Operator Collective

Navigating flexible schedules and different time zones.

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

Creating spontaneous social interaction.

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)

Remote Teamwork Strategies: Building Visibility

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:

• Asking for input (“Do you have any suggestions?”)
• Asking for collaboration (“Could you please do X, Y, and Z?”)
• Asking for confirmation or authorization (“Yes or no?”)
• Asking for direction (“Let me know how you want to proceed
• ”) Each of these use-cases requires a different type of response; in order to be efficient, team members need to know from the outset what is being asked of them

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:

• Email: for all external written communication and some internal written communication (e
• g
• internal discussion about an external email)
• Slack: for some internal written communication (e
• g
• standalone conversations, follow-up on verbal discussions)
• We have a whole separate guide that delves into much more detail about how we use Slack
• In-App Comments: for internal tool-specific collaboration (e
• g
• Google Docs and Slides, Airtable, Canva, etc
• )
• Whenever possible, we have enabled Slack integrations for these tools so that in-app comments get posted to Slack (especially helpful when people are on the go!)
• Text Message: typically reserved for personal and/or urgent 1:1 written communication
• Zoom: for internal and external voice and video communications
• Phone: typically reserved for personal and/or urgent 1:1 voice communication (or when we need a break from Zoom)
• In-Person: for quarterly offsites, community gatherings, etc

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

Clarity around availability and responsiveness.

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: