TL;DR notes from articles I read today.
How to build a remote team that will last
Some tips to do remote working right:
- Define and refine your company’s culture and put the company values and culture docs in a virtual handbook for new employees (and old) to access easily at all times.
- Introduce remote workers to all their colleagues and ensure they have access to all the same tools and resources as they would have when in office.
- Communicate using a variety of tools, apps, and media. Use chat apps as a sort of virtual water cooler and allow off-topic, informal conversations. For specifically work-related conversations, use a collaboration suite. Add video check-ins through Skype and Zoom, use these for weekly/bi-weekly meetings as well.
- Remote workers are mostly invisible to you except telecommunication, so regularly measure their engagement and happiness.
- Build healthy, rewarding habits for your whole team as part of your company’s culture and values: encourage free interaction with and by new members. Send positive messages through shoutouts for appreciation and send direct communication along the most productive channel, send the non-urgent messages through Slack.
- Encourage remote workers to switch off communication channels for blocks of time for focused work and also to take regular breaks.
Full post here, 5 mins read
Maximize your team: How I created an engineering roadmap
- It takes considerable effort from you as a leader for your team to be successful. Draw up a roadmap for the team:
- Identify a long-term focus
- Evaluate previous efforts
- Allow visibility into what the team is focusing on
- Ensure planning efforts and workloads are easy to timebox and monitor so the team knows when they are ahead or behind.
- Collaborate with other teams and use your business needs to prioritize value over cool factor.
- Set the roadmap at a meeting and brainstorm together to visualize the destination you want to arrive at, and when you want to get there. Use a value system to filter or prioritize the ideas generated - nice to have, important but not urgent, critical for efficiency, debugging needed right away, important and urgent.
- Create a roadmap document:
- Summarize team and business goals.
- List responsibilities and desired outcomes for the team. Include a list of all the things the team is managing and what is likely to be phased out or removed to help prioritize.
- Review achievements for the previous year both for tracking goals and for motivation.
- List this year’s goals, with 4-5 overarching objectives with 3-5 subheads each. Organize each section in a similar way to the main roadmap document.
- Avoid cluttering the document with too much detail of plans and solutions to issues targeted - that’s a different exercise, which you should restrict to the relevant team and not the entire larger team.
Full post here, 6 mins read
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Top comments (2)
I think all it takes is if you pay them good, they last.
Pay is an important aspect to your professional life. But the theory of making it the center piece of your team has been debunked in multiple studies. Folks require more than just money to keep them happy and productive.
Do read "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton Christensen and Remote by the good folks at Basecamp on this topic.