Personal Review

As the subtitle says, this book covers almost every topic there is to talk about the subject of managing teams working remotely, regardless of the industry you might be working in. It tackles answers to questions like: "how to address the challenge of building a new remote team?", "what aspects should be considered when bringing in a new team member?", "how to keep your remote team engaged?", "how to run effective virtual meetings?".

I found this book very well structured, so you can go directly to a specific chapter if you are interested in a certain topic, which is not always the case in some books out there.

I liked this book for several reasons: it is updated and relevant after "Covid-times", it has a nice length; not too short nor too long; and most statements, if not all of them, are supported by a reference to some research by someone else. Therefore, sometimes it doesn't read as just opinions from the author, but as a compendium of opinions from different people that have worked hard to have evidence on different topics. Having said that, then there is a direct drawback to this: the author doesn't seem to be a researcher himself, so this is not a result of his own research. I looked for his background, and he's described as a "forward thinker", a former business school professor, and an organizational psychologist, so I have my doubts about how much of the material comes from his own real-life experience, or how much of it has been put to the test by the author, given that he doesn't seem to have been leading a remote-working team himself. However, I still think there is a lot of valuable material.

Summary

Covid-19 has accelerated what might have been inevitable, and most of us will have to deal with remote teams, and we have to be able to handle the benefits and challenges of remote work.

Research has shown that:

More than 50% of employees want remote work to be their primary method of working.
Around 75% of employees would like the option to work remotely at least some of their time.
Remote teams can be more productive

Working from home doesn't boost performance per se, it's the other way around: offices decrease performance; they are terrible places to get work done, as they are full of distractions. An office can be described as "an interruption factory".
Also, without commutes, employees have shown that they start working earlier, and work until the end of each day, which doesn't exactly mean that people are having a better performance in terms of effectiveness, they are just working more.
Remote working made employees more productive only if they really wanted to work from home.

Remote workers reported attending more meetings than in-person workers did. A lot of them probably come from the faulty assumption that meetings are the best mode of communication for a team.

The perception of the effectiveness of meetings is hugely affected by how many meetings you're asking people to attend.

You need to set clear rules on when to use each mode of communication: synchronous vs asynchronous.
Electronic surveillance of employees dramatically reduces their intrinsic motivation (motivation to do the work because of the joy of working) and possibly their creative thinking ability. The leader's job is about supporting the team to do their work, not spying on them to check whether they're working.
There is a significant correlation between employees' perceptions of autonomy and their overall performance. The more managers gave up control over what to do and how to do it, the more likely employees were to do it well. It is the leader's job to guide them in finding ways to do it better.

Autonomy doesn't mean independence. Remote work can be highly autonomous while also being highly collaborative (interdependent, rather than independent).

Employees working remotely are subtly tempted into working harder and working longer, which leads to burnout.

Keep your team united while they are apart

Have a shared understanding of each other's habits

Make sure that each team member knows who knows what (their skills and strengths), and who's taking what responsibility.
Help them have a clear understanding of the expectations they have for each other.
Identity if there are different cultural contexts and constraints, and communicate them before misunderstandings or misinterpretations trigger a conflict.

Unite around a shared purpose and identity

Remind individuals that their individual efforts produce progress toward a larger mission.
A strong shared identity enhances team performance and reduces conflict.
Find an answer to one of these questions:

What is the problem in the world we are trying to solve?
What is the injustice we are trying to resolve?
What are we trying to prove?

Try to fit your purpose within one of the 3 types of most inspiring fights:

The revolutionary fight: are we trying to change the status quo?
The underdog fight: are we trying to take on the established players in the industry?
The ally fight: are we helping our customers or stakeholders to win their battles?

Make them feel connected and aligned. Build bonds.

In an office environment, coffee usually works as an excuse to connect and socialize, as well as the water cooler, where a lot of chitchat usually happens. Those spaces are good ways to reset the mind and connect with coworkers. With remote teams, we should have a digital replacement for those spaces.

Schedule short breaks to chat about nonwork topics, during work hours, maybe setting up pairs at random.
Have a chat room available where people can have "small talk" and have nonwork conversations. This room must not generate notifications that interrupt people's work.

Plan shared virtual meals. It is similar to the previous point, but in this case, the idea is for the whole team to share a moment together.
Set up partnerships. Studies have shown that people are more creative and work harder when they are being watched by a coworker (not monitored). This could be just having a video call open while you are working. This also helps to create boundaries, and help people around you to respect your space and restrain from interrupting when they see you are on a call with someone.
Reserve a space in your calendar that you offer your teammates as a space available for any discussion, like most professors do at a university. Interesting things can come out of those discussions, and it helps deepen the relationships.
Build team rituals to create a sense of group identity.

Examples:

Taco Tuesday (it's still possible to organize with remote teams)
Short talks where every team member prepares a lecture on any topic that interests them.

Get the best performance through a positive culture

The company's culture is about how the employees treat one another every day, it reflects the main way they think and act.
The leader is responsible for building the right culture.
Characteristics of teams with the best performance:

The "who" part of the equation doesn't seem to matter.

A star performer might not have the same performance once he is moved to another team.
It's not about individual talents.

You want the right mix of skills, abilities, and knowledge, throughout the team.

5 elements to build the best teams:

Dependability: team members must be accountable to shared expectations.
Structure and clarity: the team must have established roles and rules of engagement.
Meaning: the team must feel their work has significance. They have to be connected to the team's shared purpose.
Impact: team members must feel their work makes a difference.
Psychological safety (this is a cornerstone for a positive culture)

Trust

Everything runs more smoothly when team members trust one another
Trust is not given, and it's not earned; it is both, it is reciprocal.
Demonstrate that you trust your team to get things done without constant monitoring.
Admit your mistakes to your team, and they will feel that they can trust you and admit their own mistakes to you.

Respect

If I trust you, I will open up and share. If you respect me, it means you will value what I share with you.
The team members must feel mutual respect and must be comfortable being themselves.
The team members must feel that they can be vulnerable and authentic with one another
Respect is the variable that has been demonstrated to have the biggest impact on employee performance.
Respect is a learned behavior
Learn to handle disagreements:

It is perfectly acceptable to disagree, but make sure you demonstrate that you've actually listened and understood their point of view.
Offer more information on the concept being shared, rather than challenge the validity of their information.

Bringing the right members to your team

Who you bring to your team is one of the most important decisions you have to make.
Don't choose only for the skills for the job, but most importantly also look for the right collaboration, communication, and motivation habits to fit the team.
3 key characteristics

Are they collaborators?

Key questions when interviewing:

Describe your ideal team.

How often do people interact?
How do they treat each other?

In what type of team do you feel you do your best work?
Describe a team where you considered you didn't work well

Are they communicators?

Key questions when interviewing:

How do you like to keep in touch with your colleagues?
Tell me about a time when a colleague completely misunderstood you. How did you react? How did you resolve the situation?
How often do you proactively reach out to other team members or your manager?

Are they self-motivated?

Key questions:

How do you organize your day-to-day tasks?
How do you stay motivated when working alone?
How do you limit distractions?
Tell me about a project you took on all by yourself

Communicate effectively. Focus on getting things done

More communication is not necessarily better communication.
The goal is to learn efficient ways to be able to talk about the work that needs to be done, and still leave enough time to actually do that work.
Most employers get stressed out more about the constant interruption that doesn't allow them to work, than the work itself.
In order to get the best performance, it is crucial to know when to use which type of communication, and how often.
Ideal communication rhythm maximizes both collaboration and solo-focused time.

Asynchronous communication --> most of the time --> allows for focused time. Not everything can be communicated asynchronously.

e-mail
group chats
comments on a shared document
message boards

Synchronous communication --> real-time communication --> sometimes, when absolutely necessary.

Guidelines:

Asynchronous communication

Setup expectations:

everyone must have the expectation that people won't respond immediately.
A response within 24 hours is more than reasonable and should be the default expectation.
You must not ask people to keep a chat window open all the time. It's like demanding they attend an all-day meeting that has no agenda.
Employees cannot be expected to respond quickly to each message. If there is an important issue that needs an immediate response, then you need a synchronous communication method.

Write clearly and concisely

Favor simple sentence structure.
Keep the language as concise as possible.

Don't make assumptions

If you need confirmation of receipt, ask for it.
If you need a response for a certain time or date, state that clearly.
You could state that if you don't have a response for a certain deadline, you'll assume consensus. The deadline must be reasonable (definitely more than 24 hours). Remember, if you need a response within 24 hours, probably you must consider using a synchronous call to at least let the other person know that there is something urgent in their inbox.

Infuse positivity

The lack of emotional cues misleads readers to interpret messages as significantly more negative than the writer intended.
Always keep in mind that what you write might easily be misread, so you must definitely avoid things like sarcasm.
On the other hand, when you are the recipient of a written communication, always assume a positive intent from the writer.

Synchronous communication

Use voice-only when it's a one-on-one call (unless the call is to "let someone go")

Audio calls are more likely to be shorter.
A few minutes on the phone will beat a full day of back-and-forth emails, and an hour-long video call
Seeing the other person full-screen can be stressful for some people. It works differently where there are several people on the call, where the face of each person is shown smaller on the screen to make room for everyone.

People prefer to see the real room behind the video callers, instead of a beach sunset. Consider just blurring your background.
Remember to make lens contact instead of eye contact. You could put a sticky smiley face next to the camera lens to remind yourself to look up and smile.
Actively remind yourself that uninterrupted work is one of the core benefits of working remotely.

Run effective meetings

Plan with a purpose

Declare the purpose upfront
Keep it to one purpose per meeting
Valid reasons to have a meeting

Deliberate on an issue
Generate ideas
Make a decision
Collaborate real-time on a document
You want to connect everyone together every once in a while

Invite only the right people

Keep the list as short as possible.
The effectiveness of the meeting is inversely related to the number of people in the meeting.

Build the right agenda

Send the agenda ahead of time.
Just having an agenda doesn't automatically improve effectiveness. It's extremely important that you actually stick to the plan.
Use questions as the items of the agenda, instead of using generic titles.

Questions have 2 benefits

Before the meeting: they put people in the right frame of mind when they read the agenda.
After the meeting: they help everyone know if the meeting was indeed effective. If we got our questions answered, it was indeed an effective meeting.

Start the meeting 10 minutes early

Usually in-person meetings have a pre-meeting phase that allows for valuable team bonding. That's an important phase that is usually undervalued, and with remote meetings, it has been lost for the most part.
Make sure that you sign onto the conference platform five to ten minutes earlier than that, to account for unforeseen technical issues. You don't want to miss that phase.

Start with a positive note

Things mentioned in the beginning are more likely to be remembered.
Start positive and it will be remembered as a positive meeting.

Capture minutes

There should be a scribe, to keep track of what was said.
It should be someone that is not the facilitator.
Important things to capture:

What ideas were presented?
Who committed to taking what action?

Stay on topic, and stick to your planned allotments of time

If someone arrives late, you don’t need to waste time catching them up.
Let them read the minutes.

Close with a review

Run through the questions from the agenda and check that everyone agrees those questions were answered.
Confirm that action items are understood by the assigned person and try to get a time commitment for each item.

Leave the line open

Let the people socialize afterward.

Send the minutes, and publish the recording.
Other tips:

Share the pain of inconvenient times for a meeting

If the team is distributed across different time zones, everyone should feel as important, and everyone should share the pain of having a meeting at an inconvenient time.
Rotate times regularly.
You want everyone to feel connected and vital to the team.

Everyone on video, or no one

Avoid having meetings with a partial group in person and the rest through videoconference. If at least one person can't attend in person, do a video call.
Everyone should have their cameras turned on.

In a meeting, we use a lot of visual cues to coordinate discussion and sense the overall emotion levels of the group.

Minimize presentation time

Encourage pauses for questions and brief discussions every so often to reengage people.
The real magic of any meeting happens during the discussion, not during the presentation.

Break it up

For long meetings, provide frequent breaks to stretch your legs and rest your eyes

Break it out

If the team is too large, consider breaking into smaller groups at some point during the meeting to increase the engagement of the participants, and then bring everyone back to the main discussion

Leverage autonomous motivation and get the best performance

Set objectives (what to work on)

Set them mutually. Have a conversation about what is needed and what is realistic.
Have intent behind the objectives and deliverables. If they understand the why, they'll be in the best position to deliver the desired outcome.
Keep deadlines as short as possible
Focus on outcomes, not on how hard they claim to be working

Track progress (measure)

The most potent factor in our motivation is the feeling of making progress.
Check in personally and regularly.

People may not be completely honest when they are with the entire team.
Do it at least once a week. You want to find the problems sooner.
The way you do it doesn't have to be the same for everyone. Adapt to the personality of each person.

Make sure everyone on the team is clear on the progress of each other.

When one person makes progress, the whole team moves forward.
Celebrate the wins of every person.

Giving feedback (help them to do better)

Separate people problems from process problems:

most problems are actually process problems (instruction unclear, or resources not provided)

Be clear and constructive

Focus on specific and concrete behaviors.
Do not assume any intent behind the actions (One goal of the feedback conversation is to discover the intent)
Review possible actions that might have been a better option
Focus on how the actions had an impact on the team or the customer.

Listening over talking

Track how many questions you are asking versus how many statements you are making.
Listen to their feelings and frustrations.

Collaborate on solutions

If the solution comes from them, the bigger the commitment will be.

Avoiding burnout while keeping them engaged

More often than "not working", working remotely leads to overworking and burnout.

Working from home makes it all too easy for work to become your life.
Without the physical location providing a boundary between work and life, studies have shown that a lot of employees working remotely are subtly tempted into working harder and working longer.

Engaging your remote team is about making sure they're not working too hard, so they don't burn out.
Engaging is about helping them develop a pattern or discipline that keeps them productive but also healthy.

Model the way first, and help them find it second.
The "freedom trap"

With the ability to do whatever they want, whenever they want, a lot of people fail to develop the self-discipline required to be effective at work and to effectively use leisure time to recharge.
Because they can work anywhere and anytime, they work everywhere and all of the time.

Sometimes deliberately not working is the most productive thing you can do for yourself in the long run.
Be on the lookout for signs of burnout; for instance, hitting deadlines faster than usual might be a sign that they're too invested in work, and are therefore headed for burnout.
Recommended disciplines to develop:

Set "business hours"

If you want to stay focused at work and avoid working too much, you need to develop a set schedule for when you're working and when you're not.
Train your team to put "do not disturb" settings on their phones after hours and mark when they aren't at their computers on the company's internal systems.

Develop an "after-work" ritual

You need to establish a good ritual to signal that it's time to end the day. This helps you keep some peace of mind.

Change devices when you change modes.

Try to have your personal laptop, separate from your work laptop.
If you don't want a second one, then consider setting up two different users in the operating system.

Get outside

This applies to your small breaks and to the hours before and after work.
Research has consistently shown that the most restorative break you can take is a nature break. It will also leave you feeling happier.
A quick walk through a nearby park or a twenty-minute spin on your mountain bike will leave you feeling much better afterward than plopping on the couch to watch an episode of your favorite TV series.
When you feel your stress level rising, or your energy flagging, don't grab more coffee. Grab a few minutes of fresh air.

Limit your distractions

"Every type of workspace comes with unintentional land mines built in to destroy your focus."

Here are some tactics to help you limit your distractions:

Build work/life boundaries

Create different "zones": have a place where work is done, and try to keep away from working where you are not supposed to be working.

This also means changing from your normal pajamas to your "work pajamas"

Build people boundaries

You can have a lot of physical boundaries and it won't help you if the people in your life don't respect those boundaries.
Educate your environment. Teach people around you when can you be interrupted, and under what circumstances.

Batch your tasks

Think of your day (or your week) as blocks of time where only certain tasks are done at certain times.
Examples

Time slots to check e-mails. Depending on your responsibilities, this could be twice a day or every two hours. (Remember, e-mails are asynchronous communication, and they shouldn't be used for urgent matters that require an immediate response).
Using the same time of day for meetings (e.g: meetings always after lunch).
Office hours (time for any of your teammates to ask you questions).

Handling conflicts

There is a 3-stage process to handle conflicts at work:

Describing the behaviors

Give them time so each party can describe the behavior they observed that negatively affected them.
Do not assume motives behind any behavior. Try to silence your own judgments. Just take note of the behavior itself.

Close the gap between intentions and perceptions / Communicating the impact

Let them describe how that behavior made them feel.
This allows the other party to hear how their actions were received.
Sometimes just hearing the true feelings of the other resolves the disconnection between intentions and perceptions, and this automatically resolves the conflict.

Focus on collaboratively developing a solution for how to behave next time a similar situation presents itself.

(Have a record of the discussion happening and of what new behaviors were agreed upon.)

Leading from Anywhere - The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams, by David Burkus