Remote teams and culture

- [Instructor] While there were some remote teams and remote options before, the COVID pandemic of 2020 brought a huge shift in remote working. Today, many companies have embraced remote work. While culture and technologies have made remote work a possibility, there are still many issues that can arise if not implemented properly. I've experienced all of these, having managed many remote teams over the past 20 years, six years of which I worked with an entirely remote company of about two to 300 people while I was there. Maintaining culture and connections can be challenging. Nothing really replaces the human connection and understanding that happens in face-to-face meetings. Gaining trust with new employees and making sure everyone is available to work together can be a challenge. It's easy to lose visibility to the work that's being done and for employees to lose visibility to the overall vision of the company. And while video technologies like Zoom are invaluable, sitting in these meetings all day long is exhausting. Studies have shown one in seven women and one in 20 men report being very fatigued from Zoom calls. It will be key to set some ground rules if you have a remote team. Think about cameras. When should they be on and when should they be off? When they're on, we can see each other and we get a little bit of that human connection, but it can be very tiring to have your cameras on all the time. Everyone should be clear about when they'll be available and online. It's great to have flexibility, but it's also important to be able to find one another and get work done together. Communicating in real time eliminates having to wait for responses and can ensure that people keep the flow of their work and solve problems when they arise. Communication is extremely critical and it's important that everyone uses the tools available and in the right way. Asynchronous communications is often necessary. This is basically being able to post a message or something somewhere that you don't need a response for right away. This can empower others to queue their work and respond later. That said, real-time communication is key. Tools like Slack, Teams, and Discord can be used for both of these methods. The key is to know when things are critical and when they're not. Tagging someone, or @here-ing a channel, will notify someone instantly if something's critical. Other tools, like email, wikis, docs, and other online discussion tools can be helpful for asynchronous communications. Issues around work tasks should use some kind of issue tracking software. Whether it's GitHub, Trello, Jira, Asana, or something else, any discussion on the work you're actually doing and that affects how things should be done and the scope of what's being done should happen in this system so that the discussion isn't lost. I've seen people have huge discussions about a specific software feature in Slack or email, only to have lost it days later, not able to find it. It's key to make sure that that doesn't happen. Of course, meeting on video and in person are critical. Sometimes working things out in a chat app takes more time than just hopping on a five-minute call. Other times you might want to hold a workshop using Miro or Figma Jam or something like that. That can be a great way to solve a problem. It can also be a great way to get alignment or just collaborate on problem-solving. Regular check-ins are good to stay connected. I've worked with companies that have very few meetings, but it's really a challenge to stay connected. And I still recommend getting together in person at least once a year, if you can make it happen. Hybrid workplaces are still figuring out how to accommodate the best of remote working and in-office meeting. Doing this correctly means having spaces for people to work, reservable conference rooms, and figuring out how to address the Wednesday problem, where everyone wants to come in in the middle of the week so the office is full on Wednesdays but then often empty on Mondays and Fridays. There are a number of tools available to help with reserving desks and conference rooms, among other things. Of course, if you have this kind of environment, you need to make sure that you're always remote first. The danger of having some people in office and others not is that you can have conversations that the remote team is not privy to, and this can lead to miscommunications and storming. Make sure not to have any key meetings on site without including remote workers. There's likely to be a lot of evolution in this space as people figure out the optimal working environment for remote and hybrid teams. Most importantly, communication should still be at the center of collaboration, so make sure to stay connected no matter how far away you are from one another.