My main learning from running a remote team is that the worst way of working remotely is simulating the physical office environment by using chat and video calls all the time. Instead it is important to build a completely different approach that embraces the unique advantages of remote work. In this post, I share some of the best practices I’ve discovered for effective remote collaboration.
Invest into knowledge management
Context sharing is one of the most important leadership skills. Knowledge bases such as internal wikis or handbooks can be invaluable tools in order to keep everyone in your team in sync. Investing time in order to setup one will pay off very quickly by saving time spent on onboarding each new employee and on responding to common queries, it will also help you reveal the hidden “tribal knowledge” of how certain things work and put it into writing in the most efficient way.
There are lots of great tools these days. You should pick one based on the approach that works best for you. You can just start with a git hosted Markdown-based wiki to keep it simple.
One important thing to consider is that you should involve everyone in your team into the process of building and maintaining the knowledge base. This way you will benefit from fresh and evergreen repository of knowledge that is a result of a valuable collaboration.
Learn to communicate asynchronously
Successful remote teams always prioritise asynchronous communication. It’s type of communication where immediate response is not expected. Does this sound like an email? Well, yes and no. Email is just a medium for sending and receiving messages. What is more important is how your team members are using this medium.
Expectations management and clear writing are the main skills to cultivate among your employees to achieve thoughtful and organised exchange of information. If you are looking for a way to start, look around for successful use cases that might already exist in your company. For example, most engineers in your company are probably already using asynchronous tools such as Pull Requests for code reviews in their daily work.
Prioritising asynchronous means avoiding real-time conversations through chat or video calls as much as possible. It is not intuitive at the beginning, but reducing amount of time spent on live interaction creates room for deep focus and meaningful work. This is especially true for the makers in your company - developers, designers, copywriters etc. This distinction is covered well in the famous article by Paul Graham.
Share the company goals and the progress clearly
In a world without a physical office it is crucial to keep everyone aligned on current goals. Make sure you share simple and clear goals with everyone. Regularly update your team on the progress that the company made against these goals. Other than providing a direction, this is also an important motivation booster. Seeing the big picture helps everyone understand their roles and contributions much better, which blooms a self-driven work culture in your company.
You can use different techniques for defining goals and tracking them. But in any case keep it minimalistic and focus on highlighting the outcomes in addition to the outputs. As for tools - it can vary from a shared document to a set of specialised dashboard services. In general, try to keep it as simple as possible and only add details to it if it is absolutely necessary.
It is also important to have recurring company update sessions to share highlights, acknowledge failures and celebrate wins. A quarterly, monthly or bi-weekly “All Hands” or “Town Hall” events are a good way to do this.
Know your team and prevent social isolation
Managing teams remotely is a challenge that requires a major advancement in leadership skills across the company. Having sense of current mood of your employees requires a much more structured approach rather than a casual 1:1 over a coffee. These days there are many great tools and methodologies that might help you to build an environment of trust, honesty and growth for your remote team. There are also plenty free resources online. Make sure you have a company-wide HR strategy and a systematic approach for implementing it.
Another important challenge is to maintain and develop a sense of community within your company while working from various locations. This can be achieved by regular online or offline meet-ups based on interests, random sync-ups and platforms for off-work discussions. All these activities should be done voluntarily and the best way to organise it is to distribute responsibilities for them among different people in your team.
Track all the work
Tracking all work is very important in an environment without in-person collaboration. Tracking doesn’t mean time tracking, but rather registering every chunk of work that is agreed to be done. Verbal-only agreements can cause lots of problems when working remotely. Even if it is a small favour that will take a day of work, having that data point will help to plan and organise resources more efficiently in future.
Remote teams thrive by ditching their office habits for new ways of working that embrace written communication, documentation and clear tracking. Instead of constant video calls, focus on building knowledge bases, sharing goals transparently and creating meaningful connections with your teammates. The best remote organisations transform not just where but how work happens.