9 Tips To Manage Remote Teams

“Great leadership isn't about control, it's about empowering people!”

Human capital is the value of any organization. The global pandemic has initiated unprecedented changes in the history of humanity: digital transformation as billions of people transition to remote work.

Josh Bersin and Diane Gherson, CHRO of IBM, said: “CFOs saved their companies in the difficult year of 2008. HR directors will save their companies in 2020." 

I founded 12 companies, including ABBYY, with 1300 employees working in 13 countries. Out of ABBYY came Yva.ai, whose employees work in 4 countries remotely. My perspective is shaped by the fact that I have lived in Silicon Valley for the last 8 years and I work remotely 100% of the time.

This guide is a collection of the founder experiences of the largest distributed organizations in Silicon Valley, who I communicate with regularly in founder forums. I’ve added my personal experiences of creating remote teams and, because managing remote teams is part of the Yva business, I am adding data and insights we’ve gained from our corporate design partners. The data I share is from real deployments of passive & active analytics to analyze remote teams.

Email is not efficient for remote collaboration; it does not have public channels and “mentions”; it doesn’t have “emoji reactions” so important during the COVID-19 crisis. Email was not designed to support discussion. Corporate messengers like Slack or MS Teams will become your first digital office space.

(Important: WhatsApp cannot become your corporate messenger. Your system administrators cannot control the membership of public channels.)

Video conferencing rooms, such as Zoom will also become your second digital office space, and we will talk about it more.

It is important that each working team plans a short stand-up for 15-20 minutes every day at a predetermined time. Nudge employees to come to the stand-up 2-3 minutes early and use this time for communication. This might sound basic, but take an interest in each other: Family, children, cats/dogs. If you ever have a Zoom meeting with me you will see 5 different espresso machines behind me. I am a professionally trained barista that likes to experiment with new ways of creating espresso-style coffee drinks. 

My personal “Cappuccino Tip”: Order your latte exactly like this next time you go to Starbucks (takeout only during COVID19, of course!): In one cup, order a “Double Blonde Ristretto.” In a separate cup, order a small size steamed milk “Kid’s temperature” (130 F). Then, become your personal barista, squeezing the milk cup into a sharp-edged corner, slowly pouring the milk into the ristretto. After tasting several times along the way, stop pouring milk when you experience that perfect taste – the ideal balance between the bitterness of coffee and the natural sweetness of milk. There are two fundamental elements here: medium roast beans, Starbucks call them “Blonde” (NEVER do espresso drinks out of dark roast coffee beans), and steamed milk below 140 F; any higher temperature strips the natural lactose sweetness.

Personal communication increases levels of oxytocin and vasopressin - important happiness hormones that enhance attachment, warm feelings, and team spirit.

Meet through video conferences in the evening after work in virtual interest clubs and informal gatherings and dinners. It’s fun, unusual and it works! You can play Pictionary, charades, Werewolf (also known as Mafia, see the description here), Jeopardy, and don’t forget the new “house party” app that allows one-click connection between co-workers, family and friends, but overlays games on top, including with a scoreboard! Research has proven a huge amount of positive emotions result from these interactions.

Five tips that we share with our employees: 

You will need:

When switching to remote work, there is no longer any such thing as “unwritten rules.” When working remotely, especially in different time zones, people work asynchronously and continuously document, sometimes just 3 lines in a Slack channel.

“Documentation is an essential competitive advantage. Companies that rely on vocalizing end up repeating themselves in meetings, creating an inefficient environment with tremendous opportunity for knowledge leaks. While communicating and documenting through text may feel like a burden in the moment, it prevents a toxic cycle of meetings and touchpoints which serve only to "bring people up to speed."  - Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO at GitLab, the largest all-remote company in the world

If you haven’t read “Measure what matters,” that one book will drive this home for you. “You must know what someone is working on and how they are doing just by looking at a shared document online.”

When people more or less adapt to new conditions, company leaders will need to monitor and maintain the effectiveness of business processes. Process Intelligence platforms, such as ABBYY Timeline, Celonis or ARIS Process Mining can help. These intelligent solutions in real-time help analyze what is happening inside the organization: At what stage a task is accomplished, is there a pending deadline or other exception management rules such as high cycle time to make shipping decisions? They rely on digital tracks that employees leave in information systems. With these platforms supporting you, it doesn't matter where employees work - at home or the office.

Another tip is to make life easier for employees and free them from routine overload. At first, working from home may resemble Groundhog Day, especially if there are a lot of manual operations in work tasks that do not require a heavy intellectual load. Solutions for intelligent information processing can help. They automatically recognize documents, extract valuable data from them and enter them into the company's information systems. This is one way to relieve employees and give them the opportunity to devote more time to working with clients directly to accomplish more complex tasks. Search and retrieval of information is of critical importance.

It is impossible to improve what cannot be measured, as Lord Kelvin noted some 100 years ago and John Doerr has repeated in his book. At Yva.ai, we repeat these words like a mantra. Human capital is the organization’s most valuable asset, especially during this mandatory remote work era. That’s why you should constantly think about the emotional, personal, and professional wellbeing of your employees. 

But how can you objectively understand what worries employees? Especially, if you don’t run into them in the hallway anymore? Where might this information reside in real-time? 

For the last two decades, polling systems – programs that ask employees questions about engagement – have been used to answer this. However, the two primary problems with this approach are that polls are distributed less often than weekly, and they require the employee to provide an unbiased version of their experience. 

During a sudden transition to remote work, our life changes weekly and daily. But if we try to interview employees on a daily basis, they will suffer from survey fatigue and stop responding altogether. Fact: The percentage of employees responding to weekly or daily surveys is 5-10%. That leaves the traditional HR professional stuck in a no-win situation - feedback isn’t recent or accurate enough, and time affects accuracy negatively.

You can solve this paradox, combining Active Feedback --systems like Survale, Yva.ai, Glint, Qualtrics, 15Five and similar and Passive Analytics -- systems like Yva.ai, Humanyze or Cultivate. The combination between Active and Passive feedback gives you so-called “smart feedback.” The essence of smart feedback is that anonymous feedback from employees can be received without anyone telling the system when to ask, who to ask, or what to ask for. The digital interactions of employees already carry a huge amount of knowledge that can be measured and returned to them in the form of personal recommendations to improve their professional skills and create better working conditions - a modern breakthrough in responsible AI!


 
Smart feedback measures the quality of cooperation, engagement, fatigue, stress, burnout, successful leadership practices, conflicts and many other signals.

Passive feedback - anonymous signals of employee interaction in corporate systems like Slack, MS Teams, CRM, & email is combined with active feedback - short 60-second individual polls. Whereas employees would not fill out corporate surveys once a week in the past, they will answer 3 or 10 questions per week at very high rates.

Based on passive and active feedback, smart feedback technologies allow us to identify problems in the work of a remote team to increase engagement, provide constructive communication between employees and managers, and increase efficiency and trust in a team.

Did you know that 3% of the employees in your organization control the opinions of 84% of all the others? This is just one of the insights from our platform. This 3 % are your informal leaders. 

These people have already managed your organization to a great extent, but during the transition to remote work the management of your organization will completely pass to informal leaders.

Do you know who they are? Do they share your values? Are they in line with your transformation plans? 

Most botched transformation attempts fail because upper management relies too heavily on formal leaders to bring about global change. But formal and informal leaders are different groups of people that only partially overlap. 


 
Modern ONA (organizational network analysis) tools like Yva.ai, Innovisor, Worklytics or TrustSphere allow you to automatically identify such informal leaders, receive real-time feedback from them and, as a result, establish emotional and professional communication with them. 

Identify your informal leaders. Organize regular 1-on-1 meetings with them. Show them your professional respect by the fact that you bring them your ideas personally, listen to them and be sure to take into account their opinions. Empower them and the quality of management and transformation processes and your company will grow radically. 

After all, as they say in Silicon Valley: “Great leadership isn't about control, it's about empowering people!”