Chapter 10 - Managing Remotely

Making Remote Work, Work For You

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This series is also available as an Amazon Kindle book.

When managing remote teams, there should be a strong emphasis on building personal relationships. It is more difficult for relationships to grow organically when your team members are remote. Instead, you must make deliberate steps to help this happen. 

In addition, the promotion process may be more complex and strategic than you may expect. As a manager, you need to tout your team’s successes and make sure people on other teams know of your team’s work and output. You want to avoid the “out of sight, out of mind” scenario discussed earlier. Of course your team is working, and of course there are awesome results to show for it. 

Here are some tips for remote management success:

-- Managers should spend as much time as possible with their new team members during onboarding. Get to know them as people, not machines. When working remotely, it is very important that people feel like they are valuable parts of a team.  Try to find some common interests with sports teams, music, traveling, cars, home improvement projects, etc. 

-- Start 1:1 meetings with a few minutes of “small talk” before jumping into work topics. Again, you are trying to build a personal relationship. This is critically important, especially for remote workers who might rarely get to spend time with their teams in person.  

-- Understand each team member’s motivations and career goals. Set clear milestones on the path to achieve these measurable goals and be honest about the obstacles. What are their strengths and weaknesses and what should they work on improving this quarter?  

-- What is the promotion process? Make sure it is clearly understood by everyone on your team. In larger companies, the promotion process may be very competitive with each manager doing her best job to push her own team members forward. As a manager, it is in your team's best interest to make sure each of your employees work is known outside of their immediate team. This can be difficult on hybrid teams where some employees work from an office and some work remotely. You need to help ensure that the output from the remote team members is visible.       

-- When working remotely, team members might not feel very connected to their company. Occasional shipments of “company swag” such as shirts, mugs, stickers, pens, anniversary gifts, etc. can go a long way in helping employees feel like part of something.  

-- Maintain a team calendar with everyone’s birthdays and work anniversaries. Acknowledge these special days on team meetings. A virtual card from team members is a nice touch.  

-- Put programs in place that influence your team to gel and collaborate. Some examples include book review clubs, virtual lunches and online courses on interesting technologies.  

-- Create and share a manager "README" to help everyone on the team better understand your style and expectations. Just like you should get to know your team members on a personal basis, they should also get to know you. It would be a good idea to review and revise this document a couple of times a year. See https://medium.com/@kawomersley/why-and-how-to-share-your-manager-readme-plus-heres-mine-8a4fe188ee1b and https://hackernoon.com/12-manager-readmes-from-silicon-valleys-top-tech-companies-26588a660afe for more information. 

-- Ask new team members to send you daily reports for their first month on the job. This might seem overbearing at first, but I have found that it helps with alignment during these critical early days. Once you are sure this team member is comfortable, you can switch to weekly reports.   

-- Hold semiweekly check-in meetings with your new hire’s mentors. Remember, the mentors will help keep the new hire aligned with his milestones. If tasks are slipping, it is important to sound the alarm early and make course corrections.  

-- Many “remote friendly” companies organize company wide retreats once or twice a year. This is great for bringing the entire company together. It is often used for a “year in review” and company alignment. As a manager, you may want to bring your team together for smaller events to celebrate milestones or to kick off major projects.    

-- Connect team members from different locations to work together on projects. For example, pair programming and code reviews.

Next up: Introducing Remote Work Into an Existing Team

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