Working and Excelling with Remote Teams

The Covid-19 crises in the last couple of months have had a long-lasting effect on how we work and live, more than we have seen in the last decades prior. These recent changes have seen a massive adoption of remote work and also pushed topics of trust, productivity, collaboration and human communication to impressive new levels. Even as some companies begin to return to their old ways of working, some will make a long term shift to remote work and based on our experiences and learnings, we would be sharing tips on how companies can work and excel with remote teams.

Understanding a Remote Team

A remote team is a group of people working across timezones and organisational boundaries (in lieu of tradition) but still linked together with the help of web-based communication technologies. Over the years, different kinds of remote team structures have emerged, they include:

• Fully Remote Teams: in this scenario, everyone on the team works in different locations (office or home), across different cities, countries, or even continents.
• Hybrid Teams: this involves one team working together from one location, while others are remote, working from a distance from the centralised team. A variation of a hybrid team is when part of the team is in one office, and some other members of the team are co-located in another office in a different location.
• Flexible Teams: in this scenario, members of a team are co-located some of the time, but are given the liberty to work remotely. A popular example of this is when workers work from home one or two days a week or go to an office one or two days a week.

A combination of one or more of these variations to building remote teams has seen massive adoption of remote work around the globe. According to an analysis conducted by FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics, between 2005 and 2017, remote work grew by 159%. A similar study by Forrester shows that 34 million Americans work from home and the number is expected to increase to over 50% of the US workforce by the end of the decade.

What actually makes a successful remote team

In recent times, there have been calls for a paradigm shift in the way we work, and remote work has emerged as popular and a more favourable option to how people work.
Below are five traits of any successful remote team and how they influence success.

Culture
Regardless of the location of remote teams, it is important to build an organisational culture, as this will transform employees to advocates, enrich well being, and increase retention. For traditional office settings, culture evolves organically from team activities, and shared experiences. Building a remote team culture on the other hand can also happen organically, but it requires more deliberate thoughts and actions. This involves, rethinking all processes, from hiring, on-boarding, communication, career paths, and performance reviews, to collaboration, tools, and project management.

Communication
Although the level of communication may be less for remote teams, satisfaction with the level of communication can be higher, as communicating as a remote team is more tenured and is designed to be functional instead of social in nature.

For remote teams, conscious communication and asynchronous communication are the best forms of communication, but maintaining communication rhythm comes down to having the right tools and processes in place. By establishing regular meetings, overlap time and proper tools, remote companies can ensure a deliberate effort to maintain communication and alignment with the rest of the team.

Motivation
Creating a sense of purpose ultimately helps remote teams to give more to their work. By sharing performance metrics, team/company updates and organisational goals, remote teams are given a better sense of purpose.

Ensure you’re communicating with your team frequently, as good communication goes a long way to motivate teams. It may seem simplistic, but frequent contact makes remote teams feel involved and a part of something, thereby increasing their motivation.

With remote teams, it’s easy for successes to go unappreciated. However, by announcing team member‘s wins you’re not only motivating the one worker, but also those around.

Autonomy
Although remote teams have delegated tasks, every successful remote team needs some degree of autonomy, being responsible for what is given to them and what is not given them in task boards or sprints. Remote teams in most instances feel more responsibility to the extent that they feel in control and accountable for their work.

Remote work provides flexibility and freedom because being outside the office gives the worker more choices. Remote teams do not have to stick to office routines and can shift work to different times of the day. It gives employees the freedom to choose where they work, when they work and even what they wear to work to allow their best work.

A hack to having a successful remote team is creating an environment that provides remote workers with the right balance between structure and autonomy.

Trust
Building trust is the bedrock of any successful relationship and this practically applies to building remote relationships, and as such how we build and earn trust determines the long term success of any remote team. This includes demonstrating competence in team responsibilities, integrity & self-discipline in actions, deliberately making efforts to develop informal relationships with colleagues, showing transparency with tasks and commitments (open communication.

How Hirefreehands Manages its Remote Team

Hirefreehands has always been a remote-first company helping companies hire and manage remote tech talent. Over time, we have developed processes, adopted tools and set in place frameworks that ensure tasks are completed on time and to precision, easy for on-boarding and also ideal for maintaining a healthy work culture.

Perfect Team Fit
At Hirefreehands, we Hire for Remote Fit. It is imperative for us to decide on these hiring traits: open and honest communication, teamwork, working with little or no supervision and good decision-making ability and do-ers. For us, it is important to assemble a team that is capable of working and delivering in a remote environment from the get-go.

The Right Tools
The right tools are important in any remote environment because they help in organizing the entire team and help to track productivity and project progress efficiently.

Hirefreehands Workstream: we designed an intelligent project management system that ensures freehands deliver quality work. It simplifies communication, the collaboration between freehands and clients, ensuring deliverables are seamlessly managed.

Hirefreehands Community: is an internal community we are building, where important conversations go on and it will act as a great archive for our community to reference and keep up to date with discussions. Members of the community can share help, tips, provide assistance to each other on jobs, share sentiments, relate with admin, share resources. Admin can also create threads for job announcements, resources, general updates, bugs, technical complaints etc.

Cloud Storage: to store all work-related files and organize the workflow in an effective manner, as your remote team needs a fast and reliable cloud storage solution.

Task and project management: to optimize or automate tasks, helping your remote team focus on more important activities. Look out for features like; Time tracking, collaborative editing, document management, role-based features, integrations with tools and systems and task management.

Team Communication
Real-time communication is essential in building remote teams and it also helps in building a remote culture. It is vital that all team communication is centralized in a single place.

Real-time video chat is an essential complement to instant messaging. In our experience, there’s nothing like actually talking to another human being. Daily scrum stand-ups via video conferencing are a great way to build team culture and trust. Running bi-weekly team appraisal meetings where team members discuss within themselves key successes, failures and lessons learned has also proven to be key to our success in managing remote teams.

How We Work Remotely?

We have developed a well structured and concise direction for getting work done. For us, providing feedback, measuring both team and company progress is key. This doesn’t mean, we use a rigid, unchanging process in managing our operations and we will try to explain how here.

Virtual Hangouts
For us, we create regular opportunities for our remote teams to overlap and interact outside the work setting on non-strategic or technical topics, play online games, host movie nights while bringing teams together and encouraging communications. Planning inclusive team activities such as picking different topics every week and asking your team to post their pets, home office set up, or new recipes they’re trying can help in encouraging team members to discuss freely.

Virtual Open Door Policy
At Hirefreehands, we try to remove the mental barriers of sending emails, chats, messages freely to team members and leads, promoting healthy communication indirectly. It is also important team leaders show their availability and also encourage an open discussion with remote teams.

Accountability
By organizing weekly performance appraisal meetings, each team member gets to post updates and also discuss progress, obstacles and learnings. This makes it easy to keep track of projects, and also hold relevant team members accountable, and also allows everyone to focus on core tasks and see where to assist in case some members are lagging behind unavoidably.

Team Culture
For traditional office settings, culture evolves organically from team activities, and shared experiences. Building a remote team culture on the other hand can also happen organically, but it requires more deliberate thoughts and actions, hence a need for critical attention to how remote teams work, communicate, understand values and most importantly deliver on these values.

Goals and Expectations
People usually have an easier time staying engaged when they have specific targets they are aiming to achieve. Remote workers should know when they should be available, what the preferred method of communication is, how quickly they should respond to emails and how often they should check in to provide updates on projects they are managing.

Having a successful remote team is a mix of leadership, culture, autonomy, motivation, and communication and for us at Hirefreehands, having a strong team, the right tools and an efficient process have helped us to manage our remote workers and also monitor and manage our team and work deliverables seamlessly.

Hirefreehands offers an on-demand workplace platform, tapping into the highly skilled and competitively affordable talent from Africa for global clients.