How to Align Your Remote Team for Outstanding Performance
Your Time To Get Ahead
With very little preparation teams across the world have been dispersed into the confines of their own homes. People went home one day, and attempted to pick up from where they left off the next morning.
With our high connectivity the transition has been relatively seamless, but there is a lot more to a successful remote team than being able to get a video conference working or joining slack.
There are some fundamental principles that need to be addressed to enable a team to rapidly adapt to changes like this and maintain optimum performance. While many teams are struggling to survive, those that learn to be nimble and rise to this opportunity will be the ones to thrive.
Even the most advanced organisations are playing catch up now, so this is your time to get ahead.
Take One Hour To Align
That’s all is all it takes for a team to adjust and align to this new way of working together.
It is the wisest investment you can make right now and will have significant impact on your future performance.
Put the training wheels back on for 60 minutes, the resulting acceleration will be more than worth it.
Preparation
Download the coteam charter and familiarise yourself with this guide on how to use it.
Schedule a one hour session with your team to complete the charter.
Ensure everyone agrees to a positive code of conduct for the session:
Purpose comes before pride, this hour is about completing the charter
Honesty comes before compliments
Leave your ego at the door
No spectators, everybody inputs into the charter
No bosses, everyones voice is equal in creating the charter
Done is better than perfect
Appoint a someone to keep track of time and work through the charter in this order spending 10 minutes on each principle.
Your Free Coteam Charter Template
Principle 1 - Communication
In an office environment, communication is a fluid beast. From structured meetings to casual conversations next to the water cooler, we assume the role of a chameleon, sensitive to our environment and other extraneous factors that we might not even be fully aware of. We are typically comfortable communicating in a synchronous fashion, as that is what we know. We share information as we find it out, we use small talk to create trust, and discussions happen when and as they are needed. Of course, this doesn’t translate into a digital world, and attempting to replicate these communication methods can cause more damage than good. In the book Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeiser Hansson they refer to this as avoiding M&Ms; Meetings and Managers.
For online collaboration to be truly effective, work shouldn’t always need to happen simultaneously. A truly global, distributed team isn’t restricted by time zones, and work can chase the sun around the world. Even if you are still located in a similar physical proximity, there’s no reason this can’t be the same. Who says work must occur between the hours of 9am and 5pm anyway? Disseminating the difference between urgent and non-urgent communication is key. Creating structure and cadence to your communications is essential. Some members are more productive with frequent, micro-updates whilst others would rather a daily or weekly summary. More than anything else, trust is key. Anyone who’s participated in a personality profiling test (such as a Myers Briggs) will know that there are very different needs and expectations when it comes to communication style. If you haven’t already, this can be a good prompt for the conversations that follow.
It’s also critical to agree on what projects and streams require structured communication, before even attempting to work out how. Below are some questions that can help you get started:
·Who needs to be updated on what for each project stream?
What constitutes an emergency? What is the appropriate method of communication if this occurs?
Which meetings do we no longer need? How will we keep each other updated if these meetings are cancelled?
·Where is our virtual watercooler? What is the protocol for social chat?
How will we recognise and reward high performance?
·What do we miss most about F2F communication? And the least?
Open and frank conversations might feel uncomfortable at first, but remind yourselves of the session purpose and rules and create a safe space for these to occur.
Principle 2 - Organisation
Working from home is going to bring about unique challenges for each individual person. One thing that commonly unites us is the need for organisation. The internet is full of best-practice guides to making the most of a home office. Let’s face it – people’s homes are full of distractions. PlayStations, children, the fridge… How can we have faith that someone is actually doing their job and not just watching Netflix? This requires a fundamental shift in the way we think and measure success, which should be focused on output, not just clocking hours.
In Daniel Pink’s book Drive, he cites Mastery, Purpose and Autonomy as the three greatest intrinsic human motivators. The latter requires disciplined self-organisation, but the rewards are immense, as proven by the continued disruption and transformation of entire industries. Effective management nowadays is valuing organisational learning and adaptability over checking timesheets. There are many levels of autonomy, so this is not to say that we should allow everyone to work on whatever they want but giving people the space to create and lead will motivate them far beyond the realms of a relentless task list.
This can be a good time to discuss the principles instilled in agile teams. There is much literature on how these function, but is it possible in your case to organise work in sprints? Will Kanban boards keep project teams systematic and transparent? Could you employ agile ceremonies such as a daily standup, storytime or a retrospective keep you more organised?
Of course, there is also a laundry-list of practical requirements that can make working from home efficient also. Everything from creating the space to work (that isn’t the same space for relaxation) right through to ensuring you have the right equipment to get the job done in a comfortable fashion is paramount. What do you miss most from the office? Is there anything that can be supported to help replicate this in your home?
Principle 3 - Tools
Technology advances at an exponential pace which makes it tempting for many organisations to jump on the latest shiny toys, and again, focus on needs. If you look back at the previous two sections, you should have a clear idea of how you want to communicate and organise yourselves, so now it’s time to be a little more pragmatic. Most teams are going to need a tool or platform for each of the following, so discuss and agree what works for you. Whether you are using email, Slack, WhatsApp, Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, Workspace or any of the other bewildering array of communication tools out there, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so a unified approach is essential. If half the team are on Sharepoint and the other half are using Google Drive, then the system is already flawed.
Typically, remote teams will require a tool for each of the following:
Video chat (Zoom, Hangouts, Skype etc)
Instant messaging (Slack, Flock, etc)
Note-taking and documentation (Google Suite, Microsoft Teams etc)
Project management and task lists (Clickup, Notion, Todoist, etc)
Calendars and meeting scheduling (GCal, Calend.ly, etc)
Reward and recognition (HeyTaco, Karmabot, etc)
Most platforms will have the functionality to set up channels or workspaces, so also discuss and agree the best structure for these, and who needs to subscribe to each. A typical mistake many teams make is to over-communicate, which essentially distracts them from focusing where it matters. Buffer, a reasonably young company offering social media publishing and analytic tools have recently published an open blog on how they communicate effectively which may also help to guide this conversation
Principle 4 - Empathy
Such a powerful, yet often misused work. I’ve never met anyone who says they don’t have enough work to do, but at the end of the day, we are all human. Often, this can be overlooked in the scheme of “getting stuff done”, but in a distributed team, the value derived from developing and fostering real connections becomes even more crucial.
The old adage tells us there is no “I” in team, but we beg to differ. Speak to a good product manager, and they will tell you that the customer is the most important stakeholder in every decision a business makes, and this relentless, endless empathy helps design things people actually want. This is a valuable lesson and practicing these principles will help us cultivate a positive, output-driven working environment.
In her wonderful Ted speech, Brené Brown clearly expresses the difference between sympathy and empathy. The truth of the matter is that we are all in this together, so allowing ourselves to step into the shoes of our peers and truly feel what they feel will transcend the limitations of technology and bring us together in a time where it’s never been needed more.
Use an effective team building activity or just use this opportunity to try and really understand what is going on in each other’s lives. What keeps us motivated? What keeps us awake at night? Record one key outtake from each person in the team. If you take the conversation entirely away from work for a moment, you might be surprised at what you learn.
Principle 5 - Alignment
What does success really look like? Despite recent challenges, this question is one that regularly derails teams and projects. Chasing endless goals and allowing competing business priorities are not only distracting but also hugely disruptive to motivation and achievement. Let’s draw a useful analogy, imagine you are tasked with punching a single hole into a piece of paper using one finger. It’s probably achievable, right? But if I asked you to punch five holes simultaneously using five fingers, it would almost inevitably be impossible. In the 4DX model published by Franklin Covey, there is statistical proof that the more goals you have, the less you are likely to achieve.
It’s also essential that we play a part in defining our own goals. There are countless reports on productivity and engagement that disseminate the notion of top-down management, so taking time to align on what constitutes success for the team and forming an alliance around this is the first step. Creating a culture of experimentation and adaptability is the second. To quote Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who strives to be the worlds most customer-centric company, “stubborn on vision, flexible on details”.
Start by agreeing what the most important goal is for your team to achieve. Applying S.M.A.R.T principles ensures that this will be clearly outlined for everyone involved in making it happen.
Once you have agreed on a singular goal, with a due date, then agree on some specific metrics that will determine success. Originally developed as a Goal System at Google, but now widely adopted by many organisation, Objectives and Key Results (OKR’s) are a useful tool for helping structure hierarchical KPI’s across different functions to guide them towards a common goal.
Define the war you need to win, then choose the battles that will help you get there.
Principle 6 - Mission
What is your purpose? And by this, we don’t mean some marketing fluff. When you strip away everything, what are the core values that will keep you going. Not only through this crisis, but long into the world that comes after. Don’t worry about copywriting this perfectly, but if you can’t sum this up in one sentence, it’s not going to happen.
Like any corporate mission, avoid jargon and focus on the one thing that unites you. This is not about a specific goal, outlined in the previous section, but rather a distillation of everything that has been discussed to date, and at the heart of the nerve-centre which keeps the team operating.
Now Accelerate
You’ve put the work foundational work in to align. Now you can confidently start to accelerate.
Ensure you revisit your charter regularly to ensure you are living and breathing it.
If it starts to feel outdated or irrelevant because of a change in circumstances, then take some time to revise it or rebuild it entirely.
It might last a few months, or at the current pace of change it might only last a few weeks! The important thing is that you have a built a tool to help you through periods of uncertainty and change, and by using it your team will be able to adapt to whatever the future brings.
If you want to take your team to the next level in adaptability, check out our intensive team hackathon!