapid communication, followed by longer periods of silence. “
The researchers write, “Why might burstiness succeed? One reason is that burstiness is a signal that team members attend to and align their activities with one another. During a rapid-fire burst of communication, team members can get input necessary for their work and develop ideas. Conversely, during longer periods of silence everyone is presumably hard at work acting upon the ideas that were exchanged in the communication burst. In contrast, teams that don’t communicate in bursts miss out on the benefits of both energetic collaboration and truly focused work time. Presumably, these team members are constantly toggling between modes.”
Tip: To create burstiness and support deep work, define boundaries for yourself and even make agreements with your team about when you will all be available and responding quickly vs doing individual deep work.
Boundary: Media and “What if” statements
Even as I write this, I’ve probably resisted checking the news a dozen times for the latest coronavirus news. Stopping obsessively checking the news has had the most supportive effect on my level of calm in the past few weeks.
Tips:
First, pick a maximum number of times each day that you will check the news (mine is 2), and decide precisely when those will be (e.g. 8am and 5pm).
Second, create an “instead of” replacement habit. “When I feel the urge to go to nytimes.com, instead I will do X (e.g. look at my tasks list/relax my shoulders/write down 1 thing I’m grateful for/stand up and move).”
Boundary: Work vs Non-work
Without a commute to separate things, I know my work can easily bleed into everything else, especially in work I find deeply enjoyable for myself and deeply impactful for others.
Tip:
Put a clear and concrete boundary and maximum on when you will work, e.g. I will stop working by 6pm. (And if you choose to work some evenings, cap that, e.g. I will work two evenings at most per week. ) Then, create a mode-switching ritual. Note: I am referring to intentional mode-switching, not the toggling back and forth between tasks from one moment to the next.
Create Closure.
- At the end of each work day, review what you did today and define what you will do tomorrow. One study shows that writing down such a plan dramatically reduces intrusive thoughts about ongoing projects while you are doing something else.
- Turn Slack to Do Not Disturb. (As with burstiness above, make team agreements around this — and discuss how to name it when people inevitably violate those agreements in the future.)
- Then create a ritual for ending: perhaps putting your laptop and phone in a drawer, or zipping it up in your backpack (even if you aren’t going anywhere). Research also shows that “physical closure helps achieve psychological closure.”
- And finally, get undressed (i.e. change clothes). Even if to a different t-shirt or from your work pajamas to your evening pajamas. As the research on enclothed cognition reveals, clothes signal to your body that you are in a different mode.
Those are the practices. Now, iterate. Just as you iterate your product based on your users’ feedback, share feedback with each other and iterate your and your team’s remote practices.
For a 2-minute article with simple steps to transform your team using these or other practices, click here.
