A Guide to Managing Remote Teams

The good old email and phone is just enough, providing you trust the people you work with (if you don't then this is on you as a manager an no tool will help you)

Ask to be cced on the the important problems/projects and have 1 team meeting for few hours Wednesday afternoon, so everyone can share not only work related stuff, but encourage the team to talk about Life, the Universe and Everything... Get to know the people who work with you, have all hands meeting for few days every year, go out for drinks ...

Have their backs, no netter what, even if you risk yours...

Those simple steps should be enough and have served me well over the years, because, really noting beats working form home...

"You should use a screwdriver for that," says the man. "It's more suited to the job, you will find it easier and you will be more productive as a result."

"Thank you," said the Builder, taking the screwdriver.

The builder then hits the screw as hard as he could with the handle. His results are not impressive. "I think I'll stick to the hammer," he says, throwing the screwdriver away.

But I’ve come to the realization after having the company switch to alternative means (slack) that these issues are its greatest strength. The universal annoyances of setting up a phone call means that people only reach out for it when it’s absolutely necessary. Instant messaging means that others will ping you for the slightest of things. And the expectations around instant message means that if I don’t respond within 15 minutes at most, the assumption is that I’m not actually working at the time.

And email works great for everything else that can be done asynchronously and requires a written record. And email has far fewer expectations about immediate responses (in fact, the spate of email is bad commentary over the past few years means that saying you check your email once an hour is not considered bad), being open means it fits into your workflow with the many clients and tools available for consuming it, and is immensely flexible. Good threading and search capabikities, the fact that each mail contains the entire discussion thread which you can then save as a file allows you to then incorporate that information in any alternative workflow using existing tools everyone is comfortable with.

Compare this to the new email replacements, which instead of fitting into your workflow require you to fit your workflow into them (because you’re limited to their clients to use them), and have expectations of not synchronous but almost immediate responses, and take up a lot of your time.

Some caveats though. If you regularly communicate with sales types, they love being on the phone and are willing to call you for anything. My way to avoid that is to basically insist on a calendar invite that I have accepted to take a phone call. The invite must contain a high level agenda so I can make a decision whether it’s worth taking the call, or can potentially be resolved in an email.

TLDR: I agree phone (not necessarily through phone calls, but usually through Skype or Google Hangouts) + email is easily my preferred universe of work communication tools.

>The good old email and phone is just enough

I know a lot of folks at Google and most of their (internal) communications go though email (Gmail). They absolutely hate it and understand that it's totally inadequate. They use Hangout extensively (I think it's called Meet now), but they understand that they are behind Slack or Trello as far as chat and project management goes. In order to collaborate effectively you need 1. Email 2. Videoconferencing 3. Shared workspace 4. Document management 5. CRM (if you work with clients) just to begin with. Designers need whiteboards and online proofing. Some folks need mind maps. Etc. Sorry, email and phone is not enough.