What are the opportunities that distributed work presents?
Increase the talent pool available to your organization – the more flexible a company is with employee location, the broader the talent pool they can draw from. Hiring for a distributed org creates additional opportunities to hire skilled candidates.
Staffing around the clock – this is common in software development, but any team thinking strategically can carve out a meaningful advantage by staffing around the clock—provided they also build the necessary practices to support this model.
Rethinking and retooling your processes and culture – operating a distributed org challenges companies in ways that can be healthy and productive, to improve the company’s operating system. This is particularly the case in areas such as internal communications, swim lanes, and progress reporting.
Distributed teams often still need localized capabilities – if you want to operate globally, you’ll typically also need to staff certain capabilities locally due to time zone, language support, or go-to-market considerations.
What are the challenges that distributed work presents?
Back-end global operations challenges – having workers in different jurisdictions presents all kinds of compliance challenges. The good news is, there have never been more third parties tools to outsource the hassle for distributed orgs in areas such as finance, tax and HR.
Front-end challenges:
- Productivity – how do you ensure everyone has access to the tools and information needed to do their job well?
- Knowledge management – how do you ensure everyone has relatively low friction access to the information they need to do their job and feel part of the company?
- Belonging and experience – even those with access to all of the practical information can feel like they’re an afterthought at the company because of the communications and coordination challenges of distributed work. How do you make sure employees feel engaged?
- Retention – how do you keep great employees when it might not be as easy to foster belonging, loyalty, and a positive employee experience?
- Coordination – if you have a team in the three major time zone buckets (Americas, EMEA, and APAC), there isn’t a time on the clock for a meeting that doesn’t require some team to dial in during atypical hours. How do you make sure everyone stays on the same page?
What kind of companies or teams is distributed work right for (and not right for)?
Distributed staffing models are appropriate for a lot of teams – most work can be done well in a distributed setup, and distributed work is effective for a broader range of companies than any of us had thought a few years ago.
A few exceptions – distributed setups are more difficult for:
- Anyone in the business of making physical goods – some functions of a hardware business work can be highly distributed, but those related to manufacturing can’t.
- Organizations that rely on a high ratio of early-career talent – for workers early in their careers, the opportunity to work in-person can help develop skills, camaraderie, and loyalty. Yet even for this worker profile, it’s possible to hire, onboard, and grow individuals in a remote context if you make the right investments.
- Organizations that are pre-product-market fit – you might want a (mostly) in-person team while figuring out what your product is and how to get the market to understand it.
- If you’re in unfamiliar territory, in-person may be more important – teams that are doing fundamentally new things at their company (like engineering and product design) can benefit from being physically together. This is not incompatible with remote work per se—but it’s important to think about when and how often you need certain groups to come together in-person.
Ask what the change philosophy/maturity level of the team is – if the controls, processes, and tools of the team are relatively mature, it will be easier for the team to be distributed. If these processes and norms are less mature, you should harden them before choosing to “go remote” or further distributing your workforce.
What goals might you have for engagement on a distributed team? How do you measure engagement for a distributed team?
The engagement goals for all distributed teams should include:
- Focus – a clear, customer-oriented mission in which progress can be measured.
- Purpose – a clear sense that one’s work matters for our customers or personally—ideally both.
- Belonging – a feeling of being seen and recognized for who you are, as part of a broader team.
Measure workforce sentiment with an engagement survey (or similar diagnostic) – ask at least 1 question that gets at each of these qualities. Then, create an index that you can segment by team tenure, demographics, and location to see where you’re doing well and where there are gaps.
Supplement this survey with other relevant inputs – for example, the percentage of the company that has quarterly individual performance goals is an operational metric that helps measure the extent to which each person has a clear, measurable set of outcomes for which they’re accountable.
How do you measure productivity for a distributed team?
Set goals (it can be more art than science) – measuring productivity for a salesforce or customer support group is more standardized than measuring engineering-product-design squad productivity. For some teams, you might have to try and test goals and deliverables to measure from each unit of the team. Be upfront with your team about the maturity level of a given set of metrics and targets. This type of transparency can generate important feedback, particularly in places where you’re still figuring out what success looks like and how to measure it.
Managers need to be transparent – explain why you use your KPIs and why the targets are where they are. Inevitably goals will shift and teams can become frustrated with constant goal-setting. You can’t explain it all away, but you can control being clear, transparent, and humble.
If you’re in unfamiliar territory, create an interim method of evaluation – a tentative metric provides something for workers to measure themselves against and you can adjust as needed. Create psychological safety for people to say ‘I don’t think this is going well.’ If you’re a manager of the team and you don’t know where to put the bar, say so. Then, set goals and be flexible moving forward.
Don’t be afraid to set high goals – if you set high goals, you’ll have more misses but that doesn’t mean your team isn’t more productive. Just be sure to be clear about the consequences of missing a goal in this context.
What is “quiet quitting” and how can you identify and prevent it?
Quiet quitting is when an employee remains at a company and does the bare minimum, but isn’t 100% engaged – this term is new but not it’s not a new phenomenon. It can be due to burnout, lack of connection to the work, or a breach in relationship with a manager.
Quiet quitting can be symptomatic of a goal-setting issue – each person has to be pointed at something that matters. Companies often fail to provide the context for focus that’s necessary to create employee engagement. Most of us are motivated by having a clear sense of what we’re accountable for and a way to understand how well we’re doing against that.
Identification is tricky but starts with defining good performance – if you don’t have a bar for strong performance, you don’t have a chance. Trying to manage performance by activity, e.g. via at Slack volume, idle time, or keyboard tracking is a dubious, low-trust way to manage performance.
Preventative measures:
- Goal-setting that incentivizes performance above the bare minimum – it’s easiest with sales: sales above quota are rewarded with a commission. In other functions, you might offer career growth and other opportunities to high-performers, or bonuses.
- Use stay interviews to identify disengagement – stay interviews are conversations with employees )who haven’t put in notice) to learn what they like and dislike about their role, aimed at better understanding what might lead them to stay with you. Use these to receive feedback on your company’s engines of engagement. Ground the conversation in candor and ask them what gives them energy in their work, and how they see their trajectory and provide space for feedback. If you find out they’re interviewing for a new job, it’s still useful. The employee has to know that what’s said will be used to support them and won’t be used against them.
- Align on performance standards and measurement – employees and managers need to be aligned on what excellence looks like and how you’re going to measure someone’s gap to that. Without this, a lack of focus drives disengagement.
Quiet quitting isn’t only a problem in a distributed set-up – there were plenty of people in-person long before Covid who were sitting at their desks until the end of the day, disengaged from their work.
Should you deploy keystroke or productivity monitoring tools? What are the potential unintended consequences?
In general, don’t use productivity monitoring tools to evaluate employees – you risk your employees’ trust, and you might end up with incentives for unproductive behaviors (e.g., mouse jigglers). You want to communicate directly and indirectly that people are capable of greatness and given the right context, they will make great decisions and be honest and trustworthy.
These tools can be interesting if they provide real value to employees – the intrusion has to be justified with an obvious value to the worker’s performance and growth. And you need to be overwhelmingly transparent about what data is collected, and how it is and isn’t used. There has to be a very credible reason to deploy these. If your workers have to squint to see the value of a “tracking” mechanism, then you haven’t earned the right to deploy it.
How can you drive engagement through all-company communication?
Embed the mission and progress of the company into your rituals – most companies have some type of all-company format or forum, use these to habitually reinforce your company’s mission and progress. It’s an opportunity for storytelling and powerful asynchronous communications.
Two sets of voices are really important to convey:
- Customers – everything flows from the customer. Make sure you hand the mic to the customer so everyone hears from them. It helps anchor people in why they’re working in the first place. It’s one of the strongest links between focus and purpose.
- Horizontal voices from across the company – communication about mission and results should come from a variety of employees, not just leadership. This is a meaningful way to reflect demographic diversity and reinforce your desired message. In short: Diversify and expand the range of voices that communicate core company messages.
How can you help make internal communications and meetings work for a distributed or global team?
Alternating timing of core meetings – make sure that meeting times change so that no time zone or group is overburdened by frequent late-night or early morning meetings.
Employ a range of recording features – find tooling to make information available to people through the mediums that work best for them (i.e., rewindable, transcribed, searchable, etc.).
Reduce your use of idioms – try to be conscious about the language you use so that it can be easily understood by teams around the globe and from different cultural backgrounds.
Check for understanding after important communications – if you update the company strategy, and there are a couple of things you want people to think, feel, or do, how do you ensure the message was absorbed? Few companies have mastered micro-feedback rituals to make sure understanding occurs. It could be a quick pulse survey through Slack after the all-hands where employees get to tell you whether you achieved what you hoped.
How can you handle between-meeting communication?
Empower the use of Slack for impromptu communication – it’s one click and in a lot of ways, it can be faster than taking an elevator, going up three floors, and stopping in.
Run a transparent schedule – sometimes a supervisor will be in meetings and you don’t want to bother them; that’s true no matter the setup. If leaders have a public calendar, you can see they’re busy and you can easily put time on the calendar.
What role can technology play in your distributed team? What tools should you look to use?
Tooling matters – important tooling decisions need to be made pretty early on. Ask what you’re solving for on these dimensions:
- Access – how easy is it to get access to information no matter where you are, or what time zone you’re on?
- Engagement – is this communication something that is pulling you in to read, watch, or listen?
- Accessibility – can I consume these in ways that are relevant to my abilities and how I’m wired?
Common tech tools:
Intranet – a formal repository of company information. Some are more engaging than others. You can embed video, everything can be commented on. Some newer intranet tools are interesting and multi-modal.
Blogging tool – Zapier has what amounts to an internal ‘Reddit’. The bar to publish is lower than in formal forums. It’s searchable and archivable and some of our best innovations come from posts on it—partly because we’ve allowed for asynchronous and democratic communication.
Messaging tool – I still think there’s no substitute for Slack. Whatever you choose, be clear about how it should be used. Is it for all communications? Is it just for certain types of communication, or is it for all short-form communications?
Conferencing tool – I like Slack’s huddle feature because it’s one click on the button next to their name and allows for a call without video to give the eyes a little break. Of course, video conferencing tools like Zoom also have a place.
Documentation tool – used for long-form communication. A big flaw with messaging tools like Slack is the lack of inline commendable abilities or editable or suggestible.
How do you deal with a distributed team where some members are in the office and others are remote?
Foster belonging for the remote team – start with empathy–you’ll need to be intentional about ensuring the remote team feels a sense of belonging with the company.
Document important in-office conversations for the remote team – if you run into someone in the hall and come to an impromptu decision, make sure you document and report it to the remote team, repeating the important elements of the conversation. This practice costs nothing and helps with belonging and knowledge management.
Be really clear about the implications of working from home – if it’s going to be hard to get promoted as a remote worker, then you need to communicate that to the employee. You do not have to promise things that you can’t deliver. You just have to be really clear about what is and what isn’t possible—some people will gladly trade off a promotion to work at home.
How should you onboard new employees into a distributed workplace?
Make the onboarding experience reflect your mission, customers, and culture – new hires should hear from the CEO and customers in the first couple of weeks. You can ask them to actually use the product, or see a customer support interaction to get to know the customer. For some companies, this can be a really good reflection of the culture and a great context builder.
Use a new-hire buddy system – folks can have someone with them for their first 90 days. You can feed them prompts via Slack to nudge them to chat about the right topics at the right times: “You just finished 30 days, here are some things you may want to talk about.” It’s bite-sized and automated, but personal.
Remote training allows you to modularize training – this can be really beneficial—you can check for understanding, use diagnostics, and get feedback groups. For training that requires live conversations, you can add live sessions via Zoom.
Consider investing to get new grads together in-person – there’s a place for in-person experiences and this is one of them. This is a big transitional moment for a young person and you want it to be great because they could’ve gone somewhere else.
What are the most important pieces to get right?
Be clear about your operating model and align on purpose – this is simple to say but hard to do. Be clear about your model (e.g. remote, hybrid, in-person) and why it’s right for your company. If you’re not coherent and aligned on your model, people will pick up on it and experience that lack of clarity. Luckily, the opposite is also true.
Be transparent – remote work requires a lot of openness. Be clear about how employee goals are tied to company and customer outcomes, invest in lots of accessible documentation, be transparent about calendaring and when team members are available to connect. And if you’re operating a hybrid company, be clear about any career growth implications of being a remote worker.
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