The practical guide to manage remote teams
Table of content
Introduction
Remote work is now a reality.
Some members of your team might just work from home few days a week, some might permanently work in different cities or even continents. Maybe your company is a fully remote one with no headquarters or office options at all.
How to deal with the new dynamics of a virtual, remote team?
As a manager myself, I’ve been reading a lot about team management, productivity and happiness; more recently my attention focused on the new reality of virtual teams.
Today you can find great content on how to manage remote teams, mistakes to avoid, tips on how to improve team productivity and morale.
The theory is great, but how to put it in practice?
How to diligently and consistently follow the suggested recommendations?
How to leverage technology and automation to ensure those best practices are executed?
From the theory to the practice
I decided to put together a series of bite-sized articles that takes one management tips at a time and shows how to practically implement it, mostly leveraging technology considering the virtual nature of these teams.
The structure of each article is very simple:
- One management tip and its source
- Setup of the appropriate tools and workflows to put such tip into practice
The tips are taken from sources like Harvard Business Review, relevant blog posts from hybrid or fully remote companies like Stripe, Buffer, Zapier and individuals starting interesting discussions on the topic on Twitter (e.g. Ryan Hoover, Hitesh Shah, Jeff Morris Jr., Brianne Kimmel, Elad Gil, Andreas Klinger, etc.)
I’d like to make this series as collaborative as possible. If you have found management practices or workflows that worked well with your team, please share them in the comments or via Twitter and I’ll quote you in a dedicated article.
Regarding tools, I’ll focus on very few, based on my personal experience and usage. I’m sure there are some better for certain purposes, but the goal is to build a simple stack that any company can adopt. Further, many of the proposed workflows will be centered around messaging and its apps, as I developed a deep understanding of the medium while building Kyber, a Team Assistant for Slack. Messaging is the most natural and logic place to start:
- Messaging is the direct digitalization of the most common in-person interaction, talking to each other, that virtual teams need to replace
- Messaging is the most pervasive app, both in consumer and now also in enterprise, and the simplest to use
- Messaging is the common denominator in communication and collaboration for almost every remote company in the world
I will link the articles here to create a master table of content, so feel free to bookmark this page.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to hit the 👏 button below as many times as you want to tell me you found this post interesting. Use the Follow button to stay updated with the next posts around messaging, platforms, and conversational design.
Originally published at https://kyber.me on July 29, 2019.
