Managing a Remote or WFH Team for the First Time

Moving to remote work is not as simple as signing up for Zoom and continuing as normal. If you’re managing a remote or WFH team for the first time, you might run into some unanticipated issues.

I was the head of operations for a company that started with a flexible work-from-home/remote-work policy. Even with only 5 employees, I learned that you can’t just replicate office behavior with a remote team. Instead, you should consider all the valuable outcomes that come from being in-office, then make an effort to replace (or even improve) those outcomes. We managed to keep a tight, productive team as we scaled from 5 people in San Francisco to over 50 people with offices in New York, California, Texas, and Europe.

There are two important principles I learned:

Principle 1: Maximize Information Frequency & Fidelity

One criticism of remote teams is that they can not be as effective or as creative as in-person teams because their information transfer is lower. When a team is in-person, it is easy to exchange information at high frequency and at high fidelity. Team members can stop by each others' offices, and information is casually exchanged during lunch breaks. When you’re remote, this doesn’t naturally happen without some effort.

As the manager of a remote team, you should focus on maximizing the exchange of information by purposeful looking for avenues to increase both frequency and fidelity. With conscious effort, you can match or exceed the information transfer of in-person teams.

Principle 2: PRIORITIZE Engagement as much as Productivity

If you’ve only worked as an in-person team, you might take for granted all the social interactions and connections that automatically happen in an office. All that connectivity, camaraderie, and engagement gets lost without some effort to replicate it with a remote team. 

Maintaining employee engagement is as important as maintaining productivity. There is a floor for how disengaged an employee can be in the office. Even the most disaffected employees still get dressed and go to work and at least try to look productive. There is no floor for an employee working from home. Without engagement, an employee can become distracted, unproductive, and even depressed. 

Here are a few valuable processes to help you succeed at implanting the two principles above.

PRocess 1: Create a Schedule

If you’re confident in your team, you might consider letting everyone work their own hours. No matter how competent the team is, however, this creates unnecessary problems.

If your team is not on a schedule, it’s harder to know when someone will be accessible to respond to an immediate request. Delays in communication compound when people are not working at the same time, even between two people. 

If you have team members on different time zones, you may have different schedules to accommodate them, but you should aim to have scheduled overlap between everyone on your team. 

Knowing that other people are working and online also makes employees feel more like they’re on a team instead of feeling like they are one person working remotely. This can do a lot to prevent loneliness.

Consider some sort of roll-call process to make sure that people are online when they say they will be.

PRocess 2: Do one-on-one check-ins frequently

You don’t know how often team members will interact with each other, so you should check in with all your direct-reports frequently, at least once per day. This doesn't have to be a long meeting with a full status report. It could be a casual message or a short call.

Again, consider that remote work can get lonely. Hearing from you might be the only real conversation your employee has that day.

PRocess 3: Do team check-ins at least once a week

Checking in as a team is the best way to share important team information and it’s a great way to keep camaraderie alive. If you have a large team, consider doing an all-hands check-in at the beginning of the week and at the end of the week. Small teams can check in as a team every day. 

PRocess 4: Set up real time chat

Real-time chat products like Slack or Microsoft Teams are crucial. Email has too much friction for quick and light exchange. Too many calls become disruptive; you can’t get any work done if your day is full of Zoom calls.

I’ve noticed traditional business managers are adverse to chat. If you have been reluctant to adding chat to your team’s communication, you are doing yourself a great disservice.

Chat provides the ability to have non-disruptive, continuous conversation across your entire team. This greatly improves the frequency of information transfer.

If everyone is on chat during scheduled work hours, you can start to replicate some of the casual information transfer you find in offices. Your team members will have an additional incentive to stay at their desks working because they’ll have inbound chats they will need to respond to, or fun casual conversations they might want to participate in. 

Also, your employees are probably on iMessage or WhatsApp anyway, so moving to a company-managed platform allows you to better secure company information.

PRocess 5: Encourage casual banter

If you’re worried about productivity, you might have the impulse to limit casual chatter for your remote teams. While there is a limit to how much is appropriate, it's a great idea to encourage healthy amounts of chatter and banter. Casual conversation goes a long way for keeping employees engaged and feeling normal while working from home. 

Casual chatter happens in the office all day but people don’t seem to notice it because its a normal part of an office. When you move online, that chatter might not follow, so you can encourage casual conversation by initiating it yourself. If you have a chat service, set up rooms or channels specifically for casual chat. Consider scheduling some fun/casual calls at the end of the week where no real work is discussed. 

PRocess 6: Create Ceremonies & Rituals

It’s easy to lose track of time without the regular cadence of work. When working remotely, you no longer have to commute every Monday, you no longer have scheduled lunch at noon, and you no longer have Friday happy hour near your office. As a manager, you can help keep some semblance of a weekly cadence by creating ceremonies and rituals that anchor the week.

As discussed, weekly or daily check-ins help keep employees engaged. On top of standard check-ins, you should consider fun or casual ceremonies. One friend’s company does a weekly award ceremony for things like “funniest joke.” Some companies are doing scheduled meditations or an hour of scheduled downtime every day. Your creativity and company culture are the limit.

Importantly, you can use these scheduled ceremonies to engage with employees who are shy or reserved. Take the opportunity during these events to make everyone feel like a part of the team. 

PRocess 7: Pick up the phone

This one might sound weird, but I’ve learned that younger employees tend to hate unscheduled phone calls. I was like this myself at some point. Get your team (and yourself) comfortable with quick, unscheduled calls during work hours. It dramatically increases the rate of information transfer when you’re not waiting for people to check email, and it’s nice to know everyone is a short phone call away.

PRocess 8: Video calls > conference calls

If you can do a video call instead of a conference call, do it. Video calls provide a higher fidelity of information because you can see the people on your team emote. They also help with engagement because people will have a face to talk to.

Video calls should be mandatory cameras on. It’s very easy to half pay attention to a call when nobody can see you multitasking or playing video games instead of paying attention. Cameras force attention.

PRocess 9: Encourage Group hobbies to keep everyone sane and connected

I cannot overstate this: working remotely can be a lonely experience. Encouraging employees to participate in hobbies together can go a long way towards alleviating that loneliness and increasing the engagement your employees have to the organization. Consider creating chat groups or channels for interest-groups like cooking, video games, exercise, and cinema.

You should encourage your employees to find activities they can do in groups. Online video game sessions or live-streamed exercise classes are great for remote teams. Again, the limit is really one of creativity. I’ve seen remote Dungeons & Dragons sessions, remote cooking classes, and virtual marathons.

Pantheon & Remote Teams

Having a positive culture of mental and physical wellness can greatly improve employee engagement and retention. We purposefully designed Pantheon to be a fitness app you can use inside of the office and back at home. You can use Pantheon with your remote team just like you would in an office. Use Pantheon to encourage group exercise and meditation, or celebrate achievements in Pantheon during your weekly check-ins.