Managing Remotely

When working, our remote workers must always be in chat and respond as soon as they are able to (not interrupt their engaged call). We…

It depends on the team. I don’t know of any teams in our company that mandate response times for internal communication, but plenty of teams…

We do not have specific communication norms. We focus on results and work, not the management of people. If a project is immediate and requires…

Yes – see my blog where I wrote the definitive guide to planning an offsite. 

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 find one place that can host us all. Make sure it’s not in a city, you want everyone to be huddled up together…

We meet with our core team in person twice a year. It is somewhat of a retreat in that we work, and strategize but we…

Yes we have regular company retreats because we understand that nothing beats face-to-face contact for getting to know people and helping to build trust and…

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…

I am very fortunate to have an incredible team of consultants. They are self-starters who work until the job is done. This type of work…

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…

We rely on the outputs from both independent and team work to understand how individual [A]gents are doing. We also are able to evaluate detailed…

Trust is critical.

Establishing and sticking to a regular meeting rhythm is the most important thing. Meetings should have an agenda and start and end on time. Emphasizing…

Make sure there is not an “us vs. them” culture of HQ vs. remote workers. Treat everyone as remote, regardless of their location.

One of the hard parts we’re working through now is adding layers of management we didn’t have before. We’ve grown a lot over the past…

The biggest challenge is the “if only we were together (physically)” thought that pops into your head on those days when you want to call…

Creating a healthy balance between trusting our team members to manage their work time and monitoring their activity. We have team members use time management…

We set OKRs for each team that are talked about in every all-hands meeting. We also have a #winning Slack channel where teams post a…

Bitovi has three annual all-company events. We get together as a company three times per year to work together for three to five days each…

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…

As a company we have internal policies that helps us to have key security measures that protects us from any liability concerns that possibly could…

Team members can use any hardware that they please. After you’ve worked with Doist for six months, you are granted a generous hardware and software…

People can use whatever device they’d like, as long as they can use the software and apps our team is already on 🙂

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…

As a mom friendly organization we have a generous time off policy that includes paid sick days and paid family leave.

Unlimited.  Take what you need – we don’t count your sick or vacation days.

I would say more fear a lack of productivity, lack of communication or engagement, even how to manage potential issues like workers comp claims.  In…

My biggest fear is that I do not always know what employees feel. When I make an update, what do they think? Sure, they give…

I think my biggest fears are when we lose touch with someone. Every once in a while, someone will just “disappear” – they don’t answer…