Speaker 1: How to manage a remote team as a digital nomad. I'm Trevor Carlson of The Essential Digital Nomad. I'm here to share with you how I've spent the last three years or so traveling full-time as a digital nomad and managing a small team. So, whether it was producing The Formula Podcast, this Essential Digital Nomad channel and content, Freshfield Marketing, which is my digital marketing company, whatever it is, I've always had to manage teams and processes and things like that. I'm not always great at it, but these are the tools and techniques that have worked for me. Hopefully this helps you skip some of the growing pains that I've had to go through, as anybody who's worked with me can attest. There's definitely areas where I still have a lot of improvement, but I'm hoping that these tips and things can help you not have to go through some of the same things that I have. Number one, use Slack as a communication tool with your team. You can set up different channels and have direct messages with certain people. It helps to make sure that everyone is in the loop. Documents don't get lost. Everyone just kind of knows what's going on, and it's easy to reference back to notes or conversations that have happened previously on specific projects. Number two, have your team use Memory.ai. This will help ease reporting of hours, so you can see, like, okay, well, you spent 40 hours on this client this month. And also, if you're billing client hours, it also makes it easy to be able to pull all that together without having to ask everyone to manually go in and track all their stuff. So, I know I keep saying it. I've said it on another video. Use Memory.ai. It's awesome. Number three, use Loom videos to provide feedback to your team members. I know you might not be in the same time zone. It might be hard to meet. And email and Slack messages, things can get lost in translation. However, video and screen recordings, like using Loom, make it a lot easier to get the message across and provide context in a way that your team member can understand. Number four, have your team members send you Loom videos walking through what they've done and why, so you also get context. And they can ask any questions that they have for you to get back to them in a reasonable manner. I cannot tell you how great of a tool Loom is. You should definitely use it for team and client reporting. Definitely, definitely, definitely get on that as soon as you can. Number five, use a project management tool like Basecamp. I am still notoriously not great at updating all my Basecamp projects, but I think it's a good way so everyone knows what needs to be done, when, and by whom. So use a project management tool, whether it's Basecamp, whatever one that actually works for you. Who cares which one it is? Just one that you'll actually use and your team likes. Number six, keep communication open. You're going to need to maintain trust with your team. Touch base regularly and make adjustments as needed on the fly based on the feedback that they give you. Do they need less meetings, more meetings? What is it they need from you to be able to do their job the best that they can? And then whatever they tell you, just do that. Number seven, don't take things personally. This is a trap that I fall into sometimes where you might train someone and they don't and it doesn't work out. You have to let them go. You might have somebody quit and leave. You might have someone that's upset with the regularity of the meetings or the complexity of managing a remote team. Don't take it personally. Take the information. I'm telling myself this too. Take the information and try to make adjustments so that way you don't run into the same mistakes again. And you just kind of pick yourself up, dust off, and try to make better decisions in the future. Number eight, let people go quickly if you find out that remote work is not for them. It takes a lot of trust to basically assign tasks to someone and have them fulfill those tasks. You just got to find people who are good at getting things done on their own. I think there's probably some word for that. It's very independent maybe. I don't know. But you have to find people who have that skill set and keep them around because that trust with them is going to be really, really important when it comes to many different areas of your business or managing your team. Number nine, prioritize the well-being of your team members. Not only is it the right thing to do, but by making sure that they're taking care of themselves, they're in a good space. You can't force anyone to do this, of course, but by helping to prioritize the person, they're actually going to be able to show up better at work, better in their personal lives. That's good for you as a member of their team. That's good for them as just like a person in general. So prioritize the well-being of the team member. Anyways, those are some things that I found worked for me managing a remote team. I'm curious as to hear what has worked for you. So go ahead, like, subscribe, comment below what you do to manage your remote team. If you have any questions that you have, share this with a digital nomad friend who is working with a remote team or thinking of hiring one. And I look forward to you stopping by next time. Ciao.