Distributed teams have many benefits, but also some management challenges. Is your team also making these mistakes?
Table of Contents
- Summary of The 7 Common Mistakes
- Not Setting Clear Working Hours and Boundaries
- Not Including Remote Employees in Meetings and Calls
- Having Ambiguous Roles and Responsibilities
- Not Empowering People to Solve Their Own Problems
- Reinventing the Wheel Far too Often
- Setting Infrequent Check-ins
- Turning Managers into Bottlenecks
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Summary of The 7 Common Mistakes
Remote work is here to stay. There are numerous studies that show remote work reduces stress, saves employees money, and promotes workforce inclusion (source). In larger companies, it is becoming more common to see teams that work from home and multiple offices spread across one or more countries. These workforces are distributed and pose a new challenge. How do you manage a distributed team and how do you avoid making mistakes that harm morale and productivity? We have years of combined remote work experience and found these seven common mistakes pop up over and over again. In summary, the mistakes are:
- Not Setting Clear Working Hours and Boundaries
- Not Including Remote Employees in Meetings and Calls
- Having Ambiguous Roles and Responsibilities
- Not Empowering People to Solve Their Own Problems
- Reinventing the Wheel Far Too Often
- Setting Infrequent Check-ins
- Turning Managers Into Bottlenecks
Now let’s dig into each of these items in detail.
Not Setting Clear Working Hours and Boundaries
This oversight can lead to a host of issues, including burnout, reduced productivity, and strained relationships within the team. In a traditional office, working hours are defined by the physical presence in the office.
However, with remote work, these boundaries can blur. Employees can work from home, or a coffee shop, or hop between multiple company offices located in different time zones.
Given this freedom, employees feel the need to be constantly available, leading to an “always on” mentality. This can quickly result in burnout, as the distinction between work time and personal time disappears.
Managers must set and communicate clear working hours to avoid this pitfall. This not only helps employees manage their time better but also sets expectations for availability and response times.
For example, specifying that team members are expected to be online from 9 AM to 5 PM with a lunch break from 12 PM to 1 PM. It means setting your “working hours” and blocking off times for recurring non-work events like lunches, school drop-off / pick-up, etc. It’s also important to think about setting meetings at appropriate times, so one team member isn’t joining a recurring meeting at 6 AM local time.
Along with setting working hours, it is equally important to establish boundaries. This includes respecting personal time and ensuring that work does not encroach on evenings, weekends, personal holidays, or paid time off. Managers should lead by example by not sending emails or messages outside of designated working hours. This helps to reinforce the idea that it is acceptable to disconnect from work and enjoy personal time. Using features like “schedule send” can help here as well.
Implementing clear working hours and boundaries offers numerous benefits. Employees are more likely to feel less stressed and more satisfied with their jobs, leading to higher productivity and reduced turnover. Clear boundaries also foster a culture of trust and respect, which can enhance teamwork and collaboration.
Not Including Remote Employees in Meetings and Calls
Meetings and calls are essential for team communication, collaboration, and decision-making. When remote employees are excluded, they miss out on vital information, opportunities to contribute, and the chance to build relationships with their colleagues. This can lead to feelings of isolation and being undervalued, which can affect their motivation and overall job satisfaction.
How do you solve this problem?
Simple. Schedule meetings at convenient times for all team members and leverage conferencing tools like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom. We also suggest making video optional for internal calls to reduce the formality and to focus on the task at hand.
Moreover, we encourage sharing notes in a central repository (like Notion) and using async tools (like Loom) so people who cannot attend the original meeting or decision can “get up to speed” quickly on their own time.
Even if you feel like it isn’t necessary for someone to join a call, there are options available. First, you can set them as “optional” for the call. Second, you can share highlights in Slack for all channel members to see. And third, you can add the full detailed notes in Notion or Google Drive for people to reference in the future, as needed.
You are still part of the same team, even if you are not colocated in the same office.
Having Ambiguous Roles and Responsibilities
Distributed work did not create ambiguous roles, but it certainly did increase the opportunity for things to be ambiguous or vague. If you do not fully understand an assignment in the office, you likely have the opportunity to get clarity by asking your manager or talking to a colleague who sits near you.
You also have many unstructured, informal ways of gathering information from team members -- like when you get up to grab coffee or wait for a meeting to start in the conference room.
This is much harder to do with a distributed team if everyone is working from home and disjointed. Issues get compounded when people do not regularly speak to each other, either via written or verbal communication. This ambiguity leads to confusion, inefficiency, and frustration.
For example, three people from your sales team have a great call with a sales prospect. Everyone gets off the call and is excited.
But what are the next steps? Who emails the prospects? Who gathers the answers to their questions? Who updates the CRM? Who notifies the sales leader?
You need it to be abundantly clear who is assigned to which task and what is the expected due date. Or else you get duplicate work, mistakes, and incorrect responses.
To avoid these problems, create regular team huddles (with and without managers), frequent employee 1:1 meetings, use templates wherever possible, and leverage project management tools to create visibility across the org.
Instead of running everything through a formal (e.g. complicated) process, it can be helpful to ask for a 5 minute Slack call to review a Google Doc or an email before it gets sent out.
These little moments mimic walking over to a colleague’s desk in the physical office.
Not Empowering People to Solve Their Own Problems
Think about how you want to feel about your work. You want to feel empowered to solve problems, to grow, and to be given the tools so you can succeed.
Without empowerment, managers may fall into the trap of micromanagement, where they feel the need to oversee every task and decision, and employees feel stuck.
Not only does this destroy the morale of good employees, it can create bottlenecks. An employee has to wait for approval or guidance on every little step, instead of acting promptly and getting things done.
So how do you avoid micromanagement in a distributed team? Share information by default. Meeting agendas, call notes, project management tasks, and more. All of these should be public by default.
Creating an org chart and showing who reports to who is also helpful -- particularly for people who are working on projects that span across multiple teams. Write down the steps for simple processes, so that everyone (existing team members and new ones alike) know what to do.
If you find an employee asking a manager a question over and over, take a moment to reflect on how you can solve this bottleneck once and explain how to document the answer so others can learn from it as well.
Most things, like how to correctly taking meeting notes or email a sales prospect or file an expense report, can be standardized and templatized.
That’s how distributed teams win. When people in different teams, in different locations, at different times, can deliver results without waiting for a single approval that often can take days to arrive.
Reinventing the Wheel Far too Often
It is good to make steady, incremental improvements to all of your processes. That’s how a well oiled company functions. But you can take it too far.
Managers who frequently throw away entire processes and start from scratch waste precious time and resources. This not only slows down progress, but it leads to employees tuning out because they feel like their work is not valued and can be thrown out at a moment’s notice.
In a remote setting, where coordination can be more challenging, this inefficiency becomes even more pronounced.
For example, let’s say an engineering team decides to set a daily stand-up for 15 minutes and the engagement level is low. After a few meetings, the manager changes to a weekly stand-up that lasts for 1 hour. Engagement is low again. Next week, they shift to a daily stand-up but asynchronously through Slack. The month after, the manager says, you know what, it’s not work my time. They drop it all together.
All of this back and forth creates confusion. If the original 15 minute daily stand-up does not work, take a moment to stop and ask the engineers themselves why it’s not working.
The problem could be as simple as they do not understand what to share and how much detail to go into.
Maybe you need to provide an example of what a good stand-up looks like or explain why we need one (e.g. to share what you are working on and focus on any bottlenecks or roadblocks).
Distributed work is new, but you can still leverage best practices and proven methods instead of starting from zero in all aspects of management.
You should foster a culture of continual improvement and self-empowerment, especially with multiple team members who are working across multiple time zones and cannot always be in contact.
But remember that continual improvement is not the same as throwing away all of your progress till date.
Setting Infrequent Check-ins
Good managers check in frequently and are transparent. Bad managers check-in infrequently and are vague.
While it may seem like a way to give employees more autonomy, being too laid back in your communication creates gaps and missed opportunities.
Young professionals are new to the workforce and need the feedback to grow. Experienced professionals are used to working in the office and thus, getting frequent feedback organically.
Either way, you need to provide ongoing communication and feedback to make sure that team members understand their responsibilities and have the tools needed to succeed.
The worst thing you can do is say nothing. Infrequent or lack of check-ins can leave employees feeling disconnected, uncertain about their performance, and unsupported.
Employees who start to feel isolated (or like their jobs do not matter) will decline. It is the fastest way we have seen companies kill the motivation of a talented employee.
So how do you set check-ins? We suggest a 5-10 minute weekly 1:1 between an employee and their direct manager, plus a larger team meeting every 2 or 4 weeks. An all-hands meeting (with the entire company) is typically done once a quarter.
You want to drive alignment between an individual contributor, their department, and the whole company.
An individual account manager should see how their work ties into their personal goals (compensation / promotion), team’s goal (NPS / retaining customers), and company’s goals (revenue / profit).
Turning Managers into Bottlenecks
This is the biggest pet peeve of mine. If every decision has to go through a manager, then you have created huge bottlenecks in your company.
When managers become bottlenecks, they hinder the team's ability to work efficiently and independently. Team members might experience delays in getting necessary approvals, accessing resources, or making decisions.
In a remote work environment, these delays are exacerbated by the lack of immediate, face-to-face communication. It’s even worse if someone is sitting -- waiting all day -- to start a task simply because someone else refuses to respond to an email or instant message.
Effective remote teams distribute decision-making and empower employees to take ownership of their tasks.
This approach reduces dependency on managers for day-to-day operations and fosters a more agile and responsive team.
For example, a sales rep can email prospects and schedule calls without any need for approval. They can demo the product and answer questions without any approval. Only once pricing and contracting is discussed, a manager or director does need to be included.
If that is the structure, then you can easily have ad-hoc calls or a recurring meeting twice a week to discuss deals that are at the pricing/contracting phase.
When employees are empowered to take ownership of their work, they become more invested in the team’s success. When employees see bottlenecks, they become unmotivated because their responsiveness is not being reciprocated.
Bottom Line
Managing a distributed team can be difficult. People are different and need to be managed in a way that respects their individuality while still maintaining clear standards and expectations.
Here are a few tips on how to successfully manage distributed teams. First, set clear working hours and boundaries to maintain work-life balance. Next, include remote employees in meetings to ensure they feel valued, fostering engagement. Set clear responsibilities to avoid confusion and finger pointing.
Empower your employees to solve problems to foster autonomy. Avoid the trap of reinventing the wheel by starting with best practices and tweaking only when needed. Hold regular check-ins to bridge communication gaps and provide support, ensuring alignment throughout your team.
Finally, prevent managers from becoming bottlenecks, which will increase agility and efficiency. By addressing these areas, managers can build a cohesive and productive distributed team.
Hopefully, these tips above helped you. If you are looking for software to get a better pulse on your distributed team, you should check out Conrad. Join the waitlist here.