How to manage content production with remote teams
A comprehensive guide on how to organize and manage content production when your team is scattered around the globe
Now is the time when you have to start hiring remotely if you haven’t done so yet. Numerous studies show that in 2022 more than half of the professionals from highly developed countries will work remotely. Even more surprising stats: around 25% of developers from Eastern Europe who answered StackOverflow’s survey said they already work remotely full-time.
The first thing that comes to mind when we think of remote jobs is the benefits for the employee. They save time and money commuting to work, spend more time with their families, and overall have a better work-life balance than those working from an office.
Secondly, an important question arises “How to manage remote teams effectively?” Let’s figure it out together.
But first, let’s take a look at what employers gain when hiring remote teams:
And that are just some advantages companies that hire remote marketing teams enjoy.
But, of course, it wouldn’t be fair not to mention the cons of distributed teams and the things that often become deal breakers.
Nevertheless, one thing you should bear in mind is that all of these obstacles you might have already encountered are not things that can’t be resolved.
Just look at the list of companies who acknowledge working with remote or distributed teams as a part of their success:
Previously 37signals, aka the guys behind Ruby on Rails, which was first designed for internal use for developing their most successful web applications such as Basecamp, Campfire, and Highrise. They have also written two books that became New York Times bestsellers: Rework and Remote: Office Not Required. Both focus on productivity hacks and remote team management techniques and are good for further reading.
Last year, Matt Mullenweg, the company’s CEO that brought WordPress into this beautiful world, announced that Automattic is shutting down its San Francisco office. Why? Because no one was using it anyway, so they figured they can find better ways to put the money to use. Out of 500+ employees working on Automattic’s products from 50 different countries around the world, less than 10% live in San Francisco, where their abandoned 14,250-square-foot office was located. Here’s an awesome map with all the Automatticians’ locations across the globe:
Live smarter, not harder is the core value of the team responsible for one of the best social media management tools that allow digital marketers to handle all their social profiles in one place. What’s funny is that Buffer started out and grew further as a fully-remote workplace pretty much by accident. At the same time as they received their first major funding of $400 000, another defining thing happened to Buffer’s co-founders. Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich had their American visas expire and decided to move to a few different locations. The desire to hire a remarkable team along the way brought them 70 employees working from all over the world and an amazing philosophy that encourages the nomadic spirit of Buffer.
Best known as a marketplace where the creative crowd can buy and sell their digital creations, e.g., WordPress design themes, video production templates and audio jingles, etc. Envato actually acknowledges not all of the professionals who are the right fit for the company are carved out for entirely remote work. So, while they allow and encourage their staff to work wherever it feels best, they also are totally okay with working from their hipster headquarters in Melbourne. Another benefit coming from hiring people across the globe is having a distributed support team able to work flexible schedules to ensure a 24/7 online presence valuable to their global audience.
So how to remotely manage staff and do it effectively?
How do you pretend you don’t know your colleague is not wearing pants while face-timing you from their home office across the oceans? Should you worry when you see them posting Instagram updates instead of getting some work done? Does in-bed work affect their productivity in a negative way? And most importantly, should you feel embarrassed in front of your partners when telling them you don’t have an office and have never seen any of your colleagues in person?
Here’s our attempt to answer all these questions in 10 simple tips on hiring and managing remote teams.
Not everybody’s cut out for remote teams that require discipline and self-awareness.
And while recruiting is always painful, it gets only trickier when you’re hiring remotely and sometimes don’t even get to meet the person you intend to work with.
When you’re hiring for a remote team, you have to be looking for disciplined self-managers who have no trouble making their own agenda and always know what to work on and what their priorities are.
Some of the tells that will help you distinguish your people from no-go candidates are:
In a best-case scenario, if you want to hire a remote development team (or a team in any other field, in fact), you’d better have a budget to hire an international recruitment agency or a consultant. Local recruiters work even better, but you’d either have to know where exactly your next superstar lives or put in additional efforts to find several HR contractors and establish partnerships with them.
A less obvious option is to consider hiring a qualified freelance professional. Not everyone realizes that partnerships with freelancers can be full-time and long term too. Our only suggestion: if, for some reason, you don’t feel like working with us or looking for freelancers other than developers, stick to the platforms that provide vetted or pre-screened candidates. For more information about similar freelance platforms, we suggest reading this review.
Get used to this thought: your company has a culture. Even if it’s just you and your culture is “a gluten-free workspace.”
Here’s a basic checklist for a successful onboarding:
This is your answer to the question, “How to successfully manage remote teams”. You have to understand that while your remote team members will always have ongoing communication, the person managing a team always has to make out time for both group meetings and one-on-one chats.
You will need to experiment with how frequent such meetings should be. You may even discover that different people require custom approaches and while you need to have daily checkpoints with your developers, the SEO team will require your attention once a month. The optimum frequency for one-on-ones, though, is often either once a week, or once in two weeks.
Here’s how to make the most out of your checkpoints:
Report summary + Planning. Both managers and doers have to know they are on the same page. Reports on what has been done over the period of time in comparison to what has been planned help to determine weak spots faster and find a solution on how to avoid them in future.
KPIs. Everything needs to be measured somehow. KPIs are a managers’ litmus test. You see an index going down – you know something’s off.
Honest feedback should be coming from both sides. Building a culture in which asking your colleagues whether they know something that could help you grow professionally or personally is a routine isn’t easy. But it’s worth the effort. And remember:
criticism should always be polite, delivered at an appropriate time, and never emotional.
Retrospectives. Bring up some things that have happened since your last checkpoint. Highlight the best and worst parts, go over the decisions and intentions behind them, and discuss what you could have done differently and how that would have affected the situation. Because the only thing you should never look back at is your high school crush.
If you want your team to be honest and open, you must start with yourself. The more they know about overall strategies and decisions made on top, the better. Such an attitude works exceptionally well for startups. In the beginning, every company’s biggest struggle is finding efficient and scalable ways to bring more value to the world. You never know which idea will bring you the best result. Listen to everyone and test out the craziest theories.
It’s a slippery slope not to share the big picture with your colleagues. Unless you want them to consider the challenges you face to be someone else’s problem, not their own.
Trust, on the other hand, is not built overnight. It’s a simple science and something we, as human beings, can’t resist. Our reptile brain is never really asleep, telling us to trust the environments and people we’re most familiar with.
This part can be more delicate with remote teams. Your colleagues are deprived of spontaneous social interactions: cooler chats, group lunches, small talk. In other words, all those distracting office privileges on-site workers have. However, the lack of interactions can do damage as well. That’s why you have to ensure there is a time and place for discussing non-work-related things.
Here are some ideas you can use for remote team-building:
Webinars. These are golden. While learning new stuff on a peer-to-peer basis, your colleagues will also have an opportunity to show off their skills, share knowledge and gain respect from their colleagues. These practices snowball fast if you set the right mood and throw in a pinch of incentive. Money, though, shouldn’t be a part of this. Show your appreciation through small but exclusive things like limited edition t-shirts only speakers get.
Happy-hour group calls. Ever heard of long-distance friends getting together for a drink via video call? Why not give this idea a twist? Set up a time for a weekly non-work related chat, talk about the usual stuff you’d talk about at a bar, or throw a Youtube party! Group activities are important, even if your group is worldwide.
Dedicated chat room. Whatever messenger you use for corporate interactions, set up group chats where everyone can share fun stuff: favorite music, movie recommendations, must-read books, articles, and memes. Facebook’s Workplace is a great tool for that. Yeah, it’s a Facebook! But only people from your company will be able to join your space.
Document everything and then share it.
This routine should be adopted by every single team in the world, but it’s an absolute must-have for a remote and distributed team.
Develop a roadmap for storing all the information your colleagues use or produce. It should be easy to file and easy to find.
There are some collaboration tools that help you organize the knowledge base. One of the best examples is Confluence by Atlassian. However, if you’re looking for some free options, any cloud solutions, including Google Drive and Dropbox, will work great as well.
Three suggestions you might want to follow to keep all the information in order are:
Agile methodology and Kanban work pretty well for managing remote teams. You don’t have to dig in deep to start using the basic concepts.
First of all, you won’t get far without using any task-management tools.
Every task your team works on, no matter how small it is, should be written down. These techniques are almost always used within development teams, but you can apply them to any other industry with the same success.
First of all, choose an app or a website you’re most comfortable working with. When selecting, pay attention to the pricing models, features, and mobile-version availability. Here’s a list of the most popular options:
At Lemon.io, we also do a lot of work remotely. The tool we chose for task management is Trello. It suits our inner-team purposes best because it’s simple, and we try not to overload it with additional features.
Here’s what a Lemon.io Kanban board usually looks like:
As you see, we have 5 lists that hold all kinds of tasks:
Backlog. This list contains every single task I want to work on in the future. Every idea instantly goes there. We recommend you revise it once a week, pick the things that have the highest priority at this moment, and move them to the next list.
To do. Everything we choose to work on during the week goes here. This will help you keep on track with time and always know when you should speed up or have time to work on something else. Having a backlog and to-do lists divided makes prioritizing the problems easier and always working on what’s important. Once you get to know your work pace and how much you can do in a certain period of time, you should plan to work on several things that suit 80% of your full capacity. You will dedicate the rest 20% of your time to spontaneous urgent tasks.
In progress. While the name of this list is pretty self-explanatory, there’s one very important rule: no matter what, there can be only one task in progress at a time. If you have a task board for a whole team, there will be more than one task assigned to different people. What you should take away from this passage is that the In-progress list is the bottleneck of your production line. If you try to do more things at once than is possible, your productivity will only suffer.
Review. Once you’re done with your part of the task but still have to wait for proofreading, QA, approval, etc., move the task to this list to get it out of the way and start working on something new.
Done. Only fully solved tasks can move to this list. The ones that are 100% closed. The one you won’t be getting back to. This is the rule.
Micromanaging hurts everyone. It’s a typical trait of professionals prone to perfectionism, who had no choice but to delegate some part of their workload, although they didn’t want to do that.
It’s hard to fight, but here’s a framework on how to manage a remote team without micromanaging:
Want to hit the right spot in your employee’s brain? Praise their efforts and reward them. Every time we get approval from our social environment, our brain gives us a bonus dose of dopamine. This hormone has been held responsible for pleasure and happiness, and has also been proven to increase motivation and self-esteem.
Can’t think of a simple and efficient way to show them you care? Make a habit of recognizing their successes. Other awesome ideas? Send them a swag bag with cool stuff for them and their family, which they can show off. Even a simple gift basket you can order from their local vendor will make a great deal. These small things will cost you nearly nothing but can raise loyalty sky-high.
We all struggle with distractions, low focus, poor time management, and constantly look for ways to be more productive. Want to help your coworkers with that? Share your life hacks. Give them the same tools you have.
For example, here’s the list of productivity tools popular within our team:
Noisli. Awesome Chrome extension that produces white noise. Personally, I can’t go through a single workday without turning on my favorite mix (fireplace+forest+thunderstorm) at some point. The extension also has a built-in timer, so if you’re a fan of a Pomodoro technique, that will come in handy.
SelfControl. This app lets you block all the distractive websites and applications that let your focus loose.
Pocket. All the things on the Internet I find to be distracting throughout the working hours but want to get back to later go in my Pocket.
Lightshot. Probably the best screenshot app I’ve ever used. You can select the required area of the screen, make notes on your screenshot, highlight the things you want to show your colleagues, and share it in a way you prefer best. So instead of wasting my time trying to explain what’s wrong or calling a colleague to show it, I can just send a screenshot with notes.
While it’s easy to get stuck in the land of operational management, don’t forget about your strategic goals. Know where you’re going and how you are getting there. To measure your success, hold everyone accountable and set up the appropriate KPIs. Keep them clear and transparent so not only you but everyone on your team know exactly how it’s going and come up with new ideas on how to do better.
While KPIs are not something universal and should vary from position to position, you can use the big picture analytical reports that will apply to the whole team.
A great example is the burndown chart. Especially if your job is to manage a remote development team. Once you set the strategic goals, you can come up with a perspective on how fast you should be going. Let’s say you know that to complete your project, you have to solve 120 tasks throughout a year. Here’s how your burndown chart may look by the end of October if you mark down your progress level:
It’s a very straightforward solution, but it gives the whole team a clear idea of the current state of affairs.
Regarding the problem of how to manage remote teams project management theory and practice may differ. Still, it does not matter that you can’t figure it out along the way. At Lemon.io, we deal with distributed teams every day. 55% of our own team works remotely, others are free to leave the office anytime. This approach gives us unlimited opportunities to hire the best people we want to work with, not those available in our area.
Our entire existence is bound to the idea of pushing the boundaries and giving businesses from around the globe an opportunity to scale using the remote workforce. And we can assure you that if you think you won’t be able to manage a remote software team, you’re underestimating yourself. It’s like riding a bike: once you learn how to do it, you won’t be able to forget the feeling.
We not only provide top freelance developers for standalone projects but can also team you up with professionals who will become a full-time part of your team. If you want to detach from everything that’s holding you from thriving but can’t find the right people to lean on, it’s time to think bigger.
To make your remote team cooperative, swift, and productive, it’s essential to choose the proper management strategy that helps to cope with all the downsides of the remote. Here’s a brief advice list for all the interested.
1. Find the alternative for the fixed schedule.
If your team members live in different world corners, they won’t be able to work productively at the exact same hours — because when your Romanian specialist is finishing their morning tea, a professional working for you from the USA has just laid their head on the pillow, craving for sound night sleep. Flexibility in the question of working hours helps your team keep work/life balance and boosts their happiness.
2. Find virtual team management training and learn about new trends and helpful techniques. Remote management tools, teambuilding, sharing responsibilities, overcoming cultural differences — issues to study are plenty.
3. Think over the full-scale reward mechanism to create a competitive environment. Working remotely often means feeling a lack of competitive spirit. Don’t allow your team to slack and lag.
4. Organize team meetings during the most suitable hours. Make a chart with all the time zones of your employees and try to find an ideal overlap.
5. Maintain regular 1/1 and group meetings to discuss progress reports. Don’t be authoritarian — be caring and attentive.
6. Use team management tools. Try out several possibilities until you pick up the most suitable one.
7. Nurture a virtual team culture. If you can’t meet in the office, make it possible to see each other at least virtually (and informally). Don’t separate the virtual part of your team from the non-virtual one (with a possibility of offline meetings). Make everyone equal. If you’re meeting offline, try to organize an online connection too.
Remote work is quite different from the offline in-house one. Offshore workers are separated from their direct managers, which can frequently pose a problem, especially if the staff isn’t used to remote work. What are the key challenges of managing remote teams? Here’s our (incomplete) list:
No direct supervision. Managers are often afraid that employees will work inefficiently. Employees, in their turn, have much less access to managerial support. It makes employees think managers aren’t in touch with their needs.
No clear expectations. Knowing your duties in the office doesn’t automatically guarantee you will know them while working from home. Many employees need more guidance when left alone and out of the working environment with the possibility to instantly address a manager.
Lower productivity. Some of us weren’t created for the remote. Nothing to be done here, no offense should be taken. It’s often difficult to work with no supervision and additional supportive shoulder. Besides, the home’s full of distractions (especially if you have small children, leave them at home or homeschool them daily).
Lack of communication. Remote work is devoid of spontaneous meetings (be that in the corridor, the canteen, or the water cooler). All the interactions are planned: both parts should find time, turn on the webcam, and hope for the wi-fi stability.
The main reason managers hate remote work is the lack of proper visibility. If you’re in different locations (or, worse, in different countries and time zones) with your employees, it’s impossible for you to track the projects’ progress, monitor, who’s slacking, and plan all the team activity accordingly. You can’t glance at your team’s faces and instantly grasp its feelings. You don’t get the information about who stuck where — or, at least, don’t get it in time. To solve this issue, you might want to get acquainted with the plethora of remote management tools (some of them are mentioned in our article above).
Here are just some key characteristics of the great remote leaders we’d like to share.
Dynamism. Dynamic remote leaders are always vigilant, caring, and quick. They help other team members with their assignments and make everything possible to focus on goals.
Motivation. Efficient leaders understand they need a different approach to work tasks. Via collaboration and communication, they reach transparency and high results.
Flexibility. Remote leaders should be able to adapt to their teams, but in doing so, they have to keep in mind all the project objectives and goals. In addition, flexible leaders are proficient in nimble adjusting their strategies and policies to multifold changing situations.
Trust. Trust becomes a central pillar of the working process when you don’t see your staff. Successful remote managers believe that their employees finish their tasks on time and warn them about all the blockers on the way.
1. Announce your expectations right away
2. Respect your team not only as a team but also as an ensemble of individuals
3. Value and nurture sound connections inside the team
4. Practice emotional intelligence
5. Employ positive motivation
6. Don’t neglect any chance to communicate
7. Praise and reward all the deserving ones
8. Make your team as diverse as possible
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