Engage remote teams with trust and freedom
This is the decade of remote work, enough has been said about it.
In 2020, the pandemic forced many of us to work from home and I believe many have been doing this wrong. Working from home is just different than a remote work culture.
If you are a manager and you’re going to run remote teams for the long term, you may have asked yourself, how to engage remote teams? how to make work meaningful and keep everyone motivated?
I’ve been working remotely with a handful of teams during the past 6 years, and identified some interesting facts about engagement and motivation; I even ended up creating products to improve our remote work environment.
Build trust
The most important aspect for having a remote team motivated is making sure they feel trusted. There is nothing worse as a remote worker than being continuously micromanaged just because the manager does not trust.
Remote work has to be centered around goals and achievements, and not about a rigorous time schedule. That is the paradigm shift here.
If you don’t trust your teammate and cannot delegate a task and wait for it to be completed without all that micromanagement, then identify whether the problem is the teammate: low performer, then act on that; or whether the problem is the manager: cannot delegate in remote environments, then retrain yourself.
When there is trust, the remote worker will feel true ownership of their time and schedule, they will enjoy the remote work flexibility and they will be way more motivated to deliver results.
Cut unnecessary meetings
Meetings take a lot of energy. Everyone recommends video-on calls, but I discovered that in some cases the video-on calls are more exhausting than audio-only, you should understand when to use what tools. But this is another topic.
CUT. THE. MEETINGS.
A bunch of meetings can just be an email update or check-in. This was one of the problems that I wanted to solve with DailyBot and one of the motivators behind creating this tool to reduce meetings noise and create a more calm (focus-oriented) work environment.
I use DailyBot with my teams to get status reports and updates periodically, using daily stand-ups or weekly check-ins. All the information is posted transparently in our chat channels, on Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat.
I’ve noticed that after reducing meetings, people started to feel much more comfortable and motivated to do their work. They gained “Focus Time”.
As a manager I see that investing in deep work has great returns, and to achieve this you need to get a distraction-free environment.
If you’re having too many meetings, try to begin by having a day free of meetings, like “No-meetings wednesdays”, something like this has worked for some teams at Facebook and they love it.
In my case, I try to minimize meetings to the minimum and use more check-ins and written communication.
Help the team become great writers
Good writing is essential for remote work (and for life, of course). The nature of remote work is asynchronous communication, and here is where many new companies starting remote work are doing it wrong: they try to operate as if they were in the office, meaning: a lot of noise.
When you prioritize written communication over calls/meetings then you’re going to make remote work more inclusive, everyone can jump-in and add value to any project that is being developed, and then you also have more documentation in your company. Even the employee onboarding gets better just by having a team that is good at writing.
Make sure you use the right stack for written communication, I won’t enter into these details now.
Celebrate wins
Working remotely usually becomes too focused on work and the personal aspects are forgotten, people don’t hear feedback constantly about their work.
Providing room for celebration, even online, even asynchronous, has a good impact and improves the team mood.
Imagine that you start the week on Monday by getting recognition from your team about what you’re doing great. That is powerful.
In our team, we started to use our retrospectives to also congratulate teammates for their achievements. But we wanted something better and more specialized, more remote friendly.
We built Kudos, a feature to give recognition and express appreciation using a chatbot; it is way better when a bot reminds you to recognize your teammates on a weekly basis, and giving those kudos is fast.
With DailyBot we now spread good vibes and celebrate wins, using the chat:
@dailybot kudos to @laura for preparing that great product documentation!
DailyBot introduced team values, so that you can give kudos based on your values, so you align people+culture, that is useful and you get automatic pulse analysis based on each team value.
Care about team motivation
Make motivation and mood tracking part of your team 1:1 follow-ups, ask how they’re feeling, understand their work context, and identify whether there is something you can do as a manager (or company) to help them improve their environment. Try some of these questions.
I’ve given my employees noise-cancelling headphones as a gift, or given tips to improve their time management. That is very positive for them, not only you improve their day-to-day productivity but also the personal relationship gets better and the motivation increases.
Use tools that can help you with mood analysis, some people use forms or surveys from time to time to get a Pulse analysis.
As we use DailyBot for check-ins, it made sense for us to keep using it for it, DailyBot comes with several mental health check-ins and it does mood tracking (anonymously) and automatically, it’s very simple, direct and enough for our team.
Create spaces for personal connection
Last but not least, creating a space for random 1:1 connections or group calls has been another game changer for us. I believe that these 1:1 connections should happen between co-workers but also with external networks.
I had such a need that I created a side project for this: TheOneCoffee — and I’m using it internally with our team and created some external networks with friends.
It’s pretty simple, every week it asks each member whether they want to have a random 1:1 coffee that week, then people are matched for a coffee and water cooler conversation later that week.
I hope this gives you some ideas about improving remote team engagement.
Wish you the best, and take your team to the next level!
