How To Build Effective Remote Teams
Whether you’re hiring for an all-new remote team or your existing team is now working from home, you’re probably wondering how you can adopt a structure that works as well (if not better) without the parameters of an office.
When we design and staff remote teams, we implement the best practices we’ve learned from over a decade of experience and the significant research we’ve done around remote work. Below are three practices we’ve seen improve remote team performance.
Small teams are better
Remote work can amplify any existing lack of clarity around team roles. Consequently, remote employees can often have uncertainty around who to talk to for specific issues and how to bring them up. The difficulties they face navigating the company can create delays in work and decrease transparency into issues.
By moving away from large and siloed teams to smaller cross-functional teams, you can increase familiarity between stakeholders and create clarity around decision makers.
Keeping team sizes below 10 people increases levels of collaboration and reduces chances of social loafing - which is when someone decreases their effort because they feel less responsible for the outputs. Both McKinsey and HBR recommend and cite research studies that show keeping remote team sizes between 5-9 people is most effective. According to Deloitte, small teams are also a more effective model for operating in today’s unpredictable business environment. Smaller teams move faster, iterate at a higher frequency, and innovate more for the company.
Shamim Mohammad, senior vice president and chief information and technology officer at CarMax, considers their move to cross-functional product teams a “a game changer for the company”. CarMax is organized into cross-functional product teams made up of seven to nine IT, marketing, and operations employees that work together to efficiently transform ideas into products and services.
Delegate decision making
One of the common blockers holding back productivity for remote teams is overly centralized management. You can remove bottlenecks by giving teams the autonomy to make larger decisions which reduce the time needed for communication.
Hyper-successful leaders (or “superbosses”) are experts at delegating authority and creating two-way trust with their team. To effectively delegate decisions, take the time to think of what your team needs to do in order to achieve the goals they’ve been given. Also consider the decisions you’ve been making in the past that you could have confidently let your team take on. Make it extremely clear to your team what they’re able to run with, who is responsible for what within the team structure, and which leaders on other teams they should be coordinating with. At CarMax, the leadership team defines the problem and sets the performance goals but it is up to the agile product teams to learn, explore, and discover how to best deliver against business objectives.
Empowering employees and establishing a trusting work climate can lead to better information sharing and a willingness to test ideas even if these may ultimately fail. According to HBR, such behavior, over time, leads to outcomes that make companies more creative, innovative, cooperative, and agile.
Remote working has also accelerated digitization across a range of industries and sectors, increasing the need for upskilling and reskilling. Business leaders need to look critically at the technical and ‘human’ skills to ensure their teams have the skills and competencies needed to achieve their objectives, minimize dependency on other teams, and future-proof their workforce. This is the ideal time to explore options to reframe future job descriptions away from the traditional occupation-specific approach and more towards problem-solving opportunities and include competencies for multidisciplinary collaboration and empowered decision-making.
Prioritize employee well being
Anxiety and feelings of isolation are at all time highs. Studies on emotional intelligence show that employees look to their managers for emotional cues and guidance during times of uncertainty. Now more than ever managers need to create trust with their team, and that starts with respect and empathy.
The shared office is a catalyst for relationship building and ad hoc social moments, all of which contribute to engagement and job satisfaction. Now that everyone is working from home, it’s easy to feel isolated. When thinking about how your team will work together, consider how you can structure new ways for peers to interact socially and have informal conversations. This can be through remote social activities or deliberately making time, before meetings or separately, for non-work related conversations.
During one-on-ones, it’s important for managers to be actively listening to anxieties and concerns from their team. Research shows that anxiety is contagious. Acknowledge the stress employees have but also provide support and confidence. This two-pronged approach lets employees know you care, but also provides the encouragement they need to take up challenges.
Designing remote teams is ever evolving, but every challenge presents an opportunity. Whether you’re a startup, traditional organization or nonprofit, there has never been a better time to focus on how you can rethink and build effective remote teams.
Our experts have been working with remote teams for years and we’re here to help. We’ve developed an offer specifically to help organizations adapt and pivot given the challenges that COVID-19 has created. We’re offering a free 60 minute consultation to help you identify opportunities to improve your remote teams.
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