Leading Newly Remote Teams
Leading Newly Remote Teams A guide for managing, mentoring, and operating design virtually. Learning The Hard Way Sixteen years ago, I started a design studio in Southern California. A year later, I hired the first employee who lived three time zones away on the East Coast. There was no requirement to move, no relocation offered; I hired the person because I wanted to work with them. The second employee was the same story, another super talented person that I wanted to work with—they can work remote. We all worked out of our homes and collaborated through a combination of AOL Instant Messenger, Campfire (the IIRC “Slack” app of the time), Skype, and that old application we rarely use today, the telephone. Once we learned how to upload biganimated .gifs to our chat channel, the company and its culture were off to the races. Everything went well until I hired my next handful of employees locally in Southern California and opened a small office. It didn’t take too long for the culture and company operations to take a hit. Frustrations mounted. Conversations were now happening in all of the regular digital channels, but also “in-person” places at the office. The local group was presenting design and making decisions without the inclusion of the remote members of our team. Out of sight, out of mind, became the norm faster than I could see it coming. Within months I had two companies: One remote and the other local. It sucked. To fix this, we got together, talked through problems, and agreed on a plan to turn things around and make it stick. And it took a lot of effort on everyone’s part to get our company back. Years later, when I worked as an executive design director at USAA, I took an opportunity to move to Seattle with a caveat that I would travel to San Antonio for one week per month. Despite going to headquarters with more frequency than that, I still found myself left out of conversations and eventually decision making. Out of sight, out of mind is very real, and it takes a concentration to turn that around. This is all to say working remote successfully is super hard. And it doesn’t take much for a small team, let alone a large company, to start receiving a few hits. As I write this, a large client of ours sent all of their employees home today as part of a company-wide readiness test in preparation for upcoming campus closures as a part of the COVID event. I live near Seattle, where tech companies have already made headlines with their travel restrictions and campus closures. To the south, in Portland, Nike closed its campus for a “deep cleaning,” whatever that means. In short, for some of us (likely many more of us eventually), work and life routines are changing shape abruptly. Working remote is likely to become a reality for significant portions of our workforce—especially for those jobs that can relocate with a laptop. Most of us have experience working remote for a day or two here and there. A vacation that we might have wanted to extend or a sick day spent at home. The one-offs are easy enough to do, but it’s the extended remote work that will have an impact on your team’s ability to interact with others, collaborate with parts of the business, and possibly your team’s culture (something that when damaged can take a lot to recover). With this in mind, I have collected stories on how to run an effective design team remotely. You will find content that covers everything from collaboration to culture, content to pass down to your team on avoiding distractions from working at home, and other topics related to the remote practice of design. I hope you will find these articles useful. If you know of a story or another source that we should include, please let me know at gregstorey@invisionapp.com. In the meantime, please keep an eye out for more content and resources by joining my colleagues and me in the Design Leadership Forum. Greg Storey Sr. Director, Executive Programs, InVision @brilliantcrank
