On my quest to make my teams effective at remote work, I went through a boatload of content. Articles, podcasts, courses, videos, everything that was relevant, I consumed and annotated.
I reviewed 40+ resources about effective remote teams so you don’t have to. Here’s my takeaway.
Unsurprisingly, all the content offered by GitLab is brilliant. They really know what they’re doing, and the quality of what they put out there has been top-notch so far. I also didn’t want to use only them as an example, so I went out of my way to find other companies, and other examples of success to form an opinion that would be as objective and as realistic as possible.
After reviewing 40+ resources, spending hours absorbing and summarizing them, and boring my friends and colleagues about it, I thought I’d put everything into a nice little package to share what I’ve learned with others. This is what his article is.
The article is geared towards managers on how to adapt teams and organizations to become effective at remote work, and not so much on how to be a more productive individual within a remote setup.
If you’re an individual contributor, you will find interesting ideas in this article nonetheless, and also ideas on how to convince your manager to help your team and organization be effective at remote work, so read on!
To create the right environment for organizations and teams to be effective and successful, the topics you must cover are the following:
- Be explicit about which ‘remote’ you pick
- Set a culture of remote work from the top
- Embrace an async-first mentality
- Adopt management by objectives
- Don’t let individuals choose their WFH days
- Recognize the need for meaning and bonding
- Organize for physical and mental health recovery
- Adapt all the supporting organizational processes
The rest of this article dives into the details for each of those topics, and at the very end, I am sharing all the useful resources which I’ve come across.
Finally, note that this article explores all the main ideas and concepts for effective remote teams and organizations. However, it doesn’t cover how you would plan a transition and then execute this transition. I will cover this aspect in a future article. Join my email list to be notified when it comes out.
