Operator Collective - Venture capital firm
Operator Collective
Welcome to the first post from the one and only Anna Jacobson, Operations & Data Partner at OpCo Anna is a cross-functional business leader, data strategist, and operations veteran who is passionate about combining technology with process and organization design to ensure outstanding collaboration across technical, business, and creative teams Her strong leadership and communications skills combined with hands-on technical proficiency have enabled her to lead across a wide variety of contexts, bringing breadth, creativity, process, and innovation to every endeavor
Outside of work, you can find her eating and photographing her way across the world with her husband and son She’s also an avid nature fan and spends as much time as possible in the forest and on the water in her adopted home of Vancouver, BC
Anna is known for her operational expertise, and in this two-part series, she will take us on a deep dive into her perspective on internal operations to offer practical advice on building remote teams effectively and with empathy
I spent the first chapter of my career in one of the most in-person, co-located industries there is - construction management Even so, at the time I left my prior job, my team had been fully remote for over a year due to the pandemic We were thrown into remote work without any planning or preparation; the company did not have a work-from-home policy, and many people on my team had never even used Zoom before Although necessity can drive innovation, these were the worst possible conditions for any kind of intentionality about our new workplace culture, remote operations, or communications practices Most of us, myself included, were barely hanging on, just trying to survive in a frighteningly uncertain time
By contrast, here at Operator Collective, our team has been fully remote and fully distributed by design from Day 1 (which was pre-COVID) Like any startup, though, our internal operations practices developed organically and on an as-needed basis at the beginning As we enter our third year, our organization has matured and our team has grown, and so has our need to take a more intentional approach to how we function as a team One of many things we focused on last year was identifying our challenges as a remote team and designing actionable solutions to address those challenges
Remote teams have to find the right mix of tools and processes to ensure everyone has access to the information they need, understands what’s happening, and is empowered to do their job well
When teamwork is being conducted across different schedules and time zones, careful coordination is necessary so progress doesn’t get stalled
When work is always accessible and team members are reachable 24/7, misaligned expectations around availability can cause frustration and delays
To ensure healthy interactions, remote teams need to create practices to gain emotional insights about their colleagues that don’t rely on nonverbal cues such as body language, intonation, and facial expressions
The chance encounters that happen naturally in an office environment are few and far between for a remote team, potentially making it harder to form emotional bonds or know the whole person
The emotional component of lack of visibility, FOMO is the sense that things are happening that a team member is not aware of, with the negative perception of being left out or left behind (a bad feeling, whether or not it is actually the case)
Because remote teamwork relies heavily on asynchronous communication, which tends to be slower, it needs to be timely and high-quality to avoid significant back-and-forth that could mean losing days between unclear messages
Overcommunication is the strategy that addresses all of the challenges described above and enables all of the other strategies described below Though I chose it, I don’t love the word “overcommunication” since it implies communicating too much Really, what I mean by it is communicating more than what people were used to in the past - but just the right amount to optimize the team’s productivity
And it’s not just about quantity, it’s also about quality - which usually means clarity For example, instead of ending a message with “What do you think?” (something I have been guilty of doing many times in the past!), our team now strives to state clearly the goal of the communication, usually one of these five things:
When and how we communicate is also important, and consistency helps remote teams to communicate quickly and efficiently Our team has seven modes of communication with defined use cases:
Each of these modes of communication has its place in a distributed setting Using them consistently is a key to our success as a distributed team
There’s an ideal combination of communication types on a remote team: mostly asynchronous, with intentional synchronous communication only as needed - what we call async-first The goal of being async-first isn’t to eliminate synchronous interaction; an async-first approach aims to shift where we sit on the communication spectrum to find the right balance We want to maximize the benefits of both async and sync communications while minimizing their problems To do this, we have async communication as the starting point, make synchronous communication more purposeful and efficient, and enable team members to work on a schedule and in a rhythm that’s best for them
On a remote team, team members need to have aligned expectations about each other’s availability for collaboration
On our team, we don’t expect each other to be immediately accessible outside of scheduled synchronous interactions such as meetings and 1:1s, even during “business hours” (which increasingly feels like an outmoded concept when we are working across four timezones) However, we have developed some shared expectations so that we can reach each other when we need to:
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