| >> have 1 team meeting for few hours Wednesday afternoon This is really old-school (coming from a 40-plus!) and just doesn't work anymore. What if I have more than a few direct reports or multiple teams? When exactly is "Wednesday afternoon" for global teammates? How do I share this temporal, ad-hoc conversation with team members who can't call in when I decide "n O'Clock on Wednesdays is forced bonding time"? The overall sentiment is good and I completely agree of about geniunely caring for your team members, but synchronous, in-person communication just doesn't scale for remote teams. This advice also seriously conflates all the different roles a manager fills into combined interactions. You shouldn't be discussing status reports, career planning, personal issues and shooting the sh!t in the same forum, especially all-hands. Finally, email is terrible for surfacing actionable steps from meetings. There's no ownership or deadline and you will already be buried under a huge mountain of emails. Will another tool solve structural issues with your remote team? Absolutely Not. Do you need another tool to manage remote teams? Maybe; at the very least you need to tweak the tools you already use. |