Remote Work Productivity: How to Develop Successful Remote Teams

Introduction

Adopting a remote workforce can transform your business. Why, then, do we see business leaders making headlines for their oppositional stance to working remotely? Surely they are aware of the myriad of benefits. Perhaps their companies were forced to go remote briefly, and they did not fare well.  Whether their lack of success had anything to do with their workforce being remote, enabling a strong team of remote workers can be incredibly challenging. That said, it can be done, and the payoff can be immense. The biggest challenge is often in the nuances of implementation. Recognizing the pivotal role remote work can play in the modern workplace, this article offers the top activities you can do to build and sustain effective remote teams.

Team Agreement

Your remote team should set some ground rules for work preferences, covering topics that help set standards for how everyone will operate.

Implementing a Team Agreement

Create a document with key topics your team needs to agree upon. The document can be as detailed as necessary, depending on the maturity of the team. Set up an hour of time to talk with the team about each of these topics, seeking to find agreement on what will work best for the team as a whole.

Topics for the agreement may include, but are not limited to the following:

1. Core values as a team
2. Camera requirements during meetings
3. Meeting hours
4. Lunch hour(s)
5. Travel/team activity requirements
6. How members will communicate with each other
7. Expectations of each team member
8. What to do if someone violates the agreement

Tip: Working hours don’t necessarily need to be set at an individual level, but meeting and lunch hours should be agreed upon. For example, if you have workers on both the East Coast and the West Coast, you may choose to have meetings no earlier than 9:00 AM Pacific Time and no later than 4:00 PM Eastern Time.

Daily Check-ins

The goal of the daily check-in is to keep remote team members aligned with one another and on track with the most important work.

Implementing Daily Check-ins

Schedule a 15-minute check-in each morning; you may need more time based on team size. I recommend approximately 15 minutes per 5 team members. Ask each person to come prepared with the following:

1. What they accomplished the day prior
2. Their top goal for the day
3. Blockers. Blockers are anything preventing goals from being accomplished.
4. Anything they need to make the team aware of

Your goal with this call is to ensure team alignment and progress. You’re listening for where you may need to step in to help team members accomplish their goals, how work is contributing to business goals, and what pivots may be necessary for continued progress. You’re also breaking down silos and ensuring that knowledge is being shared.

Activity Tracking

Just like in the office, many things can distract a remote employee.

While you don’t need to micromanage your employees, you can help them manage their time to cultivate productivity. Having them pay attention to how they spend their time will be eye-opening. It can also help your employees with a lot of responsibility make sure they’re focusing on where they add the most value. Checking in with your employees on this periodically can give you a pulse on where there may be gaps for which a new position could be helpful, or where you can seek to gain efficiencies otherwise.

Implementing Activity Tracking

It’s all about using the calendar, and there are two key components.

1. Have your employees track their day in 30-minute increments. This can be done in multiple ways, but here are my two favorite:
   • Option 1 (recommended): After planning out goals for the day, input on the calendar when those activities will be worked on. For example, your Marketing Director’s goal is to draft a social media campaign, and she expects it to take 2 hours. She can block the two hours on her calendar that she plans to work on the campaign.
   • Option 2: fill in the 30-minute blocks of time on the calendar as activities are completed. For example, your Engineer codes a new webpage from 2:00 to 3:00 PM. They can put that activity on the calendar after it’s complete.
2. Create individualized categories for the activities that make up the majority of each role on your team.
3. Color code activities based on category. Help your employees identify categories and the expectation for percentage of time spent on each category.

For example, a product manager will need a discovery category. They may need to spend about 50% of their time doing activities related to discovery. If during your check-in you find your product manager spending 10% of their time on discovery, you’ll want to dig in to remedy that.

Daily Structure

Each remote employee should aim to structure their day in a way that promotes success. While the day might look very different for each team member, it should be structured around goals that need to be accomplished.

Implementing a Daily Structure

Have your employees begin each day by setting goals for the top things they need to accomplish and the time they believe is necessary to complete these goals. Include goals that span about 5 hours worth of work and then one additional goal called a stretch goal. The first goal should be the top priority and where time is spent first, with every consecutive goal being lesser in priority than the one before it. The last goal is the stretch goal, and it can be worked on after the rest are achieved or if anything prevents completion of the others. This is a general guideline, depending on the type of work you do.

For example, if you have 4 hours of meetings per day, the goals you include shouldn’t take more than two hours to accomplish. If they do, and they are truly that important, the meetings likely need to be moved. The idea is to help employees stay focused on priorities, especially if there are a lot of emails, messages, and meetings throughout the day. The purpose is not to feel bad if everything is not accomplished. Watch for this type of negative impact, and if it occurs, help the team member reassess goal setting in a way that works for them.

In addition, have your team set aside time each day for resolving blockers, specifically issues they need to address that are preventing other from completing their work.

Tip: In general, use morning hours for meetings that require creativity and afternoon hours for meetings that require less brain power.

Create a Strong Culture

Team culture is critical, especially for remote teams. There are several pillars where you can focus your efforts first. For a remote team, trust, empowerment, and communication are just a few of the key areas where you can establish a culture that is strong and has positive impact. To give a bit more detail on each:

1. Trust: you have to trust your team members to do their jobs. Even more important, they have to believe you trust them.
2. Empowerment: this is where you may have to pick your battles. There are so many ways to arrive at the same destination, and your employees may choose the one that’s less preferable, less efficient, or simply not what you would’ve chosen. That doesn’t make it wrong necessarily.  Let people make their own decisions, and weigh in when you are asked. When you foresee negative consequences, certainly weigh in. You can do it in a way that is not dictatorial and helps people feel they are still in the driver’s seat. For example, you can use curiosity to understand the thinking behind their decision. You can also offer ideas on other methods to consider or ask them what other ways they came up with. Having a dialogue could help them see flaws themselves, rather than telling them it’s wrong.
3. Communication: promote communication. Always lean toward over-communicating rather than under. You can call people into meetings if something comes up that pertains to them. Especially for strategic work, don’t wait until meetings to solve problems. Use chat issues that are simple and need quick resolution, email for reference, and meetings if it takes longer than 2 sentences for an explanation from either party involved.

Implementing a Strong Culture

This one takes time, effort, and intention on a different scale than the others. Here is a great starting point:

1. Decide areas of focus most important for your team.
2. Communicate these cultural values to the team.
3. Demonstrate each of these in your day to day.
4. Look for opportunities to help your team members improve this through what they are experiencing day to day.
5. Empower your team to look for opportunities to help each other improve.

Note, if your team is well established this may not be easy. However, you can improve these things with time and consistency.

In-Person Time

Having time together is an expense, but it’s one that pays in the long-run because it fosters empathy and a sense of connection beyond what you can get by being remote.

While I’m not a proponent of forcing travel, I do believe each team member should travel once per year for team-building. I like to call this mandatory fun.

Implementing In-Person Time

1. Gain commitment from each team member that they are willing to travel once per year.
2. Set the expectation that each team member will do everything in their power to find a time that works for all.
3. Try to set it at a similar time each year, so people can plan around it, and start the planning as early as possible.
4. Do a variety of activities so hopefully at least one thing will appeal to each person.
5. Ask team members to weigh in on restaurants, hotel and activities.
   • Be sensitive to dietary and other restrictions so everyone can be as comfortable as possible.
6. Funnel all the requests to one person and then do polls to try to get consensus.
7. Get feedback on each activity, so you can look for ways to improve the time for all involved. It’s essential to have everyone’s buy-in.

Continuous Improvement through Data

It’s important to know how your employees are performing, and you don’t want to be in a position where you are only aware of the problems – especially if the information you have available is subjective. Like anything else, cultivating a team of successful remote employees takes time. For continuous improvement, data can be one of your best friends. Seek a combination of qualitative and quantitative information to help you measure how well each employee is doing.

Implementing Continuous Improvement

1. Request anecdotal feedback from each employee on his own performance and his opinion on the performance of his peers.
2. Look for a baseline, which is how you will measure whether things are improving or not.
   • This may be a range spanning several months or even years if seasonality is a factor. It could be much less than that otherwise.
     • Some roles have quantifiable aspects and can be measured with ease. Some will be more difficult, but try to find areas where this is possible.
3. Have check-ins quarterly to go over the data and get your employees to interpret what it means for them.
   • The goal for your employees is understanding gaps or weaknesses and improving against themselves. However, it also allows you to see if there is a problem that might result in a performance improvement plan or even termination.

Conclusion

Remote teams can be just as successful (if not more) than in-person teams. While it does take time and effort to properly establish a strong remote workforce, it can pay dividends when done correctly. If you’ve tried to establish remote teams and it’s not going so well, press restart and give it another go with these tips at the top of your implementation checklist.