Remote work best practices, part 2: Collaborate

remote collaboration: No noise necessary

If your remote team is communicating asynchronously and in context consistently—both of which we go over in part 1 of this series—you’re well-positioned to collaborate effectively. Getting the communication right is just the first step, though. For distributed teams to reap the maximum benefits of their collaborative efforts, they need to commit to a couple of best practices.

• Collaborate without interrupting. Create Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) documents and Playbooks for everything.

• Default to transparency. Use tools that make work visible.

Everything knowledge workers do in a collocated working environment is just as possible for remote teams. Onboarding, training, mentorship, innovation… no form of collaboration is off the table, provided you take a deliberately different approach.

Collaborate without interrupting

This is where the rubber meets the road for remote teams. Collaboration sparks new ideas, turns existing ones into reality, and makes the work we produce stronger. But organizational leaders tend to take it for granted that collaboration equals real-time interaction. It doesn’t have to! At Open Door Teams, we collaborate every day to build custom software and deliver tailored IT solutions to enterprises large and small, public and private. If we relied primarily on real-time interaction to do our work, our days would be peppered with meetings and messages, and our progress would slow to a crawl. We’d be continually interrupting each other.

For remote teams to be successful, they must get good at working together without carelessly burning up precious cognitive resources on unnecessary interaction as if the supply is unending. It isn’t. But if you create SOP docs and Playbooks for everything, you can dedicate the lion’s share of your concentration to executing work together rather than talking about it.

Create SOP docs and Playbooks for everything

Here is a dumbfounding article that gives voice to, among others, leaders who believe training and mentorship for knowledge workers requires physical proximity in order for new hires and junior staff members to “absorb” knowledge from more seasoned colleagues. Nonsense. Though onboarding and training are both areas in which we invest more than the usual degree of synchronous communication, that real-time interaction supplements our onboarding and training materials; it’s not the primary method of sharing information. And physical proximity? Some of our more senior members of staff started out with us as interns, learning and growing, then teaching and mentoring, all from the comfort of their own homes.

Real-time collaboration is for nuance and team-building, not imparting knowledge, updating coworkers, creating something new together, or managing day-to-day operations.

Look, unless you’re laying brick or performing open heart surgery or the like, you don’t need to be in the same room with someone, watching them work in order to learn. What you do need are guidance materials—documents that outline the processes, workflows, and roles your organization relies on.

Does the customer support team use a particular workflow? Write it down. Be specific. Does the software development team have a standard protocol for deployment? It must be written down in detail or every new member of the team will need a real-time walkthrough just to get up to speed. Likewise, an Onboarding Lead should carefully document the typical time commitment, core expectations, and skills needed to perform their role in a Playbook. What’s more, these should all be living documents—commentable, changeable—not stone tablets. Again, we want to collaborate, to evolve, to learn and grow.

Remote teams that communicate asynchronously and get in the habit of writing out their workflows, processes, and roles in continually updated SOP documents and Playbooks don’t have to rely on interruptive forms of collaboration in order to iterate on a software feature together, for example, or seamlessly run a customer support department. Nor do they have to train new hires in real time; they’ve outsourced their collective wisdom to living documents.

Default to transparency

Creating living documents for your processes, workflows, and roles is ongoing work, and it’s difficult to say how impactful that work will be if your team is otherwise blindfolded. But couple it with a culture of transparency, and the road to fruitful collaboration will just get smoother and smoother. Start here: Stop thinking in terms of who should have access—to notes, discussions, project plans, financials, etc.—and start thinking in terms of who shouldn’t. Make open access your internal default and then tinker from there, not the other way around.

Imagine it: Every member of your remote team can find out what every other member is working on at any given time without so much as a ping.

The effort you put into building a transparent culture will pay dividends in the out-in-the-open way of working it engenders—a way of working that is critical to effective remote team collaboration because it allows team members to see each other’s work without depending on physical proximity to do so. Imagine it: Every member of your remote team can find out what every other member is working on at any given time without so much as a ping.

That’s what transparency-by-default can do for you. But you have to value it; you have to practice it. The tools you use can either hurt or help.

Use tools that make work visible

Just like organizational knowledge shouldn’t exist only in people’s heads, ongoing work shouldn’t exist exclusively in our own homes—in our individual laptops, on post-it notes or white boards. Hoarding work within our personal bubbles makes collaboration difficult. Instead, everyone on the team should go about their work in such a way that makes team-wide visibility possible, if not automatic. Which isn’t to say that everything we do should be accessible to everyone else, but obstacles to internal accessibility should be trivial enough that collaboration is always within easy reach.

Some tools to make that possible:

• Project management
  We use Pivotal Tracker because we’re an agile software development firm, but there are plenty of options here. Basecamp, ClickUp, Asana… the list goes on. Nearly all of them offer free trials.

• Day planning
  Make it easy for everyone on the team to find out (without interrupting!) what anyone else on the team is planning to do next. We built Daycast specifically for remote teams (ours, to begin with) to plan their days and track their time within full view of each other, despite the miles and time differences that separate them.

• Wireframing
  We like Figma and Sketch, but we’ve heard good things about Balsamiq too.

• Customer support
  There’s Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, and many more. Just make sure your helpdesk software keeps your support representatives aware of your customers and each other.

• Invoicing
  Many of our remote Daycast customers use and love FreshBooks for client billing. They can keep their operations teams on the same page and working together with this cloud-based accounting software.

• Messaging
  For the most part, we don’t advise using email for internal communication because email exchanges are accessible only to their participants. Instead, we recommend messaging tools like Slack, Twist, or Microsoft Teams that make internal communication searchable and accessible.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. There have never been more remote-supportive tools on the market than there are right now. Your biggest challenge is not finding what you need; it’s choosing from among several options that all fit the bill.

Collaboration doesn’t require congregation

Real-time collaboration is for nuance and team-building, not imparting knowledge, updating coworkers, creating something new together, or managing day-to-day operations. Fully remote teams like ours have been proving this for decades: You don’t need to congregate in order to get things done. You do need to congregate—now and then—in order to discuss sensitive issues, maintain and build on team cohesion, and celebrate wins. (This is the focus of part 3.) It doesn’t take much. Most of what your teams do can be done—and, arguably, done better—with asynchronous collaboration rather than with real-time interaction, provided you default to transparency and commit to working together without interrupting each other.

Part 1 | Part 3 | Photo by Ocean Biggshott

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