What to Focus on When Building a Great Remote Team

Remote work, or telecommuting is a part of almost every successful company culture these days. But still in most cases we're not utilizing it to it's full potential. The benefits of remote working are undeniable, but still implementing it right has proven hard time and again. After working a long time remotely, I decided to write a book about it www.betterremotework.com. I've combined in this article what I believe are the five most important points on doing remote work right.

1. Build Trust

Building trust in a remote team is not easy, especially when there are already people who are not used to trusting each other or have had bad experiences in the past. So, how can you build trust between people who are hundreds – if not thousands – of miles apart?

To earn trust, one needs to extend trust. The basic step that anyone can do in the process of building trust is to extent trust to each other. A new team member or one in a less important position should be given the same amount of trust as a senior or a management employee.

Allowing a person to work remotely is in itself a show of trust. By simply by allowing people to work wherever they wish, and encouraging them to do so, you will have started to build trust in your team. A study performed in 2013 by Academy of Business Research Journal found that people who work remotely are no less inclined towards trusting each other than those who work in a traditional office.

Encourage your team to get to know each other personally. This is a great way to understand each others actions better, and get an idea why they do things the way they do. If you know a person, you are more likely to understand the way that they are acting. If your employees and you know each other, it’s much easier to build trust that works both ways.

Help an employee through personal issues. In a company with a great culture, people help each other. If you can help this person in his or her time of need, you can be sure that they will offer back the same help when the company, or you as an employee, need help. This should go both ways in a culture; if a manager has an issue and his team helps him out in turn, the team benefits. In contrast, in a culture of bureaucracy and rules, instead of thinking about the company as a whole, people often take advantage of each other’s weaknesses to gain career advancement. This is built into how we as humans work. We appreciate the feeling of safety, and thrive, but if we’re working in a culture without that feeling, the natural selection that we are inclined towards easily takes over. And then it will be about the survival of the fittest, which may work for some but will corrupt the culture.

2. Learn to Deal With the Isolation

As a leader of a remote team or a company, it’s really important that you tackle social issues head-on to create well-functioning remote teams. A good remote team can function with very few to none social issues when everything is done well. However, if done in a poor way, the issues will affect team productivity, happiness, and everything else that is important in a team. Team members who feel isolated will be much more likely to leave your company than those who feel as a part of a team.

In recent decades, suicide rates have gone up significantly due to our inevitably more connected world. This sounds contradictive, but when you think about it deeper, it’s logical. Even if we are connected more and more through the Internet and Facebook, it doesn’t mean that we are getting the social interaction we need. Even the most passionate bloggers and remote workers in the world still want to meet their colleagues face-to-face in large conferences, and flock to these in large numbers. For many of us, connecting with each other through the Internet is still not the same as it is on face-to-face level.

As stated in a book by John Cacioppo, Human Nature and the Need For Social Connection, loneliness shows up in measurements of stress hormones, immune function, and cardiovascular function. Lonely adults consume more alcohol and get less exercise than those who are not lonely. Their diet is higher in fat, their sleep is less efficient, and they report more daytime fatigue. Loneliness also disrupts the regulation of cellular processes deep within the body, predisposing us to premature aging.

Being lonely hurts our body and our mind

So, being lonely has proven to cause all kinds of mishap in our employees’ health and lives. But the fact is that even when your team is working remotely, the team members don’t have to feel that they are alone.

All social interaction in remote work is extremely important. Video chat, instant messaging about things that you’re doing and what you’d like to do, taking thirty minutes in the middle of the day and going for a walk, and saying “hey” to people are all simple ways you can prevent yourself or team members from getting a feeling of isolation.

“One therapy for cabin fever may be as simple as getting out and interacting with nature. Research has demonstrated that even brief interactions with nature can promote improved cognitive functioning and overall well-being.”
- Berman, Marc G.

3. Hire Suitable Employees

Hiring remote workers is hard, as all hiring usually is, but the good thing is that you have the whole world’s workforce to choose from. When hiring remote workers, you have to concentrate on slightly different things than when considering a person for a normal job. All the same things apply than in a basic hiring process, like considering the personal fit, assessing skills, and getting a feeling of passion. But when hiring remote workers there are some things you need to consider more.

Hire good writers. When working remotely, most of the communication you will have will be through writing. A great way to find out a person’s writing skills is to assess a person’s cover letter and their profile online. If the person has written blog posts, or something else, it’s a great sign as well.

Hire people with lives. As hard as it is to say as a nerd, having a life is important. If you take a person whose only passion in life is what he is working on, it might be a great thing in the short term, but usually causes issues in the long term. A teammate who is always working wherever they are and whatever time it is, creates a disturbance in the team. I’ve had bad experiences with people trying to play the hero late at night only to perform really bad code and break whole applications in the process. Of course, our process was flawed to allow that to happen.

Find self-managing people. If they have a background as a contractor, freelancer, or a small business owner, this might be a great sign. However, with self-managed people you need to remember that if they’re looking for a job, their motivations and goals might differ too much from those of your company’s. These people are insanely great when you get them to work on your business, but getting them focused on your goals instead of their own is really hard. If they have some business background, ask them about it and make sure that you want them working on your business for at least a certain period of time, and you’re willing to reward them for success.

Concentrate on the cover letters. A passionate, well-written cover letter from a person who has already done some research on your business and doesn’t just send a copied cover letter your way is a great sign. This person deserves an interview. The CV is the past, but gives some useful information. I can’t imagine why people still have issues writing CVs. The only idea of a CV for me is to give reference to the things described in the cover letter and link to other places where one could find more information about the person.

4. Keep to a Schedule

Implement a schedule for your remote team, or else your team never stops working. From a short-term business aspect, endless work might sound like a good idea. It is the opposite, however. When great employees spend too much of their time working, the results slowly start to get worse, and burnout is inevitable. A large issue with remote work is that motivated people do too many extra hours per day without a proper work schedule.

It’s good to have your team working in a way that you have enough overlap on your working time. If you sleep during the night while the rest of your team works, this might not be preferable. In many industries, having someone on call during all of the business hours is still a must.

If your employees have to enforce their schedules themselves and all of their teammates are working around the clock, it will be really hard for them to stay off work. You should discuss this issue with your employees about and how it affects productivity. I know of people who can manage this style of work without any scheduling, but they usually are introverts or very intellectual people. We normal people need a schedule to work well.

A perfect schedule is something a team has to make up for themselves. Discuss with the team what would suit them, and usually the solution is something vaguely related to the business hours. Following basic business hours with enough flexibility to avoid feelings of being stuck in a rat race will in most cases be the best solution.

Introduce the idea of “a good days work.”

Sitting for eight hours in the office doesn’t benefit anyone. If we track ourselves by the hours that we hang online or sit in the office, there is no real push for urgency. What I love to do myself, and what I know is the best solution, is to not focus on hours but to focus on tasks. And of course if your “good day’s work” is not done until the set limit, you will still leave by that set limit to keep your normal things in order.

A Culture needs to be built where faster and better productivity is encouraged, instead of simply working the hours. The smart guy is already home (or in the case of working remotely, still at home).

5. Focus on Building Great Communication

Good communication is essential in any team, especially in a remote one. Writing well and not disturbing people in the wrong situations can make a huge difference in productivity of teams, especially in the longer term. Communication can make all the difference when it comes to remote teams, and the ones that can communicate well with each other will be a long way from the ones that don’t.

Communication needs to work in the same way as trust. Communication needs to work in all directions – between team members, between managers and employees, and to the clients that the company is delivering results. If we leave out one part of the communication, issues will arise.

A remote team needs to embrace asynchronous communication instead of one-on-one communication. Many decisions are still made on one-on-one communications, which causes issues with the group. Make sure that everyone can follow your discussion and decision-making, and take part if they so wish to do. This builds trust as well as gives everyone a feeling of belonging closer to the team.

Learn not to expect people to answer straight away. It’s important for both remote workers and onsite workers to get their uninterrupted stretches of time without disturbing them with the wrong kinds of communications. Use instant messages and email instead of calling people or walking up to them and interrupting them. Attached is a simple chart that we use to define what kind of communication to use. It’s of course not for everyday work, but you get the point.

• If you need an answer now: Phone.
• If you need an answer in 10 minutes to1 hour: Instant message.
• If you need an answer in 1 hour to 2 days: Instant message / Mail
• If you need an answer in more time than that: Mail

If you’re away for more than twenty minutes, let everyone know through your instant messaging client. Just by saying so, you’ll let them know, and if they try to contact you, they’re not expecting an immediate response. This is important for employees as well as managers to keep trust.

To find more ideas and solutions about remote work, visit www.betterremotework.com.