Making remote leadership work Part II: The minimum toolset

authors

Matthias Kainer

Contents

Before we get into the details of ensuring a smooth setup, we must understand which channels we will use for communication. In real life, a lot of what we do is informal. We manage by walking around, getting news at the coffee maker, and sometimes having slack time around meetings that we use to catch up with the other participants. A lot of this is chit-chat, and while sometimes regarded as non-productive, it’s an integral part of networking that allows for building a great organisation that go beyond the engagement in their teams to exploring and innovate by bringing in different perspectives into their daily work.

In meetings, we raise expectations on deliverables, ask for status and get asked to resolve blockers. I was using pen and paper to track meeting results and things to catch up on. I had a whiteboard in my office space to follow all the initiatives. It was great because by walking by, everybody could see what I was up to, and if a topic was of interest to anybody, they could directly discuss it.

When preparing something, we’d block ourselves a meeting room, put the slide deck on the screen, and collaborate on the result.

There were difficult talks, too. The ones where you bring in your people business partner to support you in the conversation. That needs a quiet office space with privacy for the next 90 minutes, and many visual cues from the body language of everyone involved to ensure this meeting ends satisfactorily for everyone involved.

Whenever I had an urgent topic with someone outside my area, I would just walk there, shamelessly ignoring any department borders or escalation routes to get my items done.

One-on-ones I had mostly by talking a walk outside - as long as there were only topics that didn’t require a room. On the other hand, team meetings were big get-togethers with spontaneous knowledge-sharing sessions and often involved cake.

How can this be replicated in a remote setup?

We have identified multiple areas in the last paragraphs – formal, outcome-oriented conversations, for instance, in meetings, short informal talks, work tracking and sharing on walls, collaborative creative work, and together time. So let’s start and see what tools we have.

Email

Oh, don’t we all love our overflowing inbox?

Email is the go-to for many¹ when it comes to remote conversations in the workplace. It’s a vital tool and the primary means of communication and collaboration among employees and external stakeholders such as clients, vendors, and partners. Email allows people to quickly and easily exchange information, documents, and other resources and to stay up-to-date on important matters.

Think of emails as the digital memos of the remote workplace. They’re great for communicating and managing tasks, schedules, and deadlines. For instance, imagine you’re working on a project with a team spread across the country. You can use emails to assign and track tasks, set up meetings and appointments, and coordinate work across departments and teams, all without needing to be in the same physical location.

In addition, email is often used for marketing and customer communication, as well as for keeping records and archiving important documents.

Email facilitates communication and collaboration within organisations and is essential for many business processes. It’s a widely-used and familiar communication tool, making it easy for employees to use. Plus, emails allow for asynchronous communication, meaning that employees can respond to messages at their convenience rather than having to be available for real-time communication. Emails can also be archived and searched, allowing easy access to critical information and past conversations. And emails can be easily shared with multiple people, making them an excellent tool for group communication and collaboration.

The saying, “This meeting could have been an email” nicely summarises all their strengths.

But emails are also somewhat formal and don’t work well for short, informal notes. They can also be easily misconstrued or misinterpreted and fail entirely to replace a casual catch-up at the coffee machine. Another thing that happens a lot is that different expectations on email usage can lead to information chaos - some expect that emails are answered right away. In contrast, others read them in a batch once or twice a day. Those different approaches to emails can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts.

And referring to the above statement that they can replace a meeting, email threads, on the other hand, can quickly decent into a lengthy flow of time-consuming misunderstandings that could have been solved in a 15 Minute Meeting. Or in a short conversation in our following tool.

Chat

Chat tools like Slack, Rocketchat, or Microsoft Teams are like the hallway radio of remote work communication. They’re real-time, fast-paced and allow you to communicate and collaborate with your team in short messages. Unlike email, chat messages are more interactive, immediate, and casual. You can quickly react, reducing the overall noise and making it more acceptable to write to bigger groups compared to emails.

Also, unlike emails, they are an excellent addition to creating social networks in your organisation, helping your team to form more quickly ². Those can be expanded into social activities, as you can create and join channels or teams organised around specific projects, teams, or topics. For example, in many organisations, groups about movies, music, memes or other cultural subjects have been created on their chat platform, connecting people inside the organisation in ways they didn’t even manage in an office-first setup. It acts like a virtual coffee machine where you can link with others outside your team and discuss similar interests.

In addition to messaging, these tools offer various features and integrations like video and audio conferencing, task management, and integration with tools like Google Drive and Trello. Combine this with bots, low code platforms, and other extensions, and you’ll soon come to use the messaging platform for alerts on urgent topics, a reminder on open tasks, and a trigger for actions.

It’s like a swiss army knife of communication, perfect for supporting a variety of workflows and activities within an organisation.

While they can enhance organisational communication and collaboration, they can also have drawbacks. One downside is that chat conversations can quickly become disorganised and cluttered, making it hard to follow a specific thread or find important information. Additionally, chat tools are often tied to one specific provider, making communicating with organisations using another software challenging. Furthermore, chat conversations can become overwhelming when too many people participate, making it tough for individual employees to contribute or be heard. Lastly, like emails, chat conversations can easily be misunderstood or misinterpreted, leading to conflicts or misunderstandings.

If used correctly, a chat platform will probably become the number one tool for aligning everything in your remote world. Still, sometimes you might just want to have something clarified quickly, and usually, that’s sometimes best done in a face-to-face conversation.

Video Calls

The written word can carry only so far. Much additional information is transported in a face-to-face conversation via non-verbal cues and immediate feedback, thus opening less room for misinterpretation. The closed we can get to that in a remote setup, at least until the Metaverse finally arrives, are video calls.

Video calls, through tools like Zoom, Skype or Google Meet, have become an essential part of remote work communication. They allow us to see and hear one another in real time, which can help to facilitate better communication and understanding. Video calls also enable people to share documents and other resources and to collaborate on tasks and projects.

Combining a video call with the sharing capabilities, which often allow you to work collaboratively on the presented screen, enables scenarios that significantly improve cooperative work. In software development, for instance, you can pair-develop code together on a single screen, following the cursor of one another and seeing the source code of the other in real time.

However, one of the biggest (and most obvious) benefits of video calls is the ability to see and hear the other person, which can be very useful in discussions that require more nuance or body language. For example, it’s much better to have a video call than a chat window when having one-on-one meetings.

Another example of how video calls can be used is for team workshops. During these workshops, having the video on can create a more personal and engaging experience, allowing people to see each other and establish a more human connection. Additionally, having the video on can help increase accountability, allowing people to see who is present and participating in the call. Furthermore, video calls can be recorded and transcribed, making it easy to share the session with a larger audience.

However, video calls have their limitations. They can be time-consuming and require coordination among participants, which can be challenging for teams with members in different time zones or schedules. Video call Fatigue is real, too ³. Additionally, video calls can be disruptive to employees working in a noisy or distracting environment, making it difficult for them to participate fully in the conversation. On top of that, video calls can sometimes be affected by technical issues such as poor internet connections or hardware problems, making it difficult to see or hear the other person.

Another disadvantage is that it can only partially replace real-world interaction. For instance, video calls can’t replace the feeling of a pat on the back or the energy of a room full of people. Additionally, video calls often lack the spontaneity of real-world interactions. It can be hard to spontaneously hop on a video call like you would drop by someone’s office for a quick catch-up.

Getting to the bottom of it, it’s a formal interaction, a replacement for a meeting, not a social interaction.

Examples for making Video Calls more social

Many of the beforementioned means of communication we were able to replace with their remote equivalents. However, in the article I linked in the introduction to this wall of text, there was a quote that we shouldn’t ignore:

We can also state with certainty that in a typical high-performance team, members are listening or speaking to the whole group only about half the time […]. The other half of the time members are engaging in one-on-one conversations, which are usually quite short. It may seem illogical that all those side exchanges contribute to better performance, rather than distract a team, but the data prove otherwise. The New Science of Building Great Teams, Alex “Sandy” Pentland ⁴

And a lack of casual quality time is more than just a team thing. It can be relevant to your entire organisation. We had a similar issue at ThoughtWorks, a software consultancy I worked for some years ago. As most of our consultants were distributed over multiple clients, keeping a good connection inside your own organisation was difficult. To tackle this, one of the developers implemented a little tool. Everyone could subscribe to a list, and the program would randomly choose another subscriber to be your 1o1 pair every month. That way, one could network inside the company without having a central coffee kitchen or canteen to meet. The randomness removed some parts of the formality of the video call, and the focus on non-work conversation helped to keep it casual.

We also implemented that in some of our teams once Covid started, helping the teams to maintain constant communication and a strong connection.

As long as you sit in front of the computer, however, you won’t fully get into a more casual spirit. A technique I have been using to improve that is to have walking 1o1s. Rather than having the call in front of your computer, take a mobile phone and take the conversation outside. It can even be a traditional phone call with headphones. When you walk together outdoors, it’s common not to look each other in the face all the time, and it’s just as fine during a call.

Being outside, and seeing the landscape fly by as you walk, can help tremendously to get into a more casual conversation and connect much better than you would in front of the computer. Those walking meetings are less focused than the ones in front of the screen, so choose them wisely.

The truth is that those casual conversations are essential for social connections and team building⁵, and a lack of them can be detrimental to organisations. By playing around with ideas to break out of the focused formal work-only cycle, you can help to replicate the benefits of casual interaction in a remote environment and improve collaboration and teamwork.

Work and process planning

Non-work conversations are essential, but the reasons we get to work are still, well, work-related. And to help each other organise assignments and achieve a common goal, we must know what others are doing. That’s where project management tools come to play.

Project management tools like Jira, Trello and others that allow users to create and track tasks, assign them to team members, and set deadlines were the standard PMOs toolkit long before remote work came up.

In addition to tracking tasks and projects, one can use project management tools to manage and automate various business processes, such as bug tracking, customer service, and IT support. Teams can customise them to fit an organisation’s specific needs and workflow and help them be more efficient and effective by providing a clear and organised way to manage work.

In my experience, many of the work planning tools work even better in a remote setup, as everyone is guaranteed to use them, lacking alternatives. In offices, on the other hand, teams often start tracking their work offline; digitalising this afterwards is complex and can lead to delayed visibility and errors.

You want to integrate them tightly with your other tools to get the most out of them. For instance, having a notification in your chat tool whenever a new bug comes in can improve the time-to-acknowledge as people don’t have to have the software open all the time and refresh the screen to see if something has changed.

Please don’t use them as your single knowledge base, though. The main constant on those platforms changes, and with the flow of issues and features getting pulled through your system, information documented there will be hard to find.

There are other ways, which depend on your knowledge and document management platform.

Knowledge and Document Platforms

When people stopped sending faxes, they used emails as a direct replacement and in the same way. They would attach the document to the email. Rather quickly, that led to the effect that I like to call the exploded distributed document problem. You started with a single document containing a single source of truth, but as you sent it to the others, each received a clone. They continue to work on the clone, creating new facts. As they don’t know what the others are typing, the realities diverge, and in the end, you will be faced with multiple documents that you have to merge manually, which can be hard or sometimes impossible. On top of that, you lose control of the file, and all the sensitive information there, as you can’t recall it.

Cloud-based document editing tools such as Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365, Zoho Workdrive and Dropbox Paper allow users to create, edit, and share documents in real-time. You don’t send the copy, you send a link to the original, and all participants work on the same instance. This makes it easy for teams to work on projects and documents and see each other’s changes and updates as they happen. Collaborative editing tools also typically offer features such as version control, which allows users to know the history of changes made to a document and to revert to earlier versions if needed.

In addition to facilitating collaboration, collaborative editing of documents in the cloud can also help to improve document management and organisation. Cloud-based tools allow users to easily store and access documents from anywhere and share them with others. While this was helpful in an on-site setup, it can be especially useful for distributed or remote teams, as it allows people to access and collaborate on documents regardless of location.

On top of that, you can audit who accessed the document and revoke access easily, giving you much more fine-grained control.

On top of it, you probably want a platform to organise those documents and make them accessible. Typical solutions for this are Microsofts Sharepoint or Atlassian Confluence. Moreover, those platforms often offer additional functionality, for instance, easy sharing, commenting, and liking of documents. Combined with a search, you can find what you need better. Even if, in reality, most of the search engines for those platforms still need to catch up from what we are accustomed to from a web search.

Also, you need more than those tools to live out your creativity. They lack the creative energy provided by a white wall, a pen and some sticky notes.

Your wall

We have yet to find a way to visualise our ideas. The blank canvas we can fill with drawings and sticky notes to collaborate and radiate thoughts. A platform that allows teams to collaborate and get creative. Finding a way to provide that is imperative, as remote work’s biggest negative impact is on creativity. ⁶

Digital whiteboard applications, such as Miro and Mural, are online collaboration tools allowing teams to brainstorm, ideate, and visualise ideas in real-time. These tools provide a virtual space for teams to collaborate and share ideas on projects and plans.

Digital whiteboards offer a range of features and tools that allow users to create and share visual content, such as mind maps, diagrams, and flowcharts. They also provide features such as real-time collaboration, which allows multiple people to work on the same whiteboard simultaneously and see each other’s changes and updates as they happen. Thus, they are used for various purposes, such as brainstorming, planning meetings, design reviews, and strategy sessions.

I use them for everything from 1o1s to team meetings, workshops, and ad-hoc planning.

Some of the upcoming articles will talk about some of the tools and templates I am using to collaborate remotely and how they can significantly support communication and collaboration within my teams and can be valuable for facilitating idea generation, planning, and problem-solving.

They are one of the most effective tools you can have. However, you will only make the most out of them if you use them together with the other tools above, like video calls for collaboration or document sharing to create visualised relations between documents.

Otherwise, they are like a whiteboard unbeknown to everyone in an office. They won’t radiate information, they won’t be seen, they won’t trigger ideas, nor will they be used.

Best of the rest

Many more tools can provide value in a remote context. Unfortunately, listing them all would make this long article even longer, so I just want to mention a few examples.

First, think about some tools that can support virtual well-being. Tools like Microsoft Viva, for example, can create automatic focus time blockers in advance in your calendar or ensure that emails you write outside working hours will arrive at their recipients during their working hours. This can help counter the stress of feeling as if they have to be always available.

Other tools help you connect different aspects of your working life, like mentessa, a tool that allows you to organise elements of your personal development, like Mentor/Mentee relations, in a pure remote setup.

There are many more of those tools out there. So, if you feel that the remote setup lacks “something”, try to get to the bottom of what this “something” really means and search for it. Likely, someone has already built a tool for that.

The occasional face time

Even in a remote work setup, it is essential to meet face-to-face occasionally for several reasons.

Occasional face-to-face meetings can improve morale and motivation among team members. As those meetings are naturally rare in a remote-first setup, people involved will be conscious of the time spent together. Often, the teams plan additional activities in the evening, allowing employees to socialise and build relationships with their colleagues, which can help improve their overall well-being and sense of belonging.

If those days are organised well, they can help improve team decision-making and problem-solving and provide opportunities for teams to discuss and brainstorm ideas quickly and effectively.

Think about your approach to those meetings, though. My preferred way is to meet as a group at regular intervals. This ensures that everybody can plan accordingly and have the time to come. Depending on your team size and the required travel budget, this can be for the planning of every iteration; it should be at least once a quarter for multiple teams working together in a related context (for instance, the same product). And it should be once per year for your organisation. Those occurrences are not supposed to be only meetings. Ideally, it would be best to have everyone together for a few days, maybe while hosting an event, for instance, quarterly planning, a hackathon or a conference. The goal is to give the people time to work and slack together, so make sure the schedule is manageable.

If you have budget responsibility, confirm that you plan and get the approval for the travel budget for your team.

Have we covered it all?

We were trying to find the equivalents for remote work in several areas: formal, outcome-oriented conversations, short informal talks, work tracking and sharing on walls, collaborative creative work, and together time. While we have found tools for all of them, the reality is more complicated. For example, if you have used email, you have been at the point where you were looking at your computer in frustration, wishing you could have a 5 minutes talk to solve this instead of writing lengthy email threads. Likewise, if you have used a chat tool, you will have sat there wondering why no one has replied to your message. Or why teams are using them less than you would expect. If you have used video conferencing, there will be a meeting where everyone has had their videos off, and the connection was so bad that the waste of time angered you.

And if you still need to, let me warn you that implementing each of those tools will come with high costs and many struggles.

However, using only some of them will reduce your capability to be productive in a remote setup. And, as a leader, you will have to lead. Master the tools, and lead by example. Learn how to facilitate chats for informal talks, and keep your video switched on in the conferencing software. Finally, stay interested in new ways of connecting people. At the beginning of 2023, the Metaverse is still searching for business adoption. Yet, it might be an exciting activity for your team if you have a VR Call together once in a while. And think about ways to use them in new patterns; for instance, as we had earlier, have a call while walking outside.

The latter part, how we can use them, is what the following articles will be about. So stay tuned and follow me on linkedin to get a notification when the next post is ready for you!