5 Ways to Better Run Remote: A Conversation with Laila von Alvensleben

Work from home is definitely sticking around. Major corporations are trying to push workers back into the office, post-pandemic, but guess what? In the U.S. we’ve still got 12% of folks working fully remote. That’s more than 3x the number we saw back in the early 2010s when Summit took the plunge and closed our physical location. Add in another 28% of workers in hybrid situations. With all these changes in the air, we’ve got to figure out best practices to keep improving our new professional normal.

And who better to chat about running remote than Laïla von Alvensleben, Remote Work Coach & Collaboration Designer? As a thought leader in the remote workspace, Laïla has insight into a major question: How can a fully distributed team stay connected?

Spoiler alert: When it comes to running remote, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The perfect mix will vary based on your company’s size, structure, and priorities. But at the core, it’s all about connection, communication, and collaboration. That means making the most of every type of interaction, whether that’s an in-person event, an email or slack message, or an online meeting.

Here’s what Laïla and I discussed.

Connect at In-Person Events

If we want to work fully remote, there is one absolute must: “Being in a distributed team doesn’t mean that you should never meet in person,” Laïla says. “You should get together at least once or twice a year, maybe more.”

In a remote world, people start losing connectivity very quickly, especially as you bring on newer folks. If they don’t have time to get to know each other in a relaxed, informal setting, it’s hard to develop that bonding that really keeps people at an organization.

For Summit, two retreats per year are really table stakes. Drop that number down, and you could be on the brink of disaster with your team. It doesn’t have to be the whole company (especially if your people are spread out across the entire planet). You could break up into departments or divisions with leadership teams meeting even more frequently.

Laïla is in total agreement. She recommends expanding the kinds of in-person meetings beyond formal, large-scale retreats. When she went to Lisbon to speak at the Running Remote conference, she called over other teammates based in Europe and invited them to come.

To have those kinds of spontaneous meetups, you need a strong culture to begin with. I see this all the time with our company: people are driving through town, and everyone hangs out; they meet up for dinner and introduce their spouses.

Retreats are a great way to cultivate that kind of culture: A lot of people think we’re going to bombard them with technical stuff, but really, it’s about soft skills, meeting new folks, and connecting with the people we talk to all the time, but only on video. Sometimes we stay out until 1:00, 2:00 a.m. It’s just a ginormous bonding opportunity.

To get the most out of your retreat, Laïla recommends resisting the urge to overschedule: You don’t necessarily have to do a design sprint during your retreat, she says. “Give a good chunk of time where there’s absolutely nothing planned, and people can spontaneously decide what to do.”

“That’s where the real bonds are created,” she says. “You can have all these team building activities and they force a relationship. But if you can let people organically take their time, they can do wonderful things.”

Juggle Time-Zones by Establishing Company Expectations

One of the biggest tests of a fully distributed company is the time-zone challenge. Some companies ask employees to follow a certain time zone — which might mean team members across the globe might have to hop on a call at 1:00 a.m. Laila suggests using a flexible hours policy: “You do the hours that you have to, to do your work.”

In response, Laila recommends doubling down on asynchronous communication, whether it’s email, Slack, Teams, or an online whiteboard.

Just don’t forget to over-communicate expectations around these tools. For example, have internal remote work playbooks, as well as individual team communication charters, where you can define what is expected, especially when onboarding new people. Laila explains, “Make sure people know not to expect to receive an immediate response.”

Optimize Meetings with Asynchronous Pre-Work

Who hasn’t been to a meeting that could have been an email? It’s a common problem with a simple fix: prepare.

It starts with publishing an agenda. Easier said than done, Laila tells us, but worth the effort: “Sometimes we’re in a hurry. Sometimes we have recurring meetings for updates. That’s okay, but if we publish the agenda a few days in advance, people might realize that they could contribute. Or sometimes you realize that it’s not necessary to discuss that topic in that meeting, because you could just send a Loom video where you record yourself. Then you could remove that topic and make space for something else or shorten the meeting.”

Beyond the agenda, Laila recommends preparing for meetings (or cross one off the calendar!) by brainstorming asynchronously with a collaborative whiteboard. Just like a Google doc, a collaborative whiteboard allows multiple simultaneous contributors while also enabling asynchronous input for team collaboration.

“We want to use meetings in a way that feels productive for everyone. It’s not just to inform people about something but rather to resolve a problem.” She recommends doing as much possible prework to cut to the chase. “Let’s say that we have to meet to share some ideas about an event that we just created together. I could send you a link and say, ‘Hey, can you add what you thought about the event, what worked well, and what we could do better next time?’”

“If we read each other’s comments beforehand, we can save 15 minutes, and then use the meeting to focus on the next actionable steps. Synchronous time is not always used wisely and that leads to meeting fatigue,” Laila says. “There’s this old way of thinking that we need to have everybody in the same room, that we need to be communicating constantly, synchronously. And that’s just not the case.”

Shorter meetings? Music to my ears.

Maintain Boundaries (and Help Your Employees Do the Same)

When you’re new to a company, there’s this notion that whenever someone invites you to a meeting, you’re expected to say yes, or when someone messages you, you should reply right away.

The more you get to know a company, the easier it is to figure out what’s urgent and what can wait.

“I’ll come online one day, and I’ll see that my day has five or six meetings back-to-back for four hours,” Laila says. “Technically I could do all of them, but that means I’ll be sitting at my seat without even a bathroom break, which is not healthy for my legs. But also, I noticed that I won’t get that much work done and I have other things to do.”

If you’re in that situation, Laila recommends shooting the person a message and asking if you can reschedule or get a recording. She also suggests blocking out some time on your calendar. “I block out my Fridays as what I call ‘JOLT’ — joy of Laila time, so that I have time to work without set meetings. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you’re busy on Friday.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, I’m so busy.’”

For newer folks, company charters or policies can help new folks grasp the culture. “I’ve experimented with a rule that if there was no published meeting agenda, anyone could feel free to decline,” said Laila. The idea is to take the burden off the attendees who might feel awkward asking for an agenda and put the ball in the organizer’s court.

When in Doubt, Ask for Feedback

When you’re a remote work advocate, you often hear concerns from worried business owners about what it would be like to go fully distributed. I get it. When I first proposed the idea of going remote to my team, they thought I was telling them the (not-so-funny) joke of the week. (They came around. But only after I fully renovated our office space.)

What does Laila say when she gets pushback?

Start by asking employees how they feel about their current communication.

One way to do this is through a survey or poll to get anonymous feedback. “Get that data,” she recommends and understand what people want about the way work is being done. What you tend to find is that people say they don’t have enough time to do the deep work.

From there, set a communication charter. That means going through every single tool, eliminating the ones you no longer need, and establishing new norms of communicating with the ones you keep. Take it for a test drive and call each other out when they’re not respecting the rules of engagement.

“Set up that new rhythm of collaboration,” Laila recommends, “and then look at the results next quarter and see if that data has changed. Often when people say it hasn’t worked, they haven’t been very intentional. Managers need to role model the behaviors, so their direct reports adopt them too. Otherwise, you see a lot of inconsistencies.”