5 Invaluable Tips for Distributed Team Success

Tips and tricks learnt from 5 years of distributed team management.

Sooner or late in your career, you will find yourself working with or managing a team who aren’t physically in the same office as you. I managed remote teams for 5 years across the UK, US, Spain, Bulgaria, China and Singapore, and here is a handy list of the things I found made a difference to the success of my (our) work.

If you’ve never worked in a distributed team, you may not be familiar with the main challenge: Just Getting Answers. There’s nothing worse than needing one crucial piece of information and the person with the knowledge isn’t in the office until 6 pm your time. Not getting this information means you need to wait until 6 pm the next day, so your options are limited, and you need to be little pushier than you would be to someone in the same office.

Even if you’re not comfortable calling, it’s time to get on the phone. If the person doesn’t answer, think of other options — don’t be afraid to put in a 5-minute meeting in the calendar, or bribe a friend who works in the same office to walk over to that person’s desk and remind them. You don’t have to be anything other than your usual, polite self in the call, but explaining that you’re working on X and you really need to know Y to move forward can help explain the intrusion.

Likewise, you’ll need to put up with the same from others. Try to be responsive, go out of your way to squeeze in calls a little earlier or later than you might ideally like, because someone on the other side of the world needs some information or input from you. Not ideal, but helps you build up credit for the times the tables are reversed!

Coordinating across time zones is hard, and sometimes there might only be a one-hour timeslot that is convenient for calls. If someone has put some time in to talk to you, be on time. Hold them to the same standards — if a colleague is consistently late, speak to them to understand why. Reiterate that when time is such a precious resource, you want to make sure it’s respected.

Not everything needs an answer right away, sometimes you need things in writing, sometimes writing is too complicated and a sketch or verbal explanation is better, and sometimes you just need a quick answer and explanation.

Generally, I’ve found the best communication method is based on the following questions:

I found the following tools invaluable for working in distributed teams:

The human element of distributed teams can be hard to imitate when you’re on different continents. Tools like Slack are amazing for this —much of what makes teams successful is the sense of camaraderie and the chit-chat the happens outside work, and it’s great to keep these going.

With all the tools in the world, nothing can help a team gel as well as meeting in real life. At certain key moments it can make sense to get everyone together, such as the start of a new project, or before a big milestone. We always tried to do new team kick-off meetings in person, because relationships are forged over dinners and coffee and this closeness and team spirit then continues on, even once everyone has gone back to their respective real lives.

To wrap up, I hope this helps cover some of the lessons that I had to learn the hard way! If you have any other tips and tricks I’d love to hear them too — what has worked well for you?

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