One thing we do is keep a slack channel for announcements only. We require everyone to acknowledge they’ve read and understood said announcements by adding an emoji response. Then you can follow up with anyone who fails to respond. (And discuss in 1-1s with anyone who makes a habit of failing to respond.)
Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
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Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
#12I think a distributed team,where individual members of the team are geographically distributed, is designed to fail. Sure you could accomplish some goals but the inertia is working against you. Such teams will be always outperformed by co-located teams. A better approach would be to have distributed teams where the teams are cohesive unit with co-located members. Each team has local autonomy and a central mandate. Th…
> I think a distributed team,where individual members of the team are geographically distributed, is designed to fail. Sure you could accomplish some goals but the inertia is working against you. Such teams will be always outperformed by co-located teams.
Provide examples/data for this or I cant take this comment seriously.
As someone who has worked on successful fully remote teams for 6.5 years I couldnt disagree more. My current team is mostly remote and moves Billions of dollars, delivers features at a rapid pace. It comes down to select the right team members, having centralized places of communication and empowering each member with the autonomy and ability to contribute no matter where they sit.
The "butt in seats mentality" is very outdated imo. How many hours are wasted commuting?
Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
#13You might need to prune and/or curate your slack channels better.
For major projects/initiatives we use a new ephemeral slack channel for the duration of the project. All chat comms about the project are stored there. The project roadmap is kept in google docs with tickets in jira.
We have 12 teams and 150 people and prob 50+ channels.
Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
#14basecamp?
I'll second checking out Basecamp. We use both Slack and Basecamp. ZenDesk for customer issues. Everything tied together, both Slack and Basecamp have decent tools to integrate so you get alerts where you need them. Basecamp has a nice set of tools for projects and planning. I can't say I LOVE it (and I don't hate it), but I do love their support people. You could probably get away with just using Basecamp as well. We did for quite a long time.
Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
#15Tools that have worked in the past for me:
- Confluence for long lived documents
- JIRA for time boxed groupings of work.
- Slack for real time comm if anything arises.
- "Culture" and Process Living Document
I ran a team of about 25 in the past and followed the following agile principles to help with alignment: - retrospectives - "sprints" (preference on the 3-4 week range) - Sprint Review
Alignment, while tricky, isn't all that hard so long as processes are evolving from retrospectives and you have a single source of truth for long form documentation.
Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
#16From a tools/infrastructure support perspective, standardizing on tools and clearly declaring and assigning a single tool for each function. Clearly ask people to pitch in to adhere to this. Set clear standards for yourselves.
From a people perspective, clearly defining goals and constantly asking clarity questions to gauge if there is alignment is the only real way. Also if you notice people are not aligned but they think they are, declare that you're not sure they're aligned. They'll hash it out themselves.
It also helps for people to declare when they're unavailable in something like a slack channel. Finding out someone is not there when you expect the to be is very jarring/frustrating.
Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
#17I think a distributed team,where individual members of the team are geographically distributed, is designed to fail. Sure you could accomplish some goals but the inertia is working against you. Such teams will be always outperformed by co-located teams. A better approach would be to have distributed teams where the teams are cohesive unit with co-located members. Each team has local autonomy and a central mandate. Th…
I used to strongly agree, until I worked on a successful distributed team.
Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
#18I think a distributed team,where individual members of the team are geographically distributed, is designed to fail. Sure you could accomplish some goals but the inertia is working against you. Such teams will be always outperformed by co-located teams. A better approach would be to have distributed teams where the teams are cohesive unit with co-located members. Each team has local autonomy and a central mandate. Th…
There are several fully remote companies collectively generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. To require physical colocation is a failure to properly manage, as well as delegate authority and responsibility. > Such teams will be always outperformed by co-located teams. Could you share data to back this assertion up?
I agree with you.
For me, I've been fully remote for many years and was primarily remote for a few years prior to that.
Companies I've been at where there is no flexibility whatsoever typically suffer from poor management or are the type of work place where there are pieces of hardware or other resources one can not really work on remotely.
One of the primary benefits for me when initially working remotely was the time saving that resulted not having to spend 1.5-2.5 hours a day in the car.
Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
#19Usually, one manager/lead take care of 3-7 people. So rather than making everyone on the same page, I'd spend more time with these leads and making sure that you guys are on the same page, and it will percolate down to the rest of the team. On top of that, well written document with clear goals and high-level strategies help to re-inforce it amongst everyone, but imho it should still be the mid-level manager's job to communicate in 1:1 and in other ways to their team.
Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?
#20The guys behind Todoist have a tool to solve this. I haven't tried it myself: https://twist.com/?lang=en