How We Make Remote Work Work At LeadWise

The basic tenet of managing and being part of a remote team is this: Treat adults as adults. At LeadWise, we don’t want to, and neither can we, control people’s behaviors or what they trust in.

So, creating a space where people trust each other and have autonomy is paramount if you want to make remote work, work.

While trust and autonomy sound like tall orders, they can be built into your team’s psyche more easily than you imagine.

There are a host of tools on the Internet that allow for smooth collaboration between team members, whether they’re seated directly across you or, on the other side of the globe.

A fully remote team ourselves, we’ve figured out the tools that are a great fit for our specific needs via simple trial and error.

Our team loves using

• Slack for internal communication
• Zoom for conducting face-to-face meetings between individuals or the entire team
• Wistia to host our videos
• Trello for our project management needs
• youcanbook.me for scheduling our meetings
• Helpmonks to manage shared emails accounts
• Drip for our email marketing campaigns
• Zapier to do our software integrations an
• the Google suite of apps to create our docs, articles, presentations and spreadsheets

It’s evident from that list that it’s possible to run entire businesses with the help of a set of carefully chosen tools. Like elves, these tools constantly work for you.

And they can help your team, just like they did ours, be more productive and effective. You just need to discover the unique mix of tools that work for your particular team.

Not All Tools Are Equal

The tools I’ve listed above have truly helped us improve our ways of working — but that wouldn’t have been possible, if our team members weren’t open to trying new things or to adapting their working style on the go.

We’ve had our share of hiccups — and we’ve had to remove tools that weren’t working for us, replacing them with newer ones that we discovered along the way.

For instance, we were using Crazy Egg to get heat map analyses on our websites — but figured out later that we weren’t getting many actionable insights. Another example would be the online chat tools for customer support. Since the volume of interactions was very low, it didn’t really justify the cost of using the tool and assigning people to manage it. And finally, we tried three different platforms for webinars — webinarsonair.com, clickwebinar.com and anymeeting.com — but we found out that they simply weren’t working for us. So, we turned to Zoom for our webinar needs as well.

However, the focus here isn’t on tools that your team will use and discard, but the flexibility and adaptability of your team members themselves. These qualities are what every successful remote team possesses.

The Where And When

Working remote can be as exotic and fun as it’s made out to be, but it can be pretty challenging as well — especially to align the timezones of all your team members. Sometimes, timezones are the single most important aspect a remote team needs to get right.

Enter timezone management tools that can help you keep track of where all your team is situated and what their local time is.

My personal favorite is World Time Buddy because it makes it very easy to visualize, at a glance, the major cities (the first four options are for free) and play with the timezones. Besides, it’s super simple to learn and very user-friendly. I use it every time I need to plan meetings and align agendas.

Another tool that our team regularly uses is Timezone.io, which has a very clean user interface and shows you exactly what you need to see.

The All-Important Social Contract

Now that I’ve covered what tools we use in our own remote team, I want to go back to how it all began.

It isn’t as if we knew exactly how to create a remote team and had flawless collaboration right from the word go.

In fact, we started without a clear vision about what our roles and responsibilities were; and neither did we have a social contract. However, over time, things started getting clearer and we realized we had to clearly define

• what roles existed within LeadWise
• the purpose of each role
• who was responsible for what
• what metrics to use to measure performance
• what tasks were key for a role to be satisfactorily performed
• and, come up with a social contract of assumptions and principles that we all agreed to work under.

To run an effective remote team, it takes clarity on the social contract, the roles and responsibilities.

They’re important because they avoid gaps in understanding and communication. The social contract, in particular, needs a bit of thought because it’s a document about behaviors and guiding principles that a team needs to apply to their work.

For example, at LeadWise, we’re passionate about getting things done and delivering finished work on time. And that reflects in the way we phrase our agreements; post assignments to each other; in all our communications; and the way we go about achieving our S.M.A.R.T. goals. Striving to be more organized, efficient and concise are also a part of our social contract (special thanks to Mariola Wittek Mourao who has facilitated this exercise in our team ❤).

So, when someone is onboarding they understand exactly what principles lie behind our ways of working. We also believe it’s a great idea to revisit our social contract, every once in a while, to ensure that our team is working the way we all agreed to.

Without these things, it can get very difficult to keep things running smoothly across continents and timezones.

The Remote Team Recipe

The success of your remote team also depends on the style of working and collaboration you adopt: At LeadWise, it’s been extremely fruitful to work in weekly sprints.

On Mondays, we have meetings where we set our weekly goals; we do 15-minute “catch-ups” every day; and on Fridays, we do a retrospective meeting where we discuss what went well that week, what needs more work and what steps to take in the future. This type of working model has proven quite effective for us.

Let me wind up with the most important ingredient to a great remote team: Its members.

You need the right mix of people with an inclination to working remotely with others just like them. The kind of people that are drawn to LeadWise are those who are open-minded and willing to give remote working a shot. Someone who needs 100 percent direction in every move they make; someone who doesn’t really believe in self-management or, someone who feels it’s super complicated, is probably not a good fit for a work culture like ours.

That said, I do believe that people can always learn how to fit their personalities into this kind of a work culture.

With a little bit of help, your team members too can be shown how they can adopt or adjust to the idea of working remotely.

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We believe that we need to change how work works. LeadWise is a home for business leaders to get practical tools and education to lead in today’s changing world. We do this by offering online courses, in-person workshops and software through an international network of changemakers. Join the movement at www.leadwise.co.

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