Effective Remote People Management

As a manager of a remote team, I like to know what's going on with people. What's working, what's not working, what they're stressed about and what they're happy about.

I know how quickly feelings of loneliness or of being unappreciated can destroy motivation, and therefore productivity. Luckily, there's a very simple solution to prevent this from happening: Communication. (and a bunch of other tricks I picked up from the Gitlab Remote Playbook.)

Here are a few examples of issues I've faced with remote team members. These cases are anonymous, but you'll find one of these people in any remote team.

1. The one who works too much

You notice Mia online almost always, regardless of the time of day. She answers emails almost instantly at all hours, even on weekends. She's always ready to volunteer for projects and help her teammates. You keep telling her she's doing a fine job, but that makes it almost worse. She takes it as a signal to work twice as hard.

This is a common problem, especially with inexperienced remote workers. Because there's no clear separation between work and home, they will often work TOO hard to not feel like they're slacking off. Over time, this constant stress will lead to mistakes, their decision-making will suffer and eventually they will burn out. As a remote manager, your job is to nip this behavior in the bud.

As someone who is on Slack way too much, I took note of often seeing Mia online as well. Over a few weeks, I noticed more warning signs, so I spoke about it with her. Indeed, she was feeling pressure to perform due to the new tech we were using. She felt like her expected productivity should be higher, so she was "working a few extra hours to meet quotas," and how those few hours just started piling up. We spoke about how to spend time more efficiently, and I encouraged her to set a hard stop to her workdays.Over the following weeks we worked together to build strong work/life boundaries and time management habits.

2. The one who misinterprets messages

Dave is a super diligent engineer. Always smiling and work is always excellent quality. Except... when he doesn't quite get the memo. Dave has a habit of misinterpreting direct instructions. Which in this case resulted in a missed deadline. He thought the deadline was for review commits, not finals.

When two people in full mental capacity are talking with each other in the middle of the day, miscommunication happens. When people are haphazardly writing emails in a rush to the other side of the world, more miscommunication happens. As a remote manager, your job is to create a bulletproof communication system and doublecheck that everyone is on the same page.

See, I thought Dave got me. He replied with a cheery "Gotcha!" and I didn't give it a second thought. It took a month for the mistake to reveal itself. I noticed Dave's commits were behind, but he said it's fine. On the day of the deadline, I was shocked to see he was still behind. But he was even more shocked when he found out the actual situation. In his mind, deadline always meant for reviews. And he was right. That was a cold shower of a lesson for me. I've since worded my emails more carefully, but also made sure any time sensitive messages would be sent through multiple different channels. And require confirmations on Trello.

3. The isolated one

Jeff is the team's graphic design wizard. Everyone respects his skill, but he's never really around for daily banter and rarely takes part in spontaneous brainstorming that happens on Slack. He's a man of few words, even on morning meetings. Over time, Jeff's work quality begins to dip. He doesn't feel very engaged and barely makes deadlines.

Team cohesion is difficult at the best of times, and can be 10x worse when people aren't in the same physical space. If you're not the most outgoing person, it's incredibly easy to fall on the wayside and feel absolutely isolated. This is where careful listening plays a strong part. As a manager, you must make sure that everyone attends daily coffee chats and meetings. Urge them to speak if they're unsure. Make brainstorming mandatory - regardless of how silly they think their idea is, it must be heard.

I took notice of Jeff's absence on a number of occasions. We tried to vary the weekly after hours get together activity to make sure everyone has a chance to attend, but he never did. He was missing a lot of coffee chats as well. Eventually I asked him about it and true enough, he felt like he was dragging everyone down, and was feeling guilty about missing deadlines. We agreed he would make coffee chats a priority. We also mixed up the coffee chats so there would be random people involved every time. I revised the meeting structure and made creative input mandatory. I also encouraged other more outgoing members of the team to actively invite Jeff to attend.

4. The one who gets lost between locations

When Darla moved countries, nobody gave it a second thought. In a remote company, it's quite normal to switch locations now and then. But for days, Darla is nowhere to be seen or heard from. When she finally shows up, she's all over the place, getting nothing done. It takes weeks for Darla to get back up to speed.

As a remote company, moving to a different location is part of the game. We try to move on the weekend or evenings, but sometimes it just takes a workday. Ideally, we're back up to speed the next day. But sometimes, well, shit happens. Wifi doesn't work. Flights are late. The accommodation is a bust. Companies like Gitlab have specific support for people changing location, and for good reason. You need to be prepared, otherwise workers can disappear off the map.

When Darla didn't appear on Slack after a few days, I was puzzled. When she did appear after 3 days, completely unprepared, I was concerned. The explanation was mundane - her accommodation wasn't available, the other apartment didn't have Wifi and her phone wouldn't connect to 4G. She had been running around between local restaurants trying to find a functional Wifi connection, with little luck. Once they got an internet connection working at her place, it was spotty. And she couldn't stay there to work because of renovation in the next room. This was 50km from Barcelona, by the way. As a manager, it's difficult to do anything after the fact. But we made strict SOPs on what to do in cases of flight delays, internet problems etc when moving location like this.

How to Make Remote Teams Work

My favorite pet peeve is LinkedIn posts disparaging remote work and remote workers as inefficient and lazy. When in fact, remote offices work as well as or better than traditional offices, as long as they're managed properly.

Here are a few methods I use to effectively manage a remote team. These are very quick techniques to turn a group of random people located around the world into one cohesive unit.

Listen

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Assigned coffee chats

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Weekly chats with team members

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Open Slack Communication

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Internal Online Events

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Support Offline Meetups

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Support Location Swaps

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Yearly Company Meetups

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Speaking Events

I'm not a naturally outgoing guy, but I love to be able to express myself and communicate my ideas. That's why I practice speaking as often as I can. Here are some of my favorite talks:

2024 Communication For IT Project Success hive/piscine coding school

Here's me in Helsinki talking about communication within a software engineering project.

2022 Client Acquisition For Freelancers, Helsinki

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2021 Client Acquisition For Freelancers, Budapest

Here's me in Budapest talking about finding clients.

2021 Speaking and Stage Fright, Pärnu University

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2020 Psychology and relationship dynamics, Helsinki

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Image

Fit

Left & Right

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