Leading Remote Teams

Right now, my team is remote. It’s a bit unusual, since we have a device lab and usually my programmers test systems side by side with audio visual engineers. How did we make this shift? How can you, as a leader or coach or team member, adapt to remote work? Here are my top tips for successful remote teams.

We all meet via video conference every weekday at the same time

We’ve had this standing meeting for a while now, 15 minutes a day, every weekday. Team members join remotely or previously, also in a physical room. We talk about any blockers, any new things we learned, and if anyone needs help. The goal is to identify impediments, share what we know, and connect as a team.

We catch up with each other individual with chat, text or phone calls

I encourage everyone on my team to reach out to each other via chat, and we often throw together impromptu chat sessions and pull in others when we have questions for them. These unplanned working sessions really help us ask questions and get answers in real time, and work on challenges we have. I meet with my team individually with 1:1 meetings where we discuss how they are doing, their goals, and progress. They know they can also text, chat or call me whenever they want to. It’s important they know they can reach out to me no matter where I am.

We take time to have fun

Whether it is a daily round table trivia question or sharing photos of our pets, we take a little time in our day to share with each other. We use MS Teams, and I’ve also used Slack and other tools before to share photos, polls, gifs and fun topics.

We listen and are vulnerable and honest

Whether it is during a virtual meeting or via team chat, I own up to my mistakes and do my best to take my team’s feedback to heart. We host a bi-weekly retrospective where team members nominate projects for us to inspect and identify what worked, what they think we should stop doing, and what we should do differently next time. Studies have shown you lose up to 70% of conversational queues when you are not in person, so finding new ways to communicate clearly and work together is critical.

Use a virtual team board to show everyone’s projects

We use Microsoft Planner and it works ok. There we can see who is working on what, when, and add comments and links to resources on a project. We can track if we have a blocker to figure out or if someone is overloaded. I’ve also used Jira, Trello, and other similar Kanban board systems, including physical boards. The virtual board is great since everyone on the team can access it from wherever they are and from any device.