1. Make sure your teams have the right structure in place
Distributed team management is a different beast than traditional teams and knowing how to build a structure that works effectively will set you up for success. The structure of your teams needs to take into account the diversity of the team and the role they play in the organization. A single-site, highly interconnected, collaborative team may operate well with one manager and 15-20 staff members, whereas an independent contributor role that sits outside of the core business processes may be more effectively managed by an individual engineer. The structure of the team should be optimized for the role of the team.
2. Clearly define your company's culture
Culture is critical to any organization, but especially so for distributed teams. You want to build a strong sense of community and shared mission, but you also need to ensure your employees are aligned with the company's goals. You should have regular cultural huddles with each team, where you discuss the values, growth goals, hiring strategy, diversity policy, benefits package, and various other organizational touchstones.
3. Establish clear communications channels
Good communication are hugely important to successful distributed team management. You need to have clearly defined communication channels, both synchronous and asynchronous, that allow for frequent and effective collaboration. Establish a virtual office through collaboration tools such as Slack, and make sure your team members are using it. Set up meetings and make sure everyone is present in the Slack channel for that meeting.
4. Manage your team across time zones
Time zones are a big issue for distributed teams. You need to consider your team's time zones, as well as the time zone of the company's headquarters. Figure out how many hours of overlap there are between the two and work with your team to figure out their schedule needs. Not every company or team can afford to hire team members in the same time zone, but you can certainly manage your team's time zones to enable better collaboration.
5. Capture and share important meetings and calls
Knowledge capture and transfer is incredibly difficult for any distributed team, but it is especially hard for remote teams. You want to capture every single meeting and call that takes place on your team, and then you want to make sure your entire team has access to that knowledge base. You need to leverage technologies that will enable you to capture both audio and video calls, and you need to make sure that your team is using these technologies to their full potential.
We recognize that knowledge capture and transfer is one of the biggest challenges your team faces. We provide a call and meeting capture solution that transforms your company's existing Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls into a searchable shared knowledge base for the entire team. Our solution takes this captured data and utilizes machine learning to create summaries of each meeting. These summaries are extremely useful in helping your team members prioritize their work. Our solution also incorporates standard knowledge management best practices such as tagging, note taking, and a clear search interface. We're excited to work with you to build an optimized knowledge base for your distributed team.