remote teams

This video is about team management.

Of course there are a lot of things that you can do in connection with management, but maybe one of the most important ones is to work out how you’re going to communicate.

Some people prefer to write to each other in text. Some people prefer to telephone. Some people work asynchronously. Others prefer to talk to somebody at the same time and so on.

Of course when you have a remote team, people are living in different cultures and have different styles. Maybe in one culture people talk a bit more and another one a bit less.

Unless these things come out into the open early on, it can make the communication very difficult.

One way to get around this is to ask your team to put together some rules for communication:

If you have something urgent, do you do it by text or do you do it by telephone?;Or do you do it by email? And how quickly do you expect a response?

Try to be detailed in your plan, because your normal in your culture is most likely different from the culture of the others, but you may not notice the difference.

If you write down the details of how you are going to communicate, you have better chances of working well together. You should end up with a table which has details for different types of communication: problem solving, reporting, communicating with each other, team building and so on.

Maybe it highlights a preferred way of communicating (eg talk in emergencies) and goes into some more detail about for which tools to use or which time of day is preferred

I had a manager once who said “Don’t talk to me before 9 a.m. I’m really very busy trying to work out what to do with the day.”

So all of those details need to be captured, not in too much detail but enough detail to record in a table and get agreement from your team.

Review this communication plan from time to time. Adjust it if over or under-documented? Just use a little more detail than would have been traditional when the team used to all sit in one room.

Thanks very much

Dr. Deasún Ó Conchúir (pronounce) is a Collaboration Consultant at Scatterwork, which supports Project Solutions for Virtual Teams.

Email: deasun@gd.scatterwork.com

Tel: +41 79 692 4735 Talk to me

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This is about starting your remote team. The very first thing we do is to draft the charter.

We then authorize it using the authority of the sponsor. This means that we have a fixed starting point for the project which is very important. If this us not done, people tend to go around in circles and the negotiations always take time.

The next thing that we do is to bring the team together online, to explain the charter to them and get their feedback from it.

Then we take everybody in the team and set up a matrix where we ask everybody to make a one-to-one call to all the other people in the team, to introduce themselves.

They can do things such as looking at their facebook pages showing photographs of their children, using Street View to show where they live and similar personal things, to get a feeling of who the other person is.

Then the first assignment of the team is to draft the team communication rules.

If the team cannot agree for example which application is used to set up team meetings or which application is used for writing notes, then you tend to loose a lot of time just moving from one to the other.

We then hold another meeting with the team to review these rules together. When agreed, we go back to the sponsor and say “We have agreed to these rules. Can we write these into the Charter?”

If you follow this sequence, you have some chance of the team starting up quickly and reasonably under control.

I wish you good luck, Thank you.

Dr. Deasún Ó Conchúir (pronounce) is a Collaboration Consultant at Scatterwork, which supports Project Solutions for Virtual Teams.

Email: deasun@gd.scatterwork.com

Tel: +41 79 692 4735 Talk to me

LinkedIn: Connect with me

Sign-up: Newsletter

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This video is about the benefits of having a remote team.

I am going to divide this article into two sections: Benefits for the team and the benefits for yourself.

The benefits for the remote team include that work that doesn’t need to be done physically close can be done by anybody, anywhere. For example, anything that we are doing will have information: when things are available, what they cost, and so forth. All that sort of thing can be done remotely.

Then we have the physical side:
We might be moving house or shifting things or going on holiday or whatever it is that we do, but the non-physical side of it can really be done from anywhere and that gives us extra flexibility. Because it is from anywhere, we have a wider variety of people we can call on so we probably get a better match. And then the fact that these people are really only interacting with us for the work means that we can take them for quite small chunks of work that would not be feasible if we were working on site.

It would not be worth people’s while to travel a distance and sit down and so on unless the work is quite big, but when they are going to interact remotely then they can have much shorter bursts of activity.

Then the benefit for ourselves is that if we want to, we can be quite direct and just use our time for the work. Of course we all want to be friendly and chat to people and so forth but if we’re working remotely there’s less need for us to get involved in long chats after the weekend and long coffee breaks So there you have it.

I think that there are benefits for holding remote teams and these are some from my own experience, thank you.

Dr. Deasún Ó Conchúir (pronounce) is a Collaboration Consultant at Scatterwork, which supports Project Solutions for Virtual Teams.

Email: deasun@gd.scatterwork.com

Tel: +41 79 692 4735 Talk to me

LinkedIn: Connect with me

Sign-up: Newsletter

Recommend: Share and earn commission.