Building a remote business across continents
Building a virtual team can be challenging, especially across contents. Done well it can produce a highly agile, accountable, and collaborative organization.
While the global pandemic pushed 88% of organizations to encourage or require their employees to work from home[1], Impactical was built to be remote, international and agile from the beginning. Over the last six months, Impactical went from a group of distributed individuals on Zoom to a high performing team. Here are some of the insights I learned about managing a new team, training interns, running successful workshops, and developing a strong team culture, all while working across three time zones and having never met 50% of the team.
1. Build Connection Quickly and Often
Connection with colleagues is perhaps the most crucial component in building a productive and efficient workplace. For many organizations transitioning from the office to home meant rethinking how to engage with your team. At Impactical, we had the benefit of being able to be intentional about forming connections from the outset.
In building a high performing team, the power is in the dialogue with individuals. Frequent meetings with your remote teams are essential. To be successful, the goal should be to take time to understand what your team is experiencing honestly and more deeply. This means going beyond just work, maintaining a genuine interest in their personal lives.
Finding the time for small talk, building in team happy hours, or letting the conversation go off-topic to allow people’s personalities to shine through, are all part of building connections across a team.
2. Build Trust and Lead through Distributed Authority
Trust is key to the successful running of any organization. For a virtual organization with geographically dispersed teams, decision-making must be delegated and decentralized to function effectively.
From the outset, leaders at Impactical were comfortable distributing authority and allowing team members to make their own informed decisions, without wasting time chasing down information and approvals. Granting our Summer Associates autonomy, and allowing them to make their own decisions, not only increased the agility and momentum of the organization, it also drove a far steeper learning curve than most new joiners benefit from. Finding the balance between being accessible for support and guidance and empowering those around you is crucial in virtual success.
When it comes to building trust, an often-underrated piece of the puzzle is structure. A framework that can be invaluable for distributed teams is DACI, which stands for driver, approver, consulted, and informed. Team members involved in a decision will naturally play one of four roles: a person responsible for driving the work; an approver who gives the go-ahead; consultants who can provide expert opinions; and finally, the informed, who need to know about the outcome because it impacts the work that they do. Knowing decision roles upfront speeds up team interactions and avoids ambiguities that can cause delays or friction.
3. Build a Rhythm and Inject some Rigour
Building a team rhythm is critical. With team members working on different projects across different time zones and competing priorities, it is far too easy to get disconnected from each other and the standard work rhythm.
Being disciplined in creating a rhythm in the virtual world is crucial. Having regular meetings, preferably on the same day and time each week, allows people to build structure. Along with rhythm, rigour is also essential. This means establishing and sharing meeting agendas in advance, having clear agreements on communication approaches, and starting and finishing on time. When you have team members working in different time zones, you must not place all the time-zone burden on some team members. Instead, establish a regular rotation of meeting times to spread the load equitably.
When I refer to rigour, this does not mean the organization has to be slow and bureaucratic. By clarifying tasks and processes, not just goals and roles, virtual teams can overcome the inherent challenge of coordination that comes with not being co-located. As a manager or leader investing upfront in outlining the details of the task and the processes used to complete them, you enable your teams to focus on producing output. Completing “weekly reviews” will allow you to evaluate how things are going and identify process adjustments, training needs, and additional support. All of which will enable you to be a learning organization that is agile and effective.
4. Leverage Technology but Follow the Energy
We have all seen Zooms share price increase by over 600% between early 2020 and mid-September. Collaborative technology truly has enabled a shift to remote working for many. At Impactical, we heavily lean on collaborative technology to work across continents. But technology is not the answer, finding the right technology for you and your team is.
Part of building a remote team means understanding how your unit works best and how they like to engage. Collaborative tools such as Slack, Google docs, and Mural only work if your team works in them. Therefore, following your team’s energy and taking the time to understand how people like to engage, helps you know how best to leverage the hundreds of tools available.
At Impactical, our first step is to understand each other and our preferences. Using “user manuals,” we invest in building connections across the team through an open and honest conversation outlining how we work best. For example, email may work best for those on an 8 hour time difference, whilst for others, Slack may be the method of choice.
A template for the user manuals we use to build good working relationships with colleagues.
We cannot predict the future, but we know that the world of work has changed and will continue to adapt and evolve. Whether in person or online, in the UK, US, South America or beyond, community and connection will be more important than ever in collaborating successfully with clients and helping them to achieve purpose.
Footnotes
[1] Gartner, Coronavirus in Mind: Make Remote Work Successful! 5 March 2020
