Why Launching a New Project with a Remote Team Is a Good Idea

As the project's leader, you must be ready to risk shareholders’ money and your own bonus in order to take on a compelling new business venture. Having a remote team in the project will lower expenses and make hiring easier. However, it will definitely lead to many operational challenges. Let's talk about how to address these.

Why it is worth choosing a remote team

If your company continues to employ office-based workers, a new project might be a good opportunity to try the remote model. The ability to work from home is the new ‘office biscuit’ that the team will appreciate more than free coffee and company fitness. And yes, it means you can pay less. They are unlikely to leave your remote office for a competitor just to get 10-20% more.

Additionally, the hiring pool will expand to include new regions or even countries where life is cheaper and candidates' salary expectations are lower. Set up two options for the expense budget: with the participation of the office team and the remote team. Try both amounts on your project, which probably looks good on paper but has not yet passed the test of harsh reality. Opt for remote.

Hiring remotely

Even if you have a business plan for the project and a described MVP, use interviews with potential new team members to retest your hypotheses and look at the project from a new angle. Whether you are talking to candidates inside or outside the company, you should ask them the following questions:

• Is the product we have come up with viable?

• Will we achieve the result on time?

• Are we organizing the workflow correctly?

The answers to these questions will reveal more about the interviewer than a summary and general words about motivation and career goals.

Talk more about the goals of the new project than the specific tasks of the employee, even if you are filling a grassroots position.

Building a team

Keep in mind that teammates on a remote team frequently have little to no interests outside of work. They don't go out to dinner together, they don't share a Qashqai to get to work, and they don't have any laughs to exchange from the past New Year's company party. Other than the project, nothing connects them. It means that this connection must be very strong and obvious.

If you demonstrate that you truly value everyone's perspective, the remote team members will be more likely to share their thoughts with you. Increase the level of criticism of your decisions and choices that is acceptable, and use anonymous surveys to gather feedback at least once every three months. Don't forget to do exit interviews with people who have been fired and, most significantly, those who have left on their own.

It is crucial that remote teams' working relationships are transparent. The most influential factor— informal communication — is almost entirely excluded, Zoom conferences are unable to transmit the full range of intonations, facial expressions, and gestures. As a result, you have very few methods for gathering information from employees. Therefore, you will need to overcome your own fears and develop the ability to directly ask hard questions.

Supervision and task-trackers

Most likely, you are familiar with the services used to manage the work of remote teams. Various time trackers and supervision programs have been placed on work PCs in many firms since the first lockdown of 2020 because these companies believe that such methods of work monitoring are ethical. If you think someone completes daily activities in six instead of eight hours, you should consider why this bothers you at all.

Most certainly, the inadequate or inaccurate description of the work responsibilities and the desired outcome is what's causing the worry. And for this reason, you can't tell whether your staff members are genuinely doing a decent job. It is preferable to tackle the issue from a different angle and outline the participants' responsibilities for the new project in such a way that they want to ‘switch on the stopwatch’ is permanently gone.

✅ Using any of the well-known task organizers, such as Trello, Asana, Jira, Weeek, or Redmine, you may keep track of task progress and assess the quality of work.

Building routine and communication

It is preferable to build a set of routine work in a hierarchically organized business using ‘horizontals’ and ‘verticals’.

⬆️ Upward vertical. You should decide what outcome the employee's immediate supervisor gets, and in what format and terms.

⬇️ Downward vertical. The desired outcome of the task should be understood by both the employer and the employees.

As a result, the following should be included in job planning:

• the conditions and sequence of approvals;

• evaluation of the effectiveness of the employee's job;

• assignment of new duties and distribution of them among the team.

⬅️ ➡️ Horizontal. The team communication process, including relationships with other departments, must be described in detail. Remote teams share the same traits as office teams when it comes to the divide into ‘us’ and ‘them’. There should therefore be little to no room for assigning blame for a partial or local failure. At each point, the timing and process for the transfer of work between individuals and departments should be documented, and this paperwork should be made available to everyone involved. Correcting this communication process is acceptable, especially after a big ‘horizontal’ conflict.

What else is crucial to take into account

🗓 Daily planning. Ask each team member to post in the general chat at the start of the working day the tasks they plan to complete today if you don't have time for regular morning Zoom meetings.

⚖️ Work-life balance. Make sure no one is working too much, especially if the project is meant to last years rather than months. Talk to folks who post in chats after work hours to reduce their chances of burning out after several months of remote work.

💯 Remote work is once and forever. Those who are used to working from home are unlikely to return to the office. Global corporations like IBM and Yahoo learned this lesson before the pandemic, wasting tens of millions of dollars between 2013 and 2017. There is no need to make those expensive mistakes only to get first-hand experience.

🎯 All team members should always have access to your product roadmap. This is the ultimate truth, a way to dispel uncertainty and settle conflicts. If you have to make ‘hidden zones’ on the road map that only you know about, keep in mind that doing so could cost you dearly in terms of decreased productivity and disloyalty.