One of my designers lives in
Turkmenistan. Every day, he wakes up to email and assignments to create
beautiful front-end designs from our commercial team in New York and San Francisco.
When he’s done, he sends them to a developer in Ukraine to implement. Throughout
the day they work on various projects, and when they go to bed our design and
development teams in New York take over. The system runs smoothly and it means
that my team happily works around the clock — without any one person actually
working around the clock.
People often ask me about how
I managed to build this global engineering team at RebelMouse, and before that
at Huffington Post, relaying their outsourcing horror stories and wondering how
I got around them.
A lot of it comes down to
being really intentional about how our globally dispersed team communicates. We
can’t take remote team members out for a beer to show our appreciation, so we
use other methods. In my 15 years managing remote teams, I have learned to:
1. Live
and breathe your email and make sure the team does too. Currently my team is
spread across more than 20 countries. Instant messaging relies on everyone
being there at the same time. Email, on the other hand can be totally
asynchronous as it fits our time zone difference and odd working hours in
general. The only way I’ve found that works is when everyone on the team keeps
their inboxes open and checks emails as their absolute highest priority.
Without that we operate blindly to each other since there is no tapping someone
on the shoulder as there would be in an office.
2. Give
the benefit of the doubt. My team has huge cultural and language differences
(although everyone does have a working knowledge of English as the basic way we
communicate). We all were raised with different ways of approaching projects,
handling conflict resolution etc. It’s essential we forgive each other
constantly for odd grammar, odd behavior and instead try to make the beauty of
building something together lift us above any confusion.
3. Overcommunicate.
Especially as part of a startup, it’s sometimes hard to understand where we are
going and what we are building. Asking questions all the time helps. I want
people to always be inquisitive while also working on the little pieces of
concrete stuff that we definitely know. If a question doesn’t get answered
because of email overload, I like people to ask again or bump up the thread so
that we make sure everyone is on the same page.
4. Be
intentionally positive. It’s way too easy for things to sound negative in an
email. Without tone, body language or anything else, it’s extra important to
make sure emails don’t turn into hurt feelings. Sarcasm and deadpan humor can
come across the wrong way (especially because humor doesn’t always translate
across cultures). But being friendly and approachable – even if it means using
lots of emoticons – is always welcome. I try to encourage my team to be overtly
friendly in their emails, even if it means they sound less “businesslike.”
5. Offer
suggestions, not critiques. When you disagree with someone in person, you can
often discuss the issue until you’re both on the same page. That’s much harder
to do from halfway across the world, when a brief “I don’t get it” can steer
the conversation into a dead end. I always tell people to make sure to move the
conversation forward: if you don’t like someone else’s idea, can you suggest an
alternative instead of simply sharing your dislike? If there’s anything you do
like about their proposal, make sure to include that. In general, I’ve found
when I have something positive to say, I send it immediately and when I have
something negative I sometimes give myself some time to mull it over. I am
usually glad I did.
As the one assigning the work,
you can also prevent communication frustration by making sure everyone has
multiple tasks in their queues. That way, if one thing gets stuck in a
communication bottleneck, remote employees can move on to the second or third
task on their list while they wait for a response on the first task. This keeps
everyone moving full speed ahead – no matter where they are in the world.
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