Best Practices for Managing Remote Teams
A guide for better remote collaboration — with some fun GIFs
As a project manager coming in to manage a remote team, it can be a sizable task to ensure your team is setup for success. Communication and efficiency are the first two victims of remote collaboration if teams are not on the same page. To get work done remotely, you need people working with the right tools and appropriate methods.
Some of the most prominent challenges when managing remote teams are:
- Ensuring everyone is in the loop
- Communication flows through the right channels
- Tracking progress
- Making everyone feel included as a team
- Efficiently managing everyone’s time
Whether you’re running an agile setup, a waterfall model or a mix and match to suit your project, having the right setup and structure in place to supplement your team members makes the managing remote teams easier and more efficient.
Get everyone on board, right at the start
Get everyone together as quickly as possible right in the beginning and straighten out basics. Define requirements, basic terminologies, metrics for progress and success, objectives that need to be achieved etc. Get everyone’s schedule before hand so that the chances of someone missing out are minimized. Be as considerate as possible when accommodating time zone differences and locations but try to get the entire team together for the initial meeting.
Having everyone in sync wins you half the fight. If team members are clear about their role and objectives then you’re setting up a self-sustaining model for collaboration that will lead to minimum hassle.
Keep communication simple and natural
The more is not the merrier when it comes to communication tools. People like simple ways to get information across. By having an email client, a messaging service, a product wiki, a task board, an instant messenger, and everything under the sun to talk to team members, you’re only increasing their headache. Keep the interaction practically as natural as possible.
Find the right tools, not all the tools. Most tools offer integrations with a wide variety of other tools to create a simplified workflow. It is best to minimize setup overhead. Consider tools that fill in the holes in your process rather than create a noisy channel.
Update tasks daily
Basically, keep everyone in the loop. When people are distributed all over the place, giving them something that can make them feel part of the team helps. This avoids creating a feeling of ‘us and them’. A transparent process keeps communication simple and reduces the number of times someone has to be updated about task progress.
Employing an efficient ticketing or issue tracking system like zipBoard can help teams, in that regard. A well maintained backlog of tasks and issues organized in one central location can do wonders to create a smooth sailing ship. Think about it — would you like one platform to know where things stand or ten different small ones to piece together the puzzle. Teams have sufficient context and everyone is on the same page.
Keep subsequent meetings relevant
Apart from one big stand up where everyone is involved, keep subsequent meetings relevant and on point. Some managers have a daily update meeting, while some do it once a week. This will vary from team to team. Depending on the project’s timeline and complexity, different teams will require varying attention.
Only bring in team members who are concerned with that specific aspect of the project. Team wise meet ups are better and shorter. Narrower scope of meetings, wherever possible, increase the chance to go into details about each issue and get more done. As your team increases in size, it becomes all the more important to hit the nail and focus attention on specifics.
Check in for 1 on 1 meetings
Reach out and check with team members for face to face meetings, periodically. Letting your team know that you’re available for a one-on-one meeting helps foster trust and reliability. Remove communication barriers wherever possible, after all the biggest resource on your team are the people. Make sure they are comfortable and on board.
Motivation can be hard to sustain if you’re working alone in one corner of the world. This is why letting team mates know that they are valued and equal owners on the project is all the more important.
Smooth onboarding for new members
Create a system where new team members can get up to date and integrated into the team as soon as possible. Have a consistent set of documentation that contains details of the project, relevant requirements, basic terms and definitions, and standard guidelines. Minimizing the onboarding time adds to how quick new recruits can add productively to your project.
This aspect also highlights the importance of having well-defined processes and the corresponding documentation to go with it.
Get the team together to bond
Nothing beats the impact and effectiveness of face to face communication. Fostering team spirit is easiest when team members can meet in person. While it’s not possible for all teams to afford getting everyone together routinely, any such opportunity that arises should be welcomed and taken. This leads to better engagement and collaboration.
Having a fun activity to complement the team’s meeting helps bring everyone closer and create a sense of belonging among the team. In case face to face meetings are not possible, group video calls that are aimed at breaking ice and team building rather than just discussing work are helpful alternatives in such scenarios.
Review and get feedback
Listen to team members for what they think can be better during remote collaboration. Whether those concerns are technical, organizational or cultural, get feedback from everyone on what processes can be improved and how they can feel more comfortable on the team. Whether it’s getting asynchronous feedback on Slack or contextual feedback on zipBoard, collecting reviews and feedback early and often can save a lot of time and effort.
Iterate on your processes like you would iterate on your project. No setup is perfect right away. It takes continuous evaluation and feedback to reach peak performance.
Final Thoughts
More and more teams are choosing to work remotely today. This trend is gaining mainstream popularity because of the benefits it offers in flexible schedules for teams and expanding the boundaries for bringing in talent. It is not necessary that the best person for a job be in the same city or even country.
Having a diverse team spread across geographical locations also helps understand more markets and appeal to a broader audience, potentially. One example of organizations using remote teams to maximum advantage is Basecamp. Their customer support is able to answer almost 90% emails in under an hour thanks to team members being spread across time zones.
zipBoard is a tool that solves the issue of remote collaboration for designers, developers, and project managers by offering a virtual whiteboard to share ideas and designs on, whether a live project or a mock design.
