For a lot of my career in publishing I’ve worked and managed teams of people remotely, first from a cubicle at a variety of fast growing web startups, then (whenever possible) from a home office, often from hotel rooms, and lately from a fully equipped mobile office that roams coast to coast and often into Mexico as well. And sometimes others have had to manage me while I was telecommuting from all sorts of zip codes. My partner and co-owner at eBookPie has also spent a chunk of his professional life remotely managing publishing offices all over Asia, and together we run our current business mainly from the road, which was fully by design.
| Working with and managing people remotely has its advantages, as 9-5 commuting friends and relatives are quick to point out. They witness the conference calls from coffee shops and parking lots and wonder how I got here. |
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What they don’t see are the late-night staff programming failures, customer service crisis and staff stumbles that follow me remotely as well. And if your staff is international (often inevitable if you are a typical bootstrap startup) sometimes your nighttime is their day, and so the late night must become your workday as well. Because when you run a company remotely, your laptop, Smartphone, iPod Touch and whatever other gizmos you rely on are inherently your office, and they too often come to bed with you as well, ready or not.
I got my start as a remote manager at O’Reilly & Associates, now called O’Reilly Media. It has become one of the worlds leading technical publishing and conference companies, with offices all over the world. But when I joined in the late 80s there were only 12 of us, and not one had any experience as a publisher or a bookseller. Still, we wanted our books to be sold everywhere possible, and I became by default the global sales manager. I gradually put together a team of sales reps who were scattered across the country and into Canada, and because the Internet was still a few years away from becoming a business tool, I got started managing remote teams the old fashion way – via phone and fax. The advent of the Internet in the 90s and the fast development of all the cool remote communication tools we have today, like chat, Skype, video conferencing and the various social media tools has made remote management a lot easier, at least technically.
Remote vs. In-person Management – it’s the People, Stupid.
But while technology has made communication easier, like most human endeavors the ultimate success of remote management still depends on the people involved. Technology doesn’t change that. I’ve found that some people just aren’t temperamentally suited to the discipline that telecommuting requires. Too much independence can drown their initiative. They require the pressure, support and camaraderie of a traditional office environment to maintain a minimum level of efficiency. Working remotely can be lonely in comparison and it affects their performance.
I’ve also worked in more traditional corporate environments where most staff was on hand and daily meetings were held to hash out policy and plans. As a manager at meeting-happy Sun Microsystems it seemed like we had staff meetings even to decide on what donuts to order. But I learned a great deal about the pros and cons of in-person meetings and being surrounded by busy colleagues. On the plus side, working with your colleagues in the same building, and being able to meet in the same room lends itself to spontaneous brain-storming and problem solving. From a management standpoint, it also means you have better control where your staff are and what they are doing. It is the assumed loss of that in-person control that causes many companies to resist telecommuting as they do not trust remote management. All to their detriment in my opinion.
Managing remote teams does not have to be difficult. If your team understands what’s needed, understands the goals and can meet deadlines, it just isn’t necessary to be in the same room with them, or even meet them. I know of more than one successful company made up of staff based all over the world who will never actually meet each other. And at eBookPie we built an entire eBook store and continue to maintain it by managing a team of programmers and designers who we’ve never met and probably never will. It can work.
Some Tips on Building and Managing Remote Teams
Building a team of remote workers
The key to successfully managing remote teams is to put together the “right” team in the first place. People who understand your aims, are professionally mature enough to meet agreed-upon deadlines without in-your-face management are required. If you’re lucky enough, you have a network of colleagues and friends to connect with that you can trust and are interested in helping you build your business. Or they can recommend others who can help you.
Friends, Colleagues and friends of friends
Tap all of your resources – friends, family, former and current colleagues, local organizations. Assuming you’ve found people with the right skill set, let them know what you’re trying to accomplish, and get an understanding of their comfort level working remotely. At eBookPie, one of our key programmers, a young Russian based in Moscow, came via a recommendation of a friend of a friend.
Check Online Freelancer sites
Many companies make use of international freelance sites like “freelancer.com and eLance. These are exchange boards where people in need of freelance services post their jobs and registered freelancers bid on the jobs. When bids are awarded to a particular freelancer, the employer puts the agreed payment in an escrow account, and the payment isn’t released until the job has been completed. At the end of each job employers and freelancers each post their reviews on whether deadlines were met, promises kept, payments made, etc. A given job post can sometimes attract 5-100 bids depending on the complexity, so filtering the bids for quality can take some time. We have used the system with mostly satisfying results, and in one case we now work directly with a designer who we found at freelance.com.
Check local user groups
If you are looking for technical help, as we often are, do some searching to find out when local user groups meet, and where. For example, last summer we were looking for a local programmer in the Boulder, Colorado area with experience in the Ruby programming language. We discovered that a Ruby user group held monthly meetings at a nearby coffee shop, found out who the group leader was and ended up meeting with him with positive results.
Regular Communication is key
When your entire team works remotely, and in our case, in different countries, the project manager needs to establish a system that enables quick and easy communication when deadlines warrant it. We have found that things go more smoothly when we define our job requirements clearly at the start. Setting realistic delivery dates also helps. People sometimes like to over-promise, but as you get more familiar with your staff you get a sense of what’s likely and what’s not.
New Year holiday week in Russia is when?
If you are working with people based abroad you can save yourself some grief by being aware of the holidays in their country. Otherwise you end up sending out angry emails wondering why you haven’t heard from them in a few days.
How often do you need to talk?
Agree on the format and frequency of ‘talking’ with each other. In our case, due to the time differences we might talk on the phone with our main developer only once every couple of months, usually using Skype and only when there is something complex to decide on. But we communicate almost daily using chat, email and job tracking services like Unfuddle to keep up-to-speed on the status of our projects, obtain feedback and get recommendations.
Produce Weekly updates
Make it a habit to put together a list of items that were to be accomplished in the past week, and the forthcoming week, and send it out to the team. Ask them to provide comments and feedback. If you can manage to get everyone on the phone without keeping someone up at 3am, then do it. Otherwise, there are tools you can use to easily create a place for such feedback. See ‘Tools’ a bit later.
Be Squeaky!
As the manager of the remote team, you can’t rely on team members to revise schedules for you. The truth is, from their perspective no news is usually good news. If you aren’t pushing them, there is a good chance they are working on something else (most freelancers are almost always working for two or more groups at a time and are always juggling priorities based on which wheel is squeakiest….)
You’ve given them the tasks at hand, and that’s what they are busy working on. If you want to know more about how things are progressing, it’s up to you to make sure you’re communicating with your team effectively, and are providing the necessary tools that allow all of your team members to work together effectively.
Useful Tools for the Virtual Startup
How to Find Good Help
There are some great tools available online for finding people with just the skills you need for various projects.
Freelancer (http://www.freelancer.com/)
We use this service quite a bit. A summary from their website:
“Freelancer.com (formerly GetAFreelancer) is the world’s largest outsourcing marketplace for small business. We have hundreds of thousands of satisfied customers from all over the world. We connect over 1.5 million employers and freelancers globally from over 234 countries & regions. Through our website, employers can hire freelancers to do work in areas such as software, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering and the sciences, sales and marketing, and accounting & legal services. The average job is under US$200, making outsourcing for the first time extremely cost effective for small businesses.”
eLance (http://elance.com)
Similar to Freelancer.
“Elance instantly matches employers with a ready and qualified workforce of more than 100,000 rated and tested professionals with technical, marketing and business skills, and provides the tools to manage online and pay for results. With more than $245 million in earnings to date, contractors and service providers around the world use Elance to meet employers and get paid for delivering great results.”
99Designs (http://99designs.com/)
99Designs is primarily a site for hiring designers to work on such things as logos, and website design.
“99designs is the #1 marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design. We connect 69,018 passionate designers from around the globe with small businesses who need design projects completed. And, we do it in a timely fashion without the usual risk or cost associated with professional design.”
Project Development and Management
These tools are great for providing detailed specifications of your project, creating delivery schedules, assigning people to various tasks, and tracking the progress.
Unfuddle (http://unfuddle.com)
“Unfuddle is a secure, hosted project management solution for software development teams.” Here is a summary of some of Unfuddle’s features:
- Tickets – Create, assign and track bugs, feature requests, and more.
- Subversion Hosting – Create unlimited Git and Subversion repositories.
- Dashboard - Get a quick overview of your entire project.
Google Docs (http://google.com)
Google docs are key tools for everyday activity for eBookPie. And it’s free.
“Create and share your work online with Google Docs: Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings, and Forms.
- Upload your files from your desktop: It’s easy to get started and it’s free!
- Access anywhere: Edit and view your docs from any computer or smart phone.
- Share your work: Real-time collaboration means work gets done more quickly.”
Bottom line – remote management can be just as effective as in-person management, and sometimes more so as you can attract a more efficient type of worker than one that is required to come to an office.
That said, it is solely the responsibility of the remote manager to make sure the remote team is delivering as promised. In the end, just as with in-person management, the key as always is to find the right people and communicate your needs to them clearly and consistently.
The world can then be your office.
A good comprehensive article. It covered all the major aspects of what we need. My fave – its all about the people
some tips I have used:
1. Use referrals – good way to build a remote team. this is particularly true if you are building a team of contractors or freelancers
2. Choose communication technology wisely. Identify your needs and see which tool fits.
one to one chat – skype
remote team, all time communications – Sococo
large team (100+) meeting – webex?
and so on
3. choose collaboration tools wisely. note they are different from project management
sharepoint is different from box.net is different from google docs.
Regarding telecommuting, I just came across this study put out by BYU that supports the effectiveness of telecommuting in general and our own experiences at eBookPie. They analyzed data from 75,000 IBM employees and concluded that, in general…”telecommuters balance work and family life better than office workers, and maintain that balance even while sometimes squeezing in a couple extra days’ worth of work each week.” The study also mentions that over 80% of IBM managers now believe that workplace flexibility is a good thing.
http://news.byu.edu/archive10-jun-telecommuting.aspx