How to bring a remote command
Employees are rapidly moving away from us. In ten years, the number of people working separately from managers has increased by more than 80 percent . Obviously, because it is profitable. Employees save time on the road, can flexibly plan their time and are not distracted by office stimuli. 69% of remote workers say that they work more productively outside the office.
No offense to the company. You can save on the maintenance and size of office space and pay extra working hours, as well as get a wide selection of candidates from different regions. But, as with any changes, remote work brings with it not only positive. In distributed teams, there are problems of a new type, primarily a lack of communication. Wrike is working with employees around the world, and we want to share some tips based on our experience.
1. Need a full fleet of collaboration tools
Lack of access to the necessary information is the main headache of the remote teams, and half measures are not enough. Each team needs to pick up its own gentlemanly set of online tools, which will make it possible to achieve the feeling that colleagues are just a click away. This is a video conferencing service, corporate messenger, file storage, a joint document editor and, of course, a project management system.
')
There are two important points here. First, you need to decide when and what to use, that is, establish rules. For example, it is more convenient to discuss the urgent routine question in a chat, but all key stages of work and coordination must be marked in the project management system and be publicly available.
Secondly, all tools need to be integrated with each other to the maximum. It is worth paying attention to the support of integration with the necessary services even when choosing tools.
2. Responsibility it is important to clearly separate and label
Workflows in a remote team may be particularly opaque. The manager may not notice for months the gaps in the knowledge of the new employee. The slipping part of the project, which no one was engaged in, can open up right before the deadline. Getting a clear status report is also often problematic. To avoid this, wherever it is necessary to create templates for typical tasks and projects, describe all actions step by step, as well as those responsible for them. This will allow beginners to get used to it faster, and everyone else to understand at what stage the work is and who is responsible for it.
By the way, mentoring can be useful in remote teams - when one of the team's veterans is responsible for introducing the newcomer to the course.
3. Build an informal relationship.
On the one hand, it’s great when employees are focused on work, rather than participating in a “how I spent the weekend” story contest with a cooler. On the other hand, the lack of informal communication will not increase their productivity and good mood. People do not go to dinner together, do not play board games and do not discuss the news. You need to come up with something instead to develop personal relationships between employees. It can be separate chat rooms for communication on non-working topics or video conferences, where new and old employees can introduce themselves and tell about themselves. Another example from our experience is to unite our support team , distributed between three cities, we organize an annual meeting of the whole team in different parts of the world.
4. Share a shared vision through regular meetings.
No one likes meetings, and remote employees are the least. However, working separately from the team, losing the overall vision of the project is much easier than in the office. Therefore, review meetings are still needed - let them be monthly or quarterly. They can discuss the overall progress of the team and what everyone should do, so that everyone has a single picture of what is happening. You can also encourage some and discuss the difficulties of others.
5. Personal qualities may be more important than experience.
Only the lazy was not joking over the sample last line of requirements in every second vacancy - all of these “initiative, organization, ability to communicate”. They are difficult to assess at the interview and it is not very clear how critical for the work. However, in the case of remote work, these qualities suddenly become top requirements. Sometimes they may even be more important than professional experience and skills.
The bottom line is that you can not select employees in the office and remotely by the same criteria. Ask for other things, prepare special tests and use a trial period to see how independent a person is and whether he can interact with colleagues.
If you have your own tips for organizing a remote team, full of bumps and an interesting story on this topic, welcome to the comments.
No offense to the company. You can save on the maintenance and size of office space and pay extra working hours, as well as get a wide selection of candidates from different regions. But, as with any changes, remote work brings with it not only positive. In distributed teams, there are problems of a new type, primarily a lack of communication. Wrike is working with employees around the world, and we want to share some tips based on our experience.
1. Need a full fleet of collaboration tools
Lack of access to the necessary information is the main headache of the remote teams, and half measures are not enough. Each team needs to pick up its own gentlemanly set of online tools, which will make it possible to achieve the feeling that colleagues are just a click away. This is a video conferencing service, corporate messenger, file storage, a joint document editor and, of course, a project management system.
')
There are two important points here. First, you need to decide when and what to use, that is, establish rules. For example, it is more convenient to discuss the urgent routine question in a chat, but all key stages of work and coordination must be marked in the project management system and be publicly available.
Secondly, all tools need to be integrated with each other to the maximum. It is worth paying attention to the support of integration with the necessary services even when choosing tools.
2. Responsibility it is important to clearly separate and label
Workflows in a remote team may be particularly opaque. The manager may not notice for months the gaps in the knowledge of the new employee. The slipping part of the project, which no one was engaged in, can open up right before the deadline. Getting a clear status report is also often problematic. To avoid this, wherever it is necessary to create templates for typical tasks and projects, describe all actions step by step, as well as those responsible for them. This will allow beginners to get used to it faster, and everyone else to understand at what stage the work is and who is responsible for it.
By the way, mentoring can be useful in remote teams - when one of the team's veterans is responsible for introducing the newcomer to the course.
3. Build an informal relationship.
On the one hand, it’s great when employees are focused on work, rather than participating in a “how I spent the weekend” story contest with a cooler. On the other hand, the lack of informal communication will not increase their productivity and good mood. People do not go to dinner together, do not play board games and do not discuss the news. You need to come up with something instead to develop personal relationships between employees. It can be separate chat rooms for communication on non-working topics or video conferences, where new and old employees can introduce themselves and tell about themselves. Another example from our experience is to unite our support team , distributed between three cities, we organize an annual meeting of the whole team in different parts of the world.
4. Share a shared vision through regular meetings.
No one likes meetings, and remote employees are the least. However, working separately from the team, losing the overall vision of the project is much easier than in the office. Therefore, review meetings are still needed - let them be monthly or quarterly. They can discuss the overall progress of the team and what everyone should do, so that everyone has a single picture of what is happening. You can also encourage some and discuss the difficulties of others.
5. Personal qualities may be more important than experience.
Only the lazy was not joking over the sample last line of requirements in every second vacancy - all of these “initiative, organization, ability to communicate”. They are difficult to assess at the interview and it is not very clear how critical for the work. However, in the case of remote work, these qualities suddenly become top requirements. Sometimes they may even be more important than professional experience and skills.
The bottom line is that you can not select employees in the office and remotely by the same criteria. Ask for other things, prepare special tests and use a trial period to see how independent a person is and whether he can interact with colleagues.
If you have your own tips for organizing a remote team, full of bumps and an interesting story on this topic, welcome to the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/302894/
All Articles