Speaker 1: A lot of companies and teams are being forced to work remotely these days and that's causing a lot of anxiety in anybody who has to lead those companies or teams. They're not quite sure how to maintain communication, foster collaboration, and generally just keep an eye on the productivity level of their

Speaker 2: teams. So if that sounds like you, you're gonna want to keep watching this video. We've been a remote company for 10 years so we're gonna share with you today the top tips and tricks we've learned managing a remote team.

Speaker 1: Welcome back to our channel where we love sharing tactical tips and best practices that will help you level up your small business. So if you want to

Speaker 2: take your small business to the next level, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you get more great videos like this and leave us a comment below. We want to know, do you love working from home or do you really miss working in

Speaker 1: the office? What do you prefer? As you start shifting your company or team to working remotely, there are several challenges you're gonna have to overcome. The first is productivity. How do you make sure that your teams are maintaining that high level of productivity that you're used to in the office? You're also gonna have to be more deliberate about communication. You're gonna have to make sure that you're over communicating because you're not gonna have the opportunities to just ad hoc communicate while you're in the office. Collaboration is another thing that can suffer a little bit when you go remote and you have to be deliberate about how you foster collaboration in your team. The last one to really think about is isolation. You want to make sure that you're doing things to continue building your team and having those social interactions so that people don't feel isolated as they move to working from home. Tip one is to move to a results-driven environment. One of the biggest questions we saw asked on Quora as we were researching for this video was people asking and wondering how do they make sure that their teams are still productive and not slacking off as they're working from home. And that is a really big challenge that you're gonna have to overcome. Moving from being in office to being at home. At the office you're able to walk around and sort of just glance and see if people are at their desks and working away but once they're remote you don't have that luxury anymore. You can't just visually take a scan of the office and see who's working and who's not. You're gonna have to be a little bit more deliberate about it. And having a results-driven environment is a good way to go to a give you the confidence that people are working but also the nice side effect is that your team will have a bit more autonomy over how they're working. And that's because in a results-driven environment you're more concerned about the outcomes that they're delivering versus just seeing them physically at their desks. There's a really great book that Dan Pink wrote called Drive and it talks a lot about motivating your people and it does talk about a results-driven environment. I'd highly recommend you

Speaker 2: check that out. We shifted to a results-driven environment by introducing a scorecard for each role that we have in our company. So the scorecard is basically a blueprint for success. It outlines two to four KPIs which stands for key performance indicators or measures of success for the role. About five to seven core competencies that really help drive the behavior and achieve those KPIs. And then it also includes core values because for us it's not just about hitting KPIs it's also about living our company culture. Which by the way we've done another video on. So if you're interested in learning how to deliberately build your company culture and create your own core values make sure you check out that video. And that's it. Scorecards were really the secret sauce for us for shifting to a results-driven environment so we don't have to rely on seeing people in the office working or monitoring what hours they're working because we can measure the productivity and the outcomes and results of their work. Tip number two is to schedule

Speaker 1: regular one-on-ones with your team and this is when you start to replace that in-office sort of gut feel on what people's productivities are just from seeing them at their desk with something more deliberate. A virtual one-on-one is the chance you have to build the confidence that your teams are maintaining their high level of productivity that you expect and that they're also doing the right things. And the secret as Christy mentioned in our previous tip are the scorecards or some other measure you've put in place to get a view onto their output as opposed to just them showing up to the job. When we

Speaker 2: transition to working from home we introduce virtual one-on-ones on a bi-weekly basis. Some companies like doing this every week, totally up to you. You're gonna need some video conferencing software. We use Zoom for these and I recommend doing at least 30 minutes for each individual's check-in. That way you can go over their KPIs, are there any action items they could they had commit to in the previous one-on-one. You want to make sure you're circling back on those and that gives you a space to coach them on their KPIs and their performance to make sure that they're being productive as well as that space for communicating just in general. Are there things that they're struggling with, maybe they're not unsure about, maybe they don't understand the company direction. So really perfect opportunity to coach your people, support your people

Speaker 1: even though you're working remotely. Tip number three is to have regular monthly remote all-hands meetings and this replaces that organic communication that happens very naturally in the office that you're gonna be losing as you move remote. In the office you could have lunch with your team or you'd bump into them at the water cooler so to speak or just generally in the hallway and in those instances you're able to sort of check in with them very ad-hoc and see where they're at make sure they're on the right track. But as you go remote it becomes a lot more difficult and you have to be more deliberate about making sure that everyone is aligned and moving in the right direction and having a remote all-hands where all your team comes in to a video call and you are able to give a presentation and talk to them all as a group about where the company is going, remind them of the vision, remind them of the goals. That's a really great way to make sure that you're building that momentum forward even though everybody is working separately in their own homes

Speaker 2: or in their own locations. Another benefit of doing a virtual all-hands is that it helps give people purpose and motivation which helps drives productivity. So when you're working in the office with everyone, you're collaborating together, you see what other people are working on, there's that energy, vibrancy, you feel like you're a team, you're all working towards something together. And when you start working from home, some of that kind of disappears. You are by yourself, sometimes you start questioning, you know, what's the purpose of this work that I'm doing? There's easy to get distractions by things going on and so by once a month doing that virtual all-hands, it helps bring people back to that high-level vision. What's the purpose? What's the direction? They can see the impact that their work is having on the company which helps drive that motivation and makes people more productive. Sometimes you need that reminder and that's really what that virtual all-hands is for, for that repetition. So for these all-hands, you want to be using video conferencing software. Hopefully everybody can attend but make sure that you record it in case people can't so that way you have that async communication. Tip number four is

Speaker 1: have regular weekly departmental or team meetings. It's really important as you've gone remote to do these and and make sure that they happen every week because you don't have that luxury of organic ad hoc meetings at the office anymore. Team members aren't just gonna bump into each other and have discussions about what they're working on and get feedback. You are gonna have to be deliberate about making sure that happens and having these weekly meetings is a great way to do that. Not just getting status updates in these meetings because those can come through other means through software or through like emails or whatever. This is a lot more about collaboration and getting the team to start talking to each other and making sure that everyone is still aligned on where you're going

Speaker 2: as a team. As Mike mentioned, don't waste these weekly meetings on status updates. You want to spend most of your time in these meetings collaborating. If you're using proper project management software or a CRM like Daylight, then you'll be able to visually see and get an overview. Okay, here's where projects are. Here's what the status is. Here's what tasks need to be done next and who's responsible and by when. So that way you don't need to waste your weekly meeting on that stuff. Really what this weekly meeting for is to get everybody together. You want to review and just make sure that you're on track and if you're not on track then you want to start asking, okay well here's the vision or direction or where we're trying to go. How do we make that happen? Are there things that we need to collaborate on? And so really as a manager, it's your job to ask the right questions to create that environment for collaboration. Ask people, are there bottlenecks or things that they're struggling with? That helps facilitate that communication and collaboration with your team. And so by doing this every week, it helps make people feel like part of the team. Again, they understand the purpose that their work is having, the impact it has. They have that opportunity to interact with their team, collaborate, which helps people feel like part of the group even when they're working from home. Tip

Speaker 1: number five is to invest in the right tools and to provide your people guidelines on how you expect them to use those tools. This sounds like an obvious tip but it's a trap that a lot of companies, ourselves included, fall into. As you're going remote, you're gonna need to onboard new tools that you haven't used in the past and you're gonna want to give your people guidelines on how to use them. What are the best practices and how to get the most out of these tools. That's not only gonna make sure that you maintain a level of productivity with the tools but it's also gonna make sure that everybody is using them together and the right ways so that the teams continue to gel. If people start going off on their own directions on how to onboard these tools either individually or in their teams, then people are gonna have a hard time collaborating through these tools because they're all using different workflows. So when you bring these tools on, make sure that you have a page somewhere that you're able to document the reason for the tool but then also how to get the most out of it and how the business should be using them. Christy, what are some examples of tools that we've onboarded as we've gone

Speaker 2: remote? The tool that sticks out in my mind the most that we didn't roll out the most effectively and you can learn from our mistakes here was Slack. When you go remote, obviously you need an instant messaging tool to talk to each other and collaborate on things and because Slack was so popular and intuitive, we figured hey people can figure it out but what we found was that because we didn't give guidelines, things happened like people were messaging each other privately which then made it difficult to collaborate and you'd have to waste time talking to multiple different people when we could have just had that in a public channel. So that was something we learned the hard way. Always use a public channel. Make sure there's a channel for every kind of project or area of the business and people know what conversations to have where. Another one was teaching people how to use threads. By not doing that, we had a lot of tons of chit-chat that you have to scroll through which again wastes time when people are trying to get updated or collaborate on things. So stuff like that. Had we given guidelines up front, we would have avoided a lot of wasted time and ineffective collaboration through that process. So learn from our mistakes. Give guidelines when you're rolling out new tools. Other tools that you're going to need as a business. So we mentioned Slack for instant messaging. Confluence is a big one. You need a place to document processes, procedures. We also use them for mocking up things like website or website copy or mock-ups. That way we can do inline comments and kind of collaborate on this one tool. Daylight for managing projects and tasks and kind of seeing where everything is. Delegating tasks. Scheduling meetings with other people. One place to have all the communication and follow-ups with clients. So those are some of the key tools you'll need. Obviously video conferencing software. We use Zoom. There's tons of other tools. That's really it. Those are the kind of key tools that you will need as you're transitioning to a remote company. And please make sure you give your team outlines for how to use these tools productively. Tip number six is to foster

Speaker 1: remote team-building activities. When you're in the office, team-building and socialization happen very very naturally. And as you go remote, that starts to break down. People start to feel isolated. They start working alone for a whole day. They don't interact with a lot of people. Definitely not face to face. So you need to take steps to make sure that you're helping them feel included in the team and help them realize that they're not alone in their day-to-day. That we're all in this together. It just feels a little bit differently. So you need to come up with ways to do events or things online that bring people together and let them have those same kind of moments that they would have ad hoc or organically in the office. Kristi, what are some examples of things that we've done to help foster this? So what we did was we looked at

Speaker 2: what are those organic collisions that happen when you're in the office and how do we make those happen in a virtual way? So for example, when you're in the office when people are getting coffee, filling up their water bottles, that's when they bump into each other. So we thought, well how do we make this happen virtually? So what we did was introduce a Slack channel called Water Cooler Channel. So that way there's a space, we encourage people to go there, chat with each other, really get to know each other on a personal level, talk about whatever movies they're watching, whatever that is. Another way people kind of bump into each other organically is they go out for lunch together. So we introduced a virtual lunch which happens over Zoom. You can eat your lunch, it's a virtual lunch and usually there's some sort of activity or game to make it a little bit more engaging, help people kind of break the ice and get to know each other and chit-chat a little bit more. Another thing we did was donut chats. So every week or every other week you're randomly paired with someone, you have like a 30-minute Zoom chat and what this does is it creates spaces for people that don't normally talk to each other while they're working from home remotely and creates that space for connecting. You feel like you're part of the team, you get to know different departments, you can help each other collaborate or problem-solve because you have that different perspective and that really helps create a great environment and foster that communication and collaboration even though you're working remotely. That's the video for you today

Speaker 1: guys. We hope that you enjoyed it. Going remote can be challenging and daunting but you can totally overcome these challenges and we hope that the tips that we shared today will help you do that. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and if you want more content like this, subscribe to the channel, hit that little notification bell so you never miss a future video. If you have any questions or you have tips to share about going remote, please leave

Speaker 2: them in the comments down below and make sure you check out the description. We'll include a link to the other video that we mentioned about defining your company culture and building your core values. We also have a link to a blog post that we wrote about our experience transitioning to a remote company. We'll include a link to all the tools that we've mentioned, the different tools that we use for managing our teams remotely and if you're needing help managing projects and tasks and clients with your company, check out Daylight. We'll include a link in the description where you can start your own free 30-day trial and make sure you hit us up on all the social channels where we love sharing tips and best practices about running a small business and taking it to the next level.