If your company is hiring a bunch of new remote workers or you are fresh to remote work, you might be wondering how to manage a distributed team. Project management and creating an agile team while remote definitely has a learning curve.
That is why we went out of our way to find real-life distributed managers and find out how they adapted to the new world of work. We interviewed Veronika Dohnalova and Jaroslav Tomek from the Czech Republic.
Here are their real-life strategies for managing a distributed team after a year and a half of remote work.
Jaroslav (Jara) is the manager of five lawyers and they have been communicating on a completely remote basis (with the occasional trip to the office) for about a year now.
He emphasized the avoidance of micromanagement and the importance of trust. He didn’t make this mistake himself, but some of his colleagues expressed their frustration with their manager's micromanaging.
“It was really tough after that to recover the relationships because people felt mistrusted,” said Jara. Looking over someone's shoulder isn’t something managers do constantly in the office and it isn’t necessary for distributed work either.
Employees are entering into an unfamiliar environment and if you start working in that field with a manager constantly checking everyone's work you will feel a lot more pressure than is necessary.
“It’s really exhausting to keep a finger on every task you assign.”Jara also mentioned. This behavior can result in managers getting overworked. Instead, he suggested having faith in your workers and only stepping in to monitor someone’s work if it’s absolutely necessary.
Veronika is a part of the HR staff and works closely with the managers from 8 different departments. She mentioned the struggles of information gaps in distributed teams.
“If you are sharing something at one team meeting, everyone may not be there. Then you forget to tell that person and they are missing that information. If you’re sitting in the office then they can just overhear the details or ask a colleague and everything is fine.”
Veronika makes an excellent point here about coordination. When your whole team works in the same location you don't have to coordinate any communication or include all the explicit details.
A lot more intention has to go into scheduling a video conference when you are part of a distributed workforce. You have to make clear the purpose of the virtual meeting, take notes during it, and check on the progress of all tasks mentioned.
Because of this extra effort, many details can be overlooked in favor of getting straight to the point. From emails to an instant message, you have to be say all the facts and figures or you may hurt the project in the long run.
Even if one employee might consider the details irrelevant, another might not understand the full context. “You have to set up the meeting, you have to check the people to see if they’re available for a phone call, you need to say what the meeting is for, it’s not as easy as shooting one sentence over the desk.”
What Veronika is saying here is that assumptions are the enemy of remote communication.
The Coronavirus has had a significant impact on individuals who have been forced into a new lifestyle. In the Czech Republic and in many places around the world, people have been dramatically affected by the switch to remote working, and by government regulations as well.
The Czech government locked down most schools and businesses since early fall 2020. People were stuck in their homes with nothing to do for the better part of six months. Both Veronika and Jara noticed the gradual and detrimental effects this had on their team’s psyche.
“For the past three or four months everyone is totally fed up with the situation and looking forward to meeting in the office once again,” said Jara.
Veronika’s team is having a similar experience “Some of them are really struggling. They have small children at home, they cannot focus, they are arguing with people at home, they have animals, it’s really a challenge.”
There is no cure for home office sickness. The best you can do as a manager and a team leader is to be available for your entire team to confide in. Try to monitor people’s working hours and deliverable to make sure they still have time for a healthy work-life balance.
Above all else, practice empathy and recognise it is a difficult time for everyone.
Coming from a hybrid distributed company, Veronika is a strong advocate of the distributed team format. She says “people from different continents mean you’ll always have ideas that are out-of-the-box.”
She recommends in the onboarding process of a new distributed team member to have them tell a bit about their themselves and home country.
She also feels that the flexibility that comes with remote work will be an expected benefit from prospective employees.
“I already received some messages from my friends saying ‘Hey we are forced to go to the office and we don’t like it. It’s really old school. Do you have some tips about companies that are more flexible?”
When he first switched to distributed work, Jara struggled with finding the right time frame for regular meetings with his team. “For example, I found out that every two weeks was the proper period for us to meet with each other.
When it was a shorter time, everyone was not really happy about work. After a longer time, it was hard for me to follow the tasks that everyone was working with.”
He went on to express that two weeks is not a universal suggestion. You should monitor your team and try a few different frequencies. Whichever time frame keeps everyone up to date and engaged is the best choice.
Both Jara and Veronika spoke highly of their companies efforts to maintain company culture and keep people updated with regular meetings.
At Jara’s company, the CEO records a personalized message (usually from his cellphone) every Friday afternoon for the entire company. Veronika’s company has a monthly town hall for the same purpose.
Meetings and messages like this can keep employees feeling appreciated and involved in the ongoings of the company. Even if your CEO doesn’t do it, consider mimicking this style of meeting with your team.
With Jara’s management schedule, he is the only person who keeps track of his time. “I’m really having a hard time keeping on track of when I should work and when I should lend that work off.”
The heads of his company give him specific tasks and deliverables and expect them by a deadline, no questions asked.
He has learned to distribute tasks more evenly between himself and his team. Otherwise, he would be up working until midnight four days a week, which he has done many times in the past.
By trusting his team more, he has freed up some necessary time for his personal life. He can then use this time to focus on his own well-being and not get caught up in everyone else's health and happiness.
Jara pointed out that knowing “how intensive your overview of the team members’ work needs to be” can save you a lot of time with managing. Knowing which employees work better independently and which flourish in a cooperative environment will also help with the distribution of tasks.
Veronika highlighted the value of knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each remote worker on your team:
“From my manager I always get a task that suits me. He knows if he gave me a task that is too detail-oriented then I would get lost in the specifics. Instead, he gives me tasks related to the big picture.”
You need to know your team even better in a distributed environment because a lot more trust is required when meeting physically isn’t an option.
Communication skills are great, but Jara specifically pointed out managers and all team members need to work on their ability to document. There should be one source of truth for processes and remote team members should contribute to it and point others to it if they have questions.
“This helps ensure that everyone is informed about their resources and developments, so they can then perform their work independently.”
Veronika's team took it a step further and every week the team leaders at her company have one on one meetings with each remote employee to debrief each other and catch up.
They then update their remote employee's progress in a central document and track each other's goals/tasks there.
By having a point of reference and always being available to help you can build a strong team within a distributed workforce. It’s also much more likely for virtual team members to perform their job effectively with no mistakes or setbacks.
Both Veronika and Jara had to buy most of their own home office equipment. Veronika’s company supplied her with a bit more, she received a headset and a monitor.
Jara was pretty disappointed with the average home office stipend his company provided, stating it was “barely enough to buy a decent monitor.”
Now, both of them have a complete home office setup that had to be paid from their pocket. Needless to say, they weren’t satisfied with their company’s support on this issue.
Additionally, neither of their companies uses a IT asset management provider but ships out equipment to distributed employees through internal departments and partnerships with E-Shops.
Jara’s company gave every employee an account with a budget on the Czech Republic’s largest e-shop. Veronika’s company has a department specifically dedicated to equipment distribution and works on a service request and approval basis.
Individuals in this department process request one by one. These models are very time-consuming for both the employees and the remote staff dedicated to them. The budget for employee supplies is sometimes cut to compensate for the cost of the systems.
With a home office equipment provider like Growrk, you can set a budget for your distributed employees and they will handle the orders and distribution for you.
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Now that we’ve gone over the strategies from these two experienced professionals, here are Jaroslav and Veronika’s most significant challenges from managing a distributed team.
The trends of home offices are here to stay. Both Veronika and Jara have seen specific changes in their companies that indicate they will not be returning to the way things once were.
In Veronika’s company, they were very open about their policy change. The previous hybrid model of three days in the office and two optional days at home will be replaced by two mandatory days in the office and three days working remotely.
The two days in the office will be preset by the manager so teams have two days of collaboration per week but she went on to say “we will never meet again as a whole company.”
At Jara’s company, the shift was a lot more sudden. His company rented several floors of office space in a building before the pandemic, and during the summer, they eliminated two floors from their lease.
While there haven’t been any official announcements about the work schedule following the pandemic, Jara says the current space they have accommodates only about 65% of the personnel “not everyone is going to have a chair to sit at.”
These trends aren’t unique to these two, we see businesses shifting to formats like this in industries worldwide. Jara says this embrace of a remote format could be related to its unexpected success:
“Everything worked, as usual, everything was very smooth regarding the tasks and so on and so forth. Under normal circumstances, no one would opt for that experiment. They just wouldn’t believe people would work as they do in the office.”
With these shifts, it makes sense to adjust your mentality and your lifestyle for the inevitable future. Embrace the changes and take the advice from this article and resources like it as a means to prepare yourself for the many years of distributed team management to come.
We would like to thank Veronika and Jaroslav for their excellent contributions and advice. Through their stories, we learned a lot about distributed team management. It’s always more meaningful to hear advice from a direct source than an overview of the industry as a whole.
Hopefully, their experience will aid you in managing your distributed team or working in a distributed environment. Remember that remote work is here to stay, so the more you adapt to the situation the more you’ll be prepared for the future of business.
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