A lot of companies are going remote these days, and while there are many advantages to working on a virtual team, it’s essential that sustainable systems are put in place in order to succeed.
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Top three tips for remote team success
- BE RESULTS-ORIENTED. This is by far the most important thing for a remote team. If you’re producing results, it shouldn’t matter how much time you sit at your desk. Jacob Morgan interviewed Eric Severson, a former co-chief human resource officer at The Gap. They discuss the shift to work-life integration and moving from time-based to results-based.
- WORK OUT LOUD. John Stepper wrote a book Working Out Loud. It’s a way of making your work visible in such a way that it might help others and keep everyone on the same page.
- USE VIDEO. Whenever you can and whenever it makes sense, turn those videos on. When you’re visible to others, you connect in a different way, form tighter bonds and feel more like a team.
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Original transcript
Welcome to the Collaboration Superpowers podcast. My name is Lisette and I’m interviewing people and companies doing great things remotely. Welcome to another episode, everyone. Thanks for being here. Last week I had the opportunity to give the Work Together Anywhere workshop in Crete, Greece, for a very forward-thinking, progressive, extremely impressive company called Knowit from Sweden. It was an internal conference team-building event that the company was hosting, and my workshop was one of the offerings. I was totally honored. On top of that, I’ve never been anywhere near that area of the world before. So it was very exciting for me to see a new place and to eat new foods and go hiking and swim in the Mediterranean because it’s still warm in that part of the world that was lovely. After the workshop, [inaudible – 00:58] and I were invited to join the company for dinner. And before dinner, we were sitting out on the beautiful terrace by the ocean, drinking a glass of wine. It’s a hard life, I know. And I was sitting next to a woman, and in our conversation, she asked me if you had to give me just the top three things that I could do to make my remote teamwork, what would it be? And I thought, “Great question.” And I really had to think about it because there are a lot of great tips. But this week, for you, I’m answering her question and distilling it down to the top three things that you can do to make your remote team successful. The first thing, and I think the most important thing, is to go from being time-oriented to results-oriented. The best example and the best resource that I can recommend is a podcast that Jacob Morgan did with Eric Severson who was the former co-chief human resource officer at The Gap. The episode is called forget work-life balance. It’s all about work-life integration. But it’s a great example of what results-oriented working looks like and what it can do for a company.
The second best tip that I can give is to work out loud, which is making your work visible in such a way that it might help others. Pilar Orti and I spent an entire podcast episode, number 48 on the 21st-century work-life podcast. And also John Stepper wrote a book about it called working out loud. So check out those resources.
And the third top tip that I can give for making your remote team successful is to use video. I know it’s not appropriate in every case, and I know there are a lot of situations where people don’t have that capability. But whenever you have the ability and whenever it makes sense, turn the videos on. It will help enormously. I can’t emphasize it enough. I see it over and over and over again. I’m convinced.
Okay, the top-three tips once again in summary. Go to a results-oriented work environment, work out loud, and turn the videos on. All right, that’s it for this week, short, sweet, and condensed. Stay tuned for next week when I have a great interview with Sococo, one of my absolute favorite online collaboration tools. Sococo is an awesome, awesome product, and their team was [inaudible – 03:26] interview. So stay tuned for that. A huge thanks to the inspiring Nick, the podcast monster, for keeping this podcast awesome. You can hire him to make you a star at podcastmonster.com. All right, until next week, be powerful.
