Lessons Learned: How we've built a successful remote team culture

Since totaliQ’s early days, we’ve had a remote workforce. While we do have an office location where a majority of our staff works, we also have employees located across the country that rarely come into the main office. Operating in the technology sector, we have the unique opportunity to enable our staff to work remotely to accommodate their schedules, their families and their lives.

Remote workers are increasingly common: according to a Gallup study, 37% of US workers have telecommuted before. In 1995, that number was just 9%. As more and more employers start to hire remote workers, the numbers will only rise. Working remotely does have its challenges though, and it’s important to equip employees with the tools and support they need to get the job done. In this post we share our Lessons Learned from years of remote work, and actionable advice for creating a productive and successful remote work culture for your own organization.

These are the most valuable things we’ve done to ensure our success:

1.     Trust - first and foremost. Trust that you have hired the right people to do the job and get the work done. While a remote work team may require increased visibility and management, micro-managing your employees is a surefire way to create a toxic work environment.

2.     Core work hours – the beauty of remote work is that employees can get their work done at a time that is best suited for them. For some people, that is early in the morning and for others, that’s late into the night. We have implemented core work hours when everyone needs to be accessible and available for meetings and team collaboration. But the rest of their work can be completed at a time when they feel they are their most productive and focused.

3.     Accountability – we have a daily meeting each morning to go over what was completed the day before and what each team member is working on for the day. This doesn’t need to be a time consuming or arduous task – even 15 minutes is enough time to establish a routine, provide accountability and keep employees in the know of what is happening within the organization. Maybe for your company, this call can be weekly, or each department or project team has their own accountability practice – choose whatever works for your organization and see the value this can add over time. With remote teams, have an all hands call or video chat to loop in all team members.

4.      Virtual Task List – keep an action list for each employee, department or project and make it available for employees to see who is working on each project and what tasks have been completed or are yet to be done. Having a virtual, shared ‘to-do’ list provides further accountability for each employee and can enable faster progress, even when employees aren’t in the same office together.

5.     Communication – anyone who has worked remotely knows that it can get lonely. Organizations need to implement tools to foster collaboration, connection and communication among employees. Employees should feel encouraged to reach out to their colleagues with questions, insights or help. This is an essential part of fostering a positive culture among employees even when working remotely. You need a managerial structure that involves having your managers regularly touch base with employees to identify any upcoming problems, identify issues that need to be addressed and ensure they receive the resources they need. Feedback and engagement are especially important for team members who are less visible because of remote working.  

6. Employee engagement - we use our totaliQ platform to engage employees. We’ve gamified this system so that employees gain points, move up levels and receive monthly achievements when they share their knowledge and help out their colleagues. No matter where our employees are working from, they can quickly log into the platform and check out where they’re ranking for the month and ‘level up’ by sharing their experience or engaging with a colleague’s content. This definitely brings our employees together through fun and healthy competition, but it’s also produced some really great insights that have helped our company progress and succeed.

Some helpful tools we use to facilitate remote work:

Slack - Slack is our go-to tool for daily interaction among our staff. Slack is a collaboration hub that can replace email to help you and your team work together seamlessly. A Slack workspace is made up of channels where team members can communicate and work together. It has a clean interface and definitely cuts down on the amount of email in our inbox! We also use it for our daily company meeting.

ClickUp - ClickUp is a cloud-based project management tool. Users can assign comments and tasks to specific team members or groups of team members. Tasks can be marked as resolved or in progress. We use it as our visual ‘to-do’ list so everybody is on the same page no matter where they are.

LastPass - LastPass is great if your company uses any shared log-ins for websites. This is a free password management tool that lets you generate secure passwords for each website that your company uses, share them with employees and then automatically fills out the login fields when an employee accesses a website. This way, you don’t have to email passwords around, worry about forgetting passwords or share your passwords with employees who may end up leaving the company.

totaliQ - particularly for large, distributed engineering teams working remotely, totaliQ can give companies maximum visibility into each employee’s expertise, and where that expertise lies across offices and regions, enabling the organization to save valuable time and resources when putting together proposals and project teams. It’s hard to maintain visibility into a company’s experience and expertise at the best of times but this is exacerbated when you have a remote work force.

At the employee level, if you are working remotely it can be difficult to know who to turn to when you need advice or help - you can’t simply lean over to ask your desk mate! With the totaliQ platform, we allow employees to ask targeted questions to other employees or to an entire project team or department. Everyone benefits from seeing both the question and answer. This is then captured in our platform to enable further cross-training for current employees, or for new employees who may come across the same issue in the future. The value in this is that all insights are recorded and are searchable at any time - so you never lose valuable knowledge in the course of a conversation on a channel like Slack. Read others insights in totaliQ to learn, grow and be mentored by other employees - no matter where you’re working from!

How does your company handle remote work? Any tools you can’t work without? Let us know in the comments and contact us here to find out how totaliQ can help your employees learn from each other - no matter where they’re located.