Managing Remotely
140 companies answer 6 questions
Managing a remote or distributed team successfully requires good support, planning, and communication. Whether deciding if and how to get the team to meet in person or defining the line between vacation and flexible work, the management of a remote team has differences from managing traditional on-site teams. In our Managing Remotely section we ask top remote companies how they keep their teams running smoothly from thousands of miles away.
Do you have remote communication protocols for your remote workers?
We created the 10 Slack agreements of Buffer just for this.
We don’t set communication rules for the team, but we rely on a collaborative approach to accomplish the company’s goals. Rarely is one team member…
Be generally available, coordinate with your team to be most effective, realize that working remotely means overcommunicating.
Do you organize remote team retreats?
Once a year we converge on a tropical location for our annual company retreat. (You can find a recap of our 2016 team trip here.)…
We meetup as an entire team at least twice per year. We call them JarFests. We work hard to plan them in a fun city…
Yes! We organize three all-company events per year. One focused on working together on specific company projects, one focused on training, and another focused on…
Do your remote team members meet in person?
We have an annual, weeklong meeting where we all gather to work and play together. We also have occasional mini conferences, during which individual teams…
We try to do annual company summits for 1 week in Oregon. This has been a great bonding experience and a chance to get to…
Not only do we all meet twice a year in person, we live together in a giant house for a week to work and play.…
How do you measure the productivity of remote workers?
It’s not a perfect science; we have had situations where employees were “skating” for a month or so and we did not notice. But, eventually…
Classes taught, student homework completion, and parent ratings.
We focus on output rather than time spent. We track our weekly goals closely to ensure that we’re doing what we set out to do.…
What elements are key to successful working relationships with remote teams?
Weekly calls are important, as is setting and communicating realistic and exciting goals.
Effective communication Understanding Accommodation
Well, we only have remote workers, including me. For a 100% distributed team, I’d point to a few key resources: A flexible, instant “virtual office…
What is the hardest part about managing a remote workforce?
The hardest part about managing a remote workforce is the propensity for terse communication. Often times, people are chatting, trying to quickly accomplish something or…
Not seeing them in person every day. Most people think the hardest part about managing a remote workforce is about productivity. It’s not. We have…
Growing larger than 50 people seems hard. It’s hard because you need a layer of managers in there if everyone is going to get individual…
How do you keep remote employees engaged and feeling part of the bigger picture?
While we aren’t big on meetings, we do have a regularly scheduled Monday meeting where we go over any admin items and talk about the…
Our team communicates regularly on Yammer, FlowDock, GitHub, and via email. We have Google Hangouts daily, and often have company-wide updates or individual “Ask Me…
We give our team members flexibility. Just because they were hired for one particular job doesn’t mean that they can’t do other things that interest…
What is your BYOD policy for remote workers?
Because of the type of work our customer care professionals do, they must be logged into a secured workstation to address Card Members’ inquiries. Many…
XWPeople use their own devices.
We have all of our team members use their own computers, but we provide all the apps necessary.
What is your time off policy for remote workers?
We do not have a time off limit. However, for it to be worth my while to manage our resources, they have to contribute a minimum…
We don’t track time off but expect people to take roughly 4 weeks vacation. Most of our team doesn’t have set hours so it’s really…
Take whatever time you need. We’re a ROWE environment.
What were your biggest fears in managing remote workers?
In regards to our independent contract remote workers, making sure they have represented themselves honestly and that their credentials are valid is a common source…
I’m a first-time people manager and first-time CEO. My fears were (and still are) around leading a team of people. Being remote was never part…
We were not afraid.