Am I the right one to work in a remote team?

"What do I need to bring as a team member to work remotely? What skills do I need?" A business friend recently asked me this question. I think it's an excellent and interesting question.

Classification

First of all, I would like to state that it is essential to distinguish between the different degrees of remote work:

• Is it the occasional work from the home office?
• Or are you a team member based in a different city to the office? So are most people sitting together in the office and only you are not?
• Or is it a company that only has remote employees, i.e. doesn't have an office itself?
• And as a bonus question, is it possible to work in a co-working space?

In my opinion, remote work is far too often equated with working from home. There may be people for whom working within their own four walls is the ideal situation. But for many, it is also important to separate work and private life spatially - and for them, it can make much more sense to work in a co-working space (this can also be a rented individual office at a company in the neighborhood).

Traits and skills of remote employees

Now let's move on to personal character traits and skills.

ℹ️ In my further explanations, I will focus on real remote work, assuming that there is no office and that the corporate culture takes place in virtual space, for example, in Slack, Notion, and other tools.

Successful work in a company, in a team, is characterized by social connectedness and the common striving to achieve something. In an office, this social connection is created automatically by seeing and interacting with each other on a daily basis. Everyone has a different need for this perceived social connection, but without it, a team cannot navigate through a crisis or conflict meaningfully. It requires mutual trust and a sense of togetherness.

People my age may still remember pen pals, but younger people are more likely to remember gaming acquaintances. This also creates a feeling of connection and social closeness - without having to see each other in person all the time. This is precisely what a remote company and every single team member must (want to) achieve.

1️⃣ The ability to build and maintain a relationship over distance

Accordingly, the first essential character trait or competence is building and maintaining a relationship over distance.

My experience is that the company or the leadership must constantly encourage all team members to devote time to this. And the founder or leadership must take the time to set an example. I have always emphasized that I can imagine better things than playing Scribbl.io but that this shared silliness is essential for the success of our startup. It also helps to set meaningful guidelines: for example, each team member should spend 1-2 hours per week of organized time to make small talk and the like with other team members and across the organization.

2️⃣ Self-organization and motivation

For people working remotely, it is crucial to have a high level of self-organization and -motivation. You need to be able to be enthusiastic about your work and want to work without pressure "from above.” On the other hand, you also need to find a sensible amount of working time and a good and healthy balance between working hours and free time. It is not easy for many people to call it a day, primarily when you work from home. Closing time means you switch off from work and don't check again to see if anything is new.

Of course, the company and leadership can and must provide support here too. But due to the distance, the possibilities are much more limited than when you work together in an office.

A very related topic is "non-parental culture.”

This is about taking responsibility for your working environment and surroundings. You have to have the ultimate will to solve problems and not complain about them. If you don't have this quality, "isolated" work from a home office or co-working space can also become a time bomb.

On the other hand, the company must encourage employees to do this from the outset. In our company, for example, every team member was given a virtual credit card before their first day at work, which they used to purchase their work equipment. There was a clear description of roles which, in addition to the area of responsibility, also indicated the decision-making powers.

3️⃣ Excellent written communication skills

In my opinion, one of the most critical points is excellent written communication skills. A distributed organization benefits greatly from working asynchronously. So don't set up a video conference for every topic, but first try to record, discuss, and solve as many topics as possible in writing.

Finding common dates is a bottleneck in many companies, and the daily madness of meetings prevents focus work in many companies. Therefore: start asynchronously, and this requires that it is not perceived as annoying to formulate a well-summarized, clear text.

ℹ️ If you want to work in a remote team, you should tend to over-communicate.

Why? You have to be aware that team members working remotely are not visible by default: In the office, you are visible just by being there. Others can see that you are there; they can also see how you move, what facial expressions and gestures you use today, and so on. All of this is hidden if you are not working in the same place.

If you work remotely, as a company, you have to create meaningful ways for employees to share this information, and the team members also have to be willing to share this information.

Remote team members should also tend to over-communicate in terms of work results. It is easier to filter on the receiver side — find out the relevant information for yourself — than to repeatedly request information from the sender.

Here is an overview of the type of information we are dealing with here:

• Work results
• Failures/learnings
• Events from private life
• Standups - How is the mood, are there any blockers, what am I currently working on...
• and much more. Of course, it is always posted in the right channel and with sufficient context so others can classify the information.

A team working remotely must send out information analogous to Facebook. It is not the sender who decides what information is helpful, but the recipient.

ℹ️ This does not mean producing and publishing information indiscriminately. On the contrary: it is vital to be able to communicate very explicitly (for example, not writing around the point, but clearly stating what it is about and what is essential or what action is expected) and to provide as much context as possible so that the recipient can process the information without having to do a lot of research.

At Frontastic, we have even dedicated one of the five values to this topic: transparency first.

Anyone setting up a remote company or perhaps following the impulses of the pandemic and now operating a hybrid model must be aware that this involves a significant change: Intransparency in the broadest sense: In the office, I can quickly recognize what mood another team member is in. This tells me whether it's the right time for an important conversation or whether I can ask the person for help.

New team members also learn very quickly how the team communicates because you hear a lot of things subliminally in the office.

In a remote organization, on the other hand, I have to make sure that everything is communicated in public channels in Slack or Teams, for example. This is the only way other people have the chance to "catch" this information. This doesn't mean that you have to follow every conversation - you (hopefully 😂 ) don't do that in the office either. But you should give chance a chance.

4️⃣ Willingness for intensive, personal meetings

Last but not least, I can think of a completely different point: The willingness and readiness to travel to a retreat once or twice a year and spend intensive, personal time there with other company members. Unfortunately, this is also not a matter of course and should be clarified in advance.

From an employer/HR perspective

From an employer or HR perspective, the question of how these skills can be tested in the application process.

In my experience, switching at least part of the process to written communication works quite well. We had a semi-automated question ping-pong that gave us a pretty good idea of whether the applicant could establish an initial relationship in this way. We also experimented with inviting candidates to a dedicated Slack space (optional) and offering a way to engage in "lightweight" communication.

In my opinion, this is a perfect way to recognize how good the respective skills are in written communication and how well people can build relationships in this way.

Point 2) self-organization and self-motivation, on the other hand, can be determined just as well in the traditional way as point 4) the willingness to travel to a place for a week for a retreat and to spend relatively intensive time with the team members.

Last but not least, here are two tips that many recruiting teams probably already implement anyway:

1. we have had excellent experiences incorporating our values into the initial communication and referencing them repeatedly. On closer inspection, some values, such as "Transparency first" or "We're in this together", are not suitable for every person. To stay with the latter example, the fact that it is more important to communicate or put things in writing than to produce new results causes resentment among some. However a high degree of work autonomy requires very good and very well-structured internal documentation.
2. We have encouraged the individual teams to provide concrete examples from their daily processes - similar to a diary. We have already integrated these into the job advertisements, giving applicants an unadulterated first impression of the work in the team. The important thing here is that it doesn't sound like marketing blah-blah (and it isn't), but rather very concisely describes the special features and day-to-day activities.

Conclusion

Not every personality type is suitable for working in a remote team. Some skills and abilities can be learned, others not so much.

In my opinion, both sides must be honest about their expectations. For example, the question arises about whether you can expect every personality type to participate in a retreat or whether this can be an optional offer in the spirit of "diversity rules".

What points have I forgotten? How did you experience working in a remote team, what is essential to be able to do?