Get to Work

Now that you’ve found the people and resources your team needs, put them to work. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to bring your team together around a mission and devise rules and routines to keep people collaborating effectively—even when you’re not there.

Launch the team

Every team needs a launch meeting, whether it’s a brand-new group or you’re just the brand-new leader. Get everyone together physically, just this once, if you can swing it. Face-to-face communication is still better than virtual when it comes to beginning relationships and developing trust. Eye contact and body language help kindle a sense of affinity and trust that will allow a group of strangers to work together before long-term bonds form. You’ll also have the chance to assess team dynamics and start setting some behavioral guidelines.

If you can’t arrange an in-person meeting, hold a virtual launch. Schedule a generous amount of time, and invite the team to introduce themselves (see the section “Build Rapport and Trust” later in this chapter). Even if you’re the only new person on the team, a launch is an opportunity for team members to reestablish their own bonds of friendship and perhaps learn something about each other.

Depending on the available time and the size of the team, consider assigning members to breakout chats to discuss specific aspects of the project or the culture and processes of the team itself. Then bring everyone back into a group chat to report on their discussions. This arrangement puts some structure on a meeting that can all too easily spiral into pointlessness, and it counteracts a natural tendency for everyone to assume the position of an audience member on group chats.

Create a shared vision

Group and breakout conversations during a launch meeting are also a great opportunity to work on the team’s sense of purpose. The development of the team’s purpose shouldn’t be a didactic presentation, but rather a collaborative conversation. So you’ll want to work with your team members to describe the purpose of your team in clear, compelling language. Even if your team is working toward a deliverable that has been well defined from the outside, it still has the opportunity to name its mission (Why are we doing this project?) and outline the particulars of the work (What are the details that will make it a success?). These answers matter for every team, but they’re especially important to remote workers, who must stave off isolation and stay motivated.

Build your shared vision with a conversation around a few key questions:

• What issue will this project address?

• What’s the desired outcome? What benefits will we realize?

• How will the virtual nature of our team allow us to accomplish these goals?

• What are this project’s high-level deliverables?

• What lies outside the scope of this project?

• What resources—financial, human, or otherwise—are at our disposal? How will we use these resources to support remote workers?

• What goals and constraints govern the project schedule? What virtual effects do we need to plan for (time zones, team member travel, and so forth)?

• What are the project’s key milestones?

• What major threats and opportunities must the project team plan for?

• What special issues does the geographic dispersion of the team present?

These conversations work best in person or on video chat, but you can use the same format in a discussion thread on your team site. Document or bookmark the discussion, and post to the team site a statement of the group’s final consensus. As the work progresses and distance chips away at the team’s cohesion, revisiting this document will bring everyone back to common ground.

Define common expectations

What does it look like to be a good team member in your group? How much can a team member do on their own before “taking the initiative” becomes “taking over the project”? How long can someone delay answering an e-mail before it starts to impede progress on the work? Is it ever acceptable to swear on a conference call?

Coordinating roles and responsibilities, not to mention plain old-fashioned etiquette, is challenging when your team isn’t colocated. The geographical and social distance provides much room for misunderstandings and mistrust to grow—which means, in turn, that your team is extra reliant on the details of task design and work processes to keep things running smoothly.

Start by simplifying the work as much as possible, ideally so that tasks are assigned to subgroups of two or three team members. For each task, clarify the work processes you’ll use to accomplish it: Who exactly does what, and when? If your work is cyclical or proceeds in clear phases, periodically conduct an after-action review both to evaluate how things are going and to identify process adjustments and training needs.

You’ll also set some ground rules for professional behavior. With a team working in branch offices, basements, and hotel lobbies, people may harbor wildly different ideas about what’s expected of them. Table 1 outlines some of the major topics you’ll want to cover (for tips about involving your team in this process, see the sidebar “What Input Should Your Team Have on Virtual Norms?”).

Align priorities

Your team fits into each member’s life in a different way. For ad hoc projects, you’re probably adding more work to a full plate. With freelancers, you’re competing for time with any number of other clients. Even stable teams with full-time members must balance different professional goals and personal commitments. Remote work makes all these dynamics more obscure, so before a project starts, meet one-on-one with your team members to learn about their current priorities and to discuss how these priorities align with the team’s shared vision and goals.

The kind of questions you ask will depend on your relationship with that person. For example, you can ask someone you directly supervise to show you how they allocate their time each week, but with a freelancer, you can’t be so inquisitive. Table 2 suggests questions you might ask your team members to elicit the details you need.

Ambition is a deeply personal thing, and you can’t persuade someone to adopt a new career goal to suit your team’s needs. Likewise, the boundaries your direct reports have set between their personal and professional lives may be nonnegotiable. For example, if someone gets chronic headaches when working overtime, they may always prioritize their health over your team’s schedule. So what can you do to align priorities?

• Can you redefine the team member’s role to better fit any professional goals or personal commitments?

• Can you redistribute tasks to better match the person’s availability?

• Can you pair the member with collaborators who will balance out any weaknesses?

• Can you rearrange the schedule to avoid panic periods or to take advantage of any synergies across work streams?

• If the person is assigned to multiple teams, can you work with their other supervisors to harmonize your directives?

The earlier you start these conversations, the more flexibility you’ll have to tie your people’s success and well-being to the work you share.

Build rapport and trust

On traditional teams, the sense of connectedness develops naturally in the interstices of office life—over lunch, in the elevator, during break time, or in pre-meeting chats. But virtual teams lack these casual encounters, so you must make a concerted effort to build rapport and trust.

Fostering team spirit doesn’t have to be a big production: Clarify norms, adopt a small set of routines, and stick to them. Use the following checklist as a menu of options, and be realistic in your selections. It’s better to do one or two things reliably than start half a dozen you can’t keep up with.

Hold video tours. Ask new hires to show each other around their workspaces. This practice allows colleagues to form mental images of one another when they’re communicating later by e-mail, phone, or text message.

Share highlights and lowlights. At the beginning or end of a meeting, ask each team member to talk about one highlight and one lowlight from their workweek.

Institute personal or professional check-ins. Invite your team members to give a quick update about themselves at the beginning of each team meeting. Gently enforce the norm that these updates should be brief, but don’t discourage personal remarks. If, for example, someone is struggling with an illness in the family, that’s good for the team to know.

Gather for Friday afternoon congrats calls. This is not very productive for many people anyway, so use it to celebrate the week’s accomplishments. Bonus if everyone coordinates consuming a snack or drink during this time.

Establish “water cooler” chats. Schedule regular five-minute check-ins a couple times a week, just to catch up. Set up a forum devoted to this sort of casual chat on your team site or any other shared communication channel.

Ban multitasking. Set a clear expectation that everyone should be mentally present and engaged during meetings, and follow up by frequently calling on people to share their thoughts. If you’re conducting meetings over the phone or by group chat, try switching to video chats. If you know that someone is multitasking—you’re getting e-mails from them during a conference call—gently and humorously call them out.

Curb mute-button usage. Background noise brings humanity into an otherwise sterile conversation—let the barking dog or crying baby be a moment of shared humor or sympathy for your team.

Appoint someone the team’s truth teller. Add a bit of levity to meetings by turning to the Yoda of the day at critical points during the meeting and ask, “So, what’s going on here that nobody’s talking about?”

Reward naysayers. Pushing back against consensus is hard to do over video or on the phone, so give warm, generous praise to team members who aren’t afraid to speak their minds. When everyone appears to be in agreement on an issue, listen for whoever is not talking, and solicit this member as a devil’s advocate.

Keep people engaged

Your virtual water-cooler chats created beautiful and trusting relationships across the team. But how can you mobilize those social bonds to keep people engaged in, and motivated about, the work at hand?

Foster shared leadership. Assign special projects that team members can share during a meeting, or invite them to run a virtual team-building exercise, such as the weekly highlight-lowlight routine described earlier. As part of your plan to get the right people on the team, ask members to coach one another in their areas of expertise (refer back to your completed team surveys).

Recognize and praise collaborative behavior when you see it. If several people worked together to solve a problem, send an e-mail to the entire team expressing your appreciation and explaining how the work has helped the team overall.

Encourage people to acknowledge each other’s work. Praise people for calling out each other’s successes. Let them know that recognizing collaboration in others makes them look good, too. Develop norms for how members communicate that they “see” each other’s work, and give feedback wherever possible. Even a bland “Thanks,” “Nice,” or “I’m using this right now” goes a long way. Sharing genuine praise and appreciation is a prerequisite to offering comments that might be more critical: Research suggests the right balance is 10 to 1. Foster candor by supplying team members with the language for criticism, such as “I might suggest . . . ” or “Think about this.”

Play games. Games provide a low-stakes, fun environment in which team members practice pooling knowledge and coordinating for a common goal. This approach also helps members learn how other members think and act in an accelerated time frame and helps people iterate strategies for working together. For long-standing teams with a gamer culture, consider online role-playing games (RPGs) such as World of Warcraft, where team members talk as they play. If RPGs don’t fit your team culture, look at mobile multi player games such as online Scrabble. Even sharing music or book recommendations gives people a chance to explore each other’s thinking and connect on a personal level. Team-building activities can feel cheesy—it’s the nature of the beast—so encourage people to have a sense of humor about them: “It’s East Coast versus West Coast in Scrabble this week!”

Build a team with rhythm. Work in a physical office has a natural tempo: You see colleagues in predictable places at predictable times, you do certain kinds of work at the same time every day, you attend meetings with familiar people in familiar rooms. When some or all the members of a team are working remotely, it’s all too easy to feel disconnected without these patterns. One antidote is to be disciplined in creating and enforcing routines in virtual team work. Hold regular meetings, ideally on the same day and at the same time each week, starting and finishing on time. Make the meeting agendas routine where possible, and share them ahead of time. Good meeting practice matters more when you have a dispersed team, because following the rules helps create those shared expectations and experiences. Establish regular check-ins by e-mail or group message: an end-of-week e-mail update, or a two p.m. “How’s it going?” text.

These practices depend on having a nimble and well-adapted communications strategy. Next, we’ll explore the major challenges in this realm.