Be remote: distributed teams - a trend in practice
Anna Antonova, Head of the Department for Working with Experts of the IDF Pre-Accelerator
In the USA, from 2005 to 2017, the number of people working remotely increased by 115%. The list of large companies whose employees are fully or almost fully working remotely grows: Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier - there work from 100 to almost 1,000 remote employees. Plus, by the year 2030, the millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce, and for them the balance between work and personal life is important, and they will require employers to work remotely.
I lead a distributed team in the IIDF for over 3 years. Experts from 17 points in Russia and in the world - from Novosibirsk to Minsk - working with startups in various formats. Our team had 73 people at the peak, at the very start there were six people in the chat.
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I will talk about how craving for experiments, advice from seniors and books helped me to assemble a distributed self-organizing team of smart and motivated people: the nuances of selecting people, the rules of communication and a little bit of fakap. I hope my path will help you shed less blood in the battle for the effectiveness of remote employees.
We are working on the online-progressive FRIA. We communicate with everyone who decided to attract investments from the Fund. More than 2.5 thousand start-ups pass through the team of experts annually, in general, the IIDF “sees” about 20 thousand start-up teams every year. Thus, a team of experts works with a tenth of the total Russian start-ups market. Conventionally, we “touch” 7 startup founders every day. I do not know who does more.
To get into our team, candidates have to compete. We collect through the competition - 4 stages, 13 deadlines, 30 days: for each step there is a specific date when everything should be done. I did not have time - soryan. Even exams pass.
Motivation letter. If the candidate could not formulate why he is interested in working with us - alas, not an option. We need people who can structure and express their thoughts. We pay attention to the style of writing and the tone of communication of the candidate. If they are not close to us, we are no longer invited to the next stage. It is motivation, besides professional skills, that is the basis of our community.
Summary. We do not watch it. Only how a person thinks and formulates thoughts about past experiences. It is important that a free retelling of professional achievements was interesting to read and there was a desire to ask additional questions. We are focused on the examination of only those who have experience with IT-products and whose practical knowledge can help the founders who come to us.
Interview. 15-minute Skype with video. Ask unexpected questions to see spontaneous reactions. A question that absolutely puzzled the candidates: “How do you understand that you have reached what you came for?” Of course, do not forget to answer questions to us. We also take into account the quality of the questions asked.
The two-week training in the inverted class method consists of two parts: the company's context (about IIDF: goals and values, our products and the relationship between them) and specialized knowledge about the formats of work. We do not teach them to be experts, we teach them to pass on their expertise.
It is especially important to find people at work at the remote place who do ten units of useful work for one unit of time of your participation. The task is clear: less time for conversations and a good result at the exit. If suddenly someone in the team "eats" more time and gives all the same ten units, then it is economically unprofitable. This can only be seen at work. We start to look at it from the moment of training.
Conventionally, I always divide the team into "reds", "greenbacks" and "yellowish". Greens - work and the head does not hurt. Yellowish people are people with whom sometimes something breaks: for example, they occasionally miss information or take on too much. The yellow category includes those with whose features it does not soar to work. Reds - those who use non-constructive communication.
Non-constructive communication takes a lot of time, but does not create any value for the system. A non-constructive communication beacon: an hour of conversation with an employee and his “well ok, I agree” at the end of the dialogue. Spent I do not recommend working with people who have this style of communication. I used to turn a blind eye to the inclination towards a useless flood when a professional came. Let him have more work, but he ac, I thought. Such ace was always economically unprofitable.
It is important for me that as a result of the dialogue “my Universe” gets better: there was a significant positive change in the methods of working with start-ups or within a team. Constructive communication also eats time. I admit, the people who contributed to the development of our team at the start wanted to kill. They asked too many questions. By forcing me to talk, they pulled out the necessary data and new things always appeared in our dialogue.
Red in the distributed team should not be. The balance of green and yellow depends on the involvement of the manager: how much time is laid on him directly to communicate with the team. The more related tasks, the less should be yellow.
A person whose tasks include the organization of work with remote colleagues is a service. In the first steps of the development of our online team, I was a 24/7 service. A distributed team manager is not a king, not a god and not a king. It is a tool, convenient, clear, fast and flexible. This approach, from my point of view, helps to work with the best.
At the same time you need to position yourself as a strong and equal. Remove piety from the dialogue. With the candidates, we immediately turn to “you” and this is primarily the FRIA culture. Equality is also a refusal of ultimatum. Everything goes in a discussion format. If I want to introduce some rule or give a task, then I write briefly, but in detail in one message: what is the idea / task, why is it such that needs to be done and how will this change the processes / affect the goal. At the end I ask what the team thinks about it. If they say that everything is cool, then we do it. If not, then we talk about what needs to be changed and why.
What is the strength in, brother? (c) Strength - take responsibility for making the final decision and “sell” it to the team.
Another important point - the team must come to the result and I am responsible for it. I must understand where I am going and why, where I have blind spots and why I cannot “highlight” them. And also honestly, understandably and deployed to broadcast all this to the team, working through their questions.
Our broadcast tool is Telegram. In addition to standard messaging, we actively use channels - microblogging and automated polls, we have our own chat bot, Antonina, and a couple of stickerpacks. Most of all in the daily routine help # tags and the ability to access through nickname .
Three golden rules of our work in the messenger
Personal file Lead it to each person in the team! There is no form, you just need to write in one place what matters to you. How many children does he have, what are his super strengths and growth points, specific success stories and failures.
Why this is important: the difficulty I faced is the transfer of knowledge about the team. While the distributed team did not exceed 25 people, this was not a problem, when we first doubled, I began to involve office colleagues in the work, and when we became 70+ I had a small department for working with experts. How to decide who to invite to work in the corporate accelerator "Beeline" ? All accumulated knowledge had to be taken out of my head during the meetings. And this time, and time - money.
Hack 1: Keep knowledge of your remote employees in a readable form available upon request.
Hack 2: Black book manager Slava Pankratov - about why it is important to know the birthday of an employee’s child and another 17 pages of insights about working with a team in IT.
Quality control. The mechanics of the distributed team of experts is similar to the work of the sales department: the employee must say "the right things", and the manager should track the correlation between what was said and the client's actions. To grow conversions you need to listen to what the expert says to a startup. With the introduction of this feature, I was late for a year. Facepalm I began to regularly listen to the recordings from the third set of experts, and I wanted to fire everyone from some dialogues and recruit new ones.
Why this is important: Captain Evidence is whispering that there is no need to stop here.
Hack 1: in the quality assessment, rely on the backbone of the team. I discussed the thesis “fire all” with the experts of the first recruitment. They told that at the start they made similar mistakes and know how to treat it. With them, we have created a form for assessing expert communication with startups. It allows you to quickly see red, yellow and green in the dialogue. Greens are attracted to auditions and the subsequent training of yellows. And with the red say goodbye.
Hack 2: Learn to give detailed feedback on the basis of quality control: how to correct mistakes and why it is wrong. In our distributed team, this turned out to be the most awaited moment in working with IIDF.
About the trend and what have I got
In the USA, from 2005 to 2017, the number of people working remotely increased by 115%. The list of large companies whose employees are fully or almost fully working remotely grows: Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier - there work from 100 to almost 1,000 remote employees. Plus, by the year 2030, the millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce, and for them the balance between work and personal life is important, and they will require employers to work remotely.
I lead a distributed team in the IIDF for over 3 years. Experts from 17 points in Russia and in the world - from Novosibirsk to Minsk - working with startups in various formats. Our team had 73 people at the peak, at the very start there were six people in the chat.
')
I will talk about how craving for experiments, advice from seniors and books helped me to assemble a distributed self-organizing team of smart and motivated people: the nuances of selecting people, the rules of communication and a little bit of fakap. I hope my path will help you shed less blood in the battle for the effectiveness of remote employees.
Are experts at all who and where do they come from?
We are working on the online-progressive FRIA. We communicate with everyone who decided to attract investments from the Fund. More than 2.5 thousand start-ups pass through the team of experts annually, in general, the IIDF “sees” about 20 thousand start-up teams every year. Thus, a team of experts works with a tenth of the total Russian start-ups market. Conventionally, we “touch” 7 startup founders every day. I do not know who does more.
To get into our team, candidates have to compete. We collect through the competition - 4 stages, 13 deadlines, 30 days: for each step there is a specific date when everything should be done. I did not have time - soryan. Even exams pass.
Motivation letter. If the candidate could not formulate why he is interested in working with us - alas, not an option. We need people who can structure and express their thoughts. We pay attention to the style of writing and the tone of communication of the candidate. If they are not close to us, we are no longer invited to the next stage. It is motivation, besides professional skills, that is the basis of our community.
Summary. We do not watch it. Only how a person thinks and formulates thoughts about past experiences. It is important that a free retelling of professional achievements was interesting to read and there was a desire to ask additional questions. We are focused on the examination of only those who have experience with IT-products and whose practical knowledge can help the founders who come to us.
Interview. 15-minute Skype with video. Ask unexpected questions to see spontaneous reactions. A question that absolutely puzzled the candidates: “How do you understand that you have reached what you came for?” Of course, do not forget to answer questions to us. We also take into account the quality of the questions asked.
The two-week training in the inverted class method consists of two parts: the company's context (about IIDF: goals and values, our products and the relationship between them) and specialized knowledge about the formats of work. We do not teach them to be experts, we teach them to pass on their expertise.
The choice of "their" in dynamics
It is especially important to find people at work at the remote place who do ten units of useful work for one unit of time of your participation. The task is clear: less time for conversations and a good result at the exit. If suddenly someone in the team "eats" more time and gives all the same ten units, then it is economically unprofitable. This can only be seen at work. We start to look at it from the moment of training.
Conventionally, I always divide the team into "reds", "greenbacks" and "yellowish". Greens - work and the head does not hurt. Yellowish people are people with whom sometimes something breaks: for example, they occasionally miss information or take on too much. The yellow category includes those with whose features it does not soar to work. Reds - those who use non-constructive communication.
Non-constructive communication takes a lot of time, but does not create any value for the system. A non-constructive communication beacon: an hour of conversation with an employee and his “well ok, I agree” at the end of the dialogue. Spent I do not recommend working with people who have this style of communication. I used to turn a blind eye to the inclination towards a useless flood when a professional came. Let him have more work, but he ac, I thought. Such ace was always economically unprofitable.
It is important for me that as a result of the dialogue “my Universe” gets better: there was a significant positive change in the methods of working with start-ups or within a team. Constructive communication also eats time. I admit, the people who contributed to the development of our team at the start wanted to kill. They asked too many questions. By forcing me to talk, they pulled out the necessary data and new things always appeared in our dialogue.
Red in the distributed team should not be. The balance of green and yellow depends on the involvement of the manager: how much time is laid on him directly to communicate with the team. The more related tasks, the less should be yellow.
Field and rules of communication
A person whose tasks include the organization of work with remote colleagues is a service. In the first steps of the development of our online team, I was a 24/7 service. A distributed team manager is not a king, not a god and not a king. It is a tool, convenient, clear, fast and flexible. This approach, from my point of view, helps to work with the best.
At the same time you need to position yourself as a strong and equal. Remove piety from the dialogue. With the candidates, we immediately turn to “you” and this is primarily the FRIA culture. Equality is also a refusal of ultimatum. Everything goes in a discussion format. If I want to introduce some rule or give a task, then I write briefly, but in detail in one message: what is the idea / task, why is it such that needs to be done and how will this change the processes / affect the goal. At the end I ask what the team thinks about it. If they say that everything is cool, then we do it. If not, then we talk about what needs to be changed and why.
What is the strength in, brother? (c) Strength - take responsibility for making the final decision and “sell” it to the team.
Another important point - the team must come to the result and I am responsible for it. I must understand where I am going and why, where I have blind spots and why I cannot “highlight” them. And also honestly, understandably and deployed to broadcast all this to the team, working through their questions.
Our broadcast tool is Telegram. In addition to standard messaging, we actively use channels - microblogging and automated polls, we have our own chat bot, Antonina, and a couple of stickerpacks. Most of all in the daily routine help # tags and the ability to access through nickname .
Three golden rules of our work in the messenger
- One chat + one channel . Everything related to the immediate function takes place in one clear and officially proclaimed place: we read in the channel, we write in the chat.
- LS - evil! General chat allows you to be in one context: to transfer facts and logical connections from your head to all your colleagues at once on the side of the monitor.
- Ethics of channel management. Publications no more than once every two hours. Already from the title it should be clear who needs to read this. At the end - a clear call to action.
What mistakes have we made
Personal file Lead it to each person in the team! There is no form, you just need to write in one place what matters to you. How many children does he have, what are his super strengths and growth points, specific success stories and failures.
Why this is important: the difficulty I faced is the transfer of knowledge about the team. While the distributed team did not exceed 25 people, this was not a problem, when we first doubled, I began to involve office colleagues in the work, and when we became 70+ I had a small department for working with experts. How to decide who to invite to work in the corporate accelerator "Beeline" ? All accumulated knowledge had to be taken out of my head during the meetings. And this time, and time - money.
Hack 1: Keep knowledge of your remote employees in a readable form available upon request.
Hack 2: Black book manager Slava Pankratov - about why it is important to know the birthday of an employee’s child and another 17 pages of insights about working with a team in IT.
Quality control. The mechanics of the distributed team of experts is similar to the work of the sales department: the employee must say "the right things", and the manager should track the correlation between what was said and the client's actions. To grow conversions you need to listen to what the expert says to a startup. With the introduction of this feature, I was late for a year. Facepalm I began to regularly listen to the recordings from the third set of experts, and I wanted to fire everyone from some dialogues and recruit new ones.
Why this is important: Captain Evidence is whispering that there is no need to stop here.
Hack 1: in the quality assessment, rely on the backbone of the team. I discussed the thesis “fire all” with the experts of the first recruitment. They told that at the start they made similar mistakes and know how to treat it. With them, we have created a form for assessing expert communication with startups. It allows you to quickly see red, yellow and green in the dialogue. Greens are attracted to auditions and the subsequent training of yellows. And with the red say goodbye.
Hack 2: Learn to give detailed feedback on the basis of quality control: how to correct mistakes and why it is wrong. In our distributed team, this turned out to be the most awaited moment in working with IIDF.
Summarizing
- Choose and work with the best. You can afford it.
- “Red”, “yellow”, “green” is a very simple and effective classification. Experiment with projections, create matrices.
- Communication and observation is the main task of the distributed team manager.
- Your team’s mistakes are your mistakes. In them it’s important not what we commit them, but what conclusions we draw from them.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/457414/
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