Ask HN: How to Manage Remote Teams

[p3rry]

There are around 7-10 developers working under me. I am thinking to give my devs working remote option . What are the best practises that i should follow or better question how do I plan "working remotely".

[davismwfl]

This is a big topic. I am assuming you are all centralized today given how you worded it.

Assuming the team has worked together in a central office so far, it is best to do this slowly and expect some headaches and maybe a false start or two. Start with going to a remote friendly environment where you allow remote work 2 days a week and work through the communication changes. Then open it to more days as you work through the process.

The biggest change is communications, no matter how small all communication has to be done in a remote friendly way. Even impromptu meetings can't have a final resolution until you include the remote participants. So essentially decisions will slow down, especially at first but it gets normalized after sometime. Also, recognize that not everyone can work remote because it requires a different mindset, for example, some people trying to work from home are totally distracted and aren't productive.

I have led remote teams for a long time, I am happy to answer specific questions or help anyway I can. The biggest thing is communications and making sure people always feel included and no one is left out. This is a hard thing to do, so do not underestimate the amount of effort it takes, especially if you already have an existing team since it is changing the way people work today versus starting that way.

[p3rry]

Right now we sit in one open office where our maximum communication happens verbally which is the reason i am not very confident. Our slack/skype uses are very minimum. I think we should practise first with work from home twice or thrice in a week to see if we can actually go with working remotely kinda job.

[davismwfl]

This is the way to start, it will let you work through the communication changes.

In fact, you should make sure you have Slack setup with channels and things are well defined for people on what will go where and when etc. Have Slack be the tool even internally when people are in the office that they turn to and ask person X a question, versus interrupting his/her work by walking over to his/her cube. Getting that nailed down decently will make someone being remote so much easier.

I do agree you need to define a primary communications tool, but also leave others on the table. In other words, my team uses Slack for 95% or more of the communication, but most calls are done on Zoom because the experience is better than Slack, especially when we are doing things internationally a lot of the time. Slack does work, but it isn't as smooth, however, I use it a lot when it is just a few of us jumping on a call as it works great then. So you'll find tools that work, and just make it clear to the team and make it simple.

Other things to think about, make sure you have something like 1Password setup, so those shared "secrets" like production creds, or keys etc are all stored someplace secure where everyone can get to them. You don't want people sharing those over email cause Jane is out of the office today and needs access to it and forgot to grab it from John before she left.

Good luck, remote teams are actually more productive in the long run in my experience, but they are not free or without some extra work, especially in the beginning.

[justdebb]

If your team is using both Slack and Skype, I think it'd be better to choose a tool and stick to it. Face-to-face communications can still happen via video for both tools, so you can still have that but it may just require more coordination and isn't as instant as in the office.

As your team slowly gets a hang of things, another thing I'd keep in mind is to make sure you keep the team motivated and maintain a good remote team culture, as remote work may feel lonely at times or team members may feel detached from one another.

There are some well-known remote teams that you can try to learn from, like Buffer and Zapier.

[p3rry]

I think i'll need to add more informal and causal conversations in our chat rooms to multiply fun element.