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?
No, we don’t have any rules or communication norms. Certain teams like to do regular calls while others do not. Personally, I dislike scheduled meetings…
Be generally available, coordinate with your team to be most effective, realize that working remotely means overcommunicating.
We expect people to be online during their scheduled workday. If they’re not going to be around or stepping out for whatever reason we ask…
Do you organize remote team retreats?
Yes we do, and they are awesome. My tip would be to keep the work content to a minimum. A brief session on how the…
We meet once a year and vote for the location that most people want to do. So far, we’ve been to Barcelona, Bulgaria, the Philippines,…
In the earlier days when the team was ~15 people, we would gather the whole company together for week-long (Mon-Fri) retreats in different locations 4…
Do your remote team members meet in person?
Our home-based team members are often separated by hundreds of miles. We rely on technology to bring our people together and harness the power of…
As a whole company we have bi-weekly video calls every other week and we get together in-person 2x a year for all company meetings.
We all meet once a year and when we travel to locations where we have part of the team we may get together one on…
How do you measure the productivity of remote workers?
We’ve experimented with OKRs and Squads but they haven’t worked or us. Ultimately, we created our own hybrid of the two systems – goals and…
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…
Through project management and time tracking tools.
What elements are key to successful working relationships with remote teams?
It is critical to have open communication and no silos. Everyone should be able to communicate with anyone and be open to reply quickly.
Clear expectations are critical for remote workers. Training a remote worker is different than training an in-house worker; it is doubly important to be clear…
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…
What is the hardest part about managing a remote workforce?
Sometimes remote workers just don’t have that much time for your company. They may have multiple clients, be traveling the world (you never know with…
Making sure they are happy employees. You can’t see them and must rely on virtual communication, which doesn’t always reveal an unhappy employee.
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…
How do you keep remote employees engaged and feeling part of the bigger picture?
Most managers have a mix of head office and remote workers in their teams, and work hard to ensure people feel included and communicated with.…
We have weekly all-hands meetings that we conduct via video chat. This gives everyone a chance to hear what’s going on in the company and…
In addition to our communication channels, our kick-off meeting goes over all of our retainer clients and the new projects we’re starting, as well as…
What is your BYOD policy for remote workers?
Our employees get a laptop for administration work, as well as a display, keyboard, and mouse. The software developers and QA team may have different…
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…
Everyone gets the latest device they need to be as successful in their work as possible, along with any device needed to perform their job…
What is your time off policy for remote workers?
We prefer to trust employees to do the right thing with time off and provide a discretionary time off policy. To stay in compliance with…
We have an open time off policy, which translates to take the time off that you need. We ask each person to discuss time off…
20+ vacation days, with unlimited sick days. We also have generous parental leave and benefits.
What were your biggest fears in managing remote workers?
As is the trend with other remote companies, we worry about workplace culture. It’s a bit harder to foster when you only see one another…
Trust is a big fear and challenge. At the end of the day, as a business owner of a remote team, you aren’t there to…
The biggest fear is “culture cracks” as our CEO calls it. Since we do have such a significant amount of remote team members, it is…