Truthfully Remote: Create the Remote Work Experience Your Team Deserves

The COVID-19 pandemic forced companies worldwide to shift to remote work, which allowed them to keep their businesses afloat. While it started as a contingency plan for many, a recent study found that remote work improved work-life balance for employees, increased productivity, reduced costs, attracted high-quality talent and potentially increased the competitiveness of the organization.

However, when COVID restrictions were lifted, many companies found themselves undecided on how to operate in the post-pandemic world. Some chose to return to the pre-pandemic norm of full-time in-office work, while others chose a remote working model that aligned with their business strategies, ranging from hybrid to fully remote.

For those organizations that claim to be remote-friendly, it's essential to understand that remote work is not merely letting people work from home and giving them a home office budget. Without a solid remote strategy, you could turn what could be a competitive advantage into one of your biggest weaknesses. A critical factor for success is the leadership that you and your managers bring to the execution of this strategy. In this blog post, we'll discuss how to be an effective leader for a remote team, covering some of the nuances that need to be worked out.

The backstory

I have been leading my teams remotely for the last 8 years, and I have learned a lot along the way. I have also been a remote employee myself for almost 15 years, so I have seen my fair share of remote working patterns and antipatterns. In fact, when I was asked to return and take up a leadership role that I had worked remotely for many years, I was quite reluctant. I had moved on and was leading a quite large engineering division. I had built strong personal and professional relationships that made it possible for us to deliver on some very ambitious goals over short spans of time. Being there in-person, sitting close to the teams in an open-office made it effortless to build that relationship with even my skip-level. And I was being asked to come back to rebuild a team while being the only one working remotely in the team.

Fast forward 8 years, and today that team is one that I'm proudest of. We built a strong culture of trust and ownership that enabled more and more people to work remotely. When the pandemic hit, we transitioned effortlessly to fully remote and stayed that way even after. I learnt a lot about building and leading a remote team along the way. When I came across Laurel Farrer ’s webinar, and then followed through with GitLab 's Remote Playbook, and their free course, I was pleasantly surprised to find validation for things that we instinctively did or established through trial and error, in our remote-working journey. This article, which I hope to make the first of a series, will share my own guidelines on building a remote team based on my own experiences, backed by the more academically rich resources above and a few more that I’ll share at the end.

Know your "why"

Why are you offering remote work? In the post-pandemic world, organizations are under market pressure to go remote. According to Statista, 95% of US knowledge workers prefer working remotely, with 74% willing to quit their present jobs in favor of a remote working opportunity. Whether it's proactive or reactive, gaining access to and retaining talent across a larger geographical region is one of the main reasons why most organizations choose remote work. It is by far the most efficient way to onboard highly skilled, specialist talent around the world without dealing with legal and immigration red tapes. Some organizations look to go fully remote for the savings in terms of rent and energy bills by not having to maintain office spaces.

Align the working models

When transitioning to a remote work model, it's important to align your team's goals and needs with the right working model. The Remote Playbook identifies at least 8 remote working models, each with its own set of benefits and challenges. While it's not possible to prescribe the right model for every team, it's important to choose a model that aligns with your team's purpose and goals.

The hybrid-remote model is one of the most prevalent models as it’s often thought to be a compromise between the management’s need to have employees co-located, and the employees’ desire to work from home. However, this model often tends to be the most sub-optimal, retaining much of the pitfalls while delivering almost none of the key benefits.?

This is why you needed to be decisively clear on the purpose of your remote work strategy. For example, 68% employers, wanted their employees in the office at least 3 days per week. If cost saving was a goal, this is hardly going to make a difference. This model also eliminates every potential candidate that’s outside the commuting distance from the office and it will not protect you from a truly remote competitor for even those candidates.

The purpose could of course, evolve over time. Our own strategy started off in the “remote exceptions” model to enable me to lead the team in India without needing to relocate me. Over time, we talked HR into a “remote-allowed” model to retain our best team members who were either dealing with long commutes or needed to relocate to other states to stay close to their families. Ironically, the pandemic forced us all to be fully remote and lift the geo boundaries for recruitment, at which point the company made a commitment to stay remote friendly.

Create the culture

Creating the right culture is essential for any team's success, and while it may happen naturally in a co-located team, it requires intentional effort and continuous attention for a remote team. When team members work remotely, they may feel disconnected and isolated from their colleagues, making it crucial to establish a culture that fosters collaboration, communication, and a sense of belonging. This topic is vast and requires a more in-depth discussion, which I plan to cover in a subsequent post. However, there is one cheat code that I can offer: lead by example.?

If you want your remote team to thrive, be a remote worker yourself. Do not work from the office and tell your team that you understand the challenges of remote work. Working remotely can be much harder than working in an office for most people. It is a stark contrast to occasionally taking a day to work from home and being highly productive. For example, those of us with young children quickly realize that locking ourselves in a room and putting up a sign that says "Daddy/Mommy's working" only works once or twice. By experiencing this lifestyle yourself, you will understand the nuances and appreciate the sacrifices your team members make when they consistently deliver quality work from home.

Build a High-Trust Environment

Trust is the most valuable currency in a remote team, and it must be equally distributed across the organization. When your team is outside your field of view, it can be challenging to trust that they are putting in their best effort. This trust must be earned and maintained by remote leaders.

Building and maintaining trust across all stakeholders is a crucial responsibility of remote leadership. It is essential to have each individual start and operate from a place of trust. When hiring for a remote role, a careful vetting process is necessary. Hiring for strengths and attitudes is not enough. You must dive deeper to understand the candidate's motivations and determine if they will be happy in the long-term doing the work required of them.

In my team, we have a thorough interview process consisting of three stages. The first two stages focus on strengths and attitudes, while the final stage is an open-ended conversation with me. I spent that time peeling through the layers to find out why this person wants to be in our team, how do we fit in her journey. At the end we regroup to piece together how all that we know about this person aligns with what the role requires from her on a daily basis. Needless to say, we spend a lot of time filling our positions. But we tend to get it right, with our attrition rates being the lowest in the company, and our median tenure being five or more years.? We have retained most of our early team members who have progressed well into senior roles.

Hiring individuals who are genuinely interested in the success of the team and the product is the key to building high-trust environments. When you have team members who love their work, you can trust that they will bring their best selves to work every day. This is why it's important to hire individuals who will remain engaged in their work for the long term.

Default to Async Communication

When it comes to remote work, asynchronous (async) communication is a crucial strategy that works for any remote team. It allows team members to communicate and share information at their own convenience, while also keeping a written record of conversations and decisions. However, this shift to written communication can catch people off guard; what used to be a quick, across-the-table conversation, now needs to be written down and immortalized in Slack. Nevertheless, the beauty of async communication lies in its ability to record all thoughts, discussions, and decisions automatically, which creates a comprehensive knowledge base that everyone can access.

While async communication is inclusive to team members in different time zones and those who may be uncomfortable speaking up in a group setting, it can also create challenges for those who are not confident in their writing skills or whose first language is not English. As a leader, it's essential to ensure that everyone feels psychologically safe to share their ideas and concerns using the language that suits them best. Encourage the use of diagrams, bulleted lists, and AI tools like ChatGPT prompts or Slack's auto-transcription of voice messages to help team members better articulate complex ideas in writing. The goal is to foster a friendly, supportive, and respectful collaboration environment that benefits everyone.

On a side note: I also wrote a post about how to run effective virtual meetings, when you absolutely need to get on a call with your team.

Closing Thoughts

Remote leadership requires a whole new set of skills and letting go of some notions of traditional management. The challenge for a new manager isn’t in the learning of these new skills: it’s in the unlearning of their existing assumptions, processes, and beliefs. A remote leader must learn to trust their team members, communicate clearly and frequently, and prioritize outcomes over inputs. They must also be comfortable with technology and be able to leverage digital tools to keep their team connected and engaged. Overall, remote leadership demands a shift in mindset and a willingness to adapt to new ways of working to achieve success.