Hey Vengat – thank you for these words!
Regarding the transition to remote work, I have many suggestions, but these I’d say are the most pressing:
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Focus on making communication expectations clear. Specifically: Match the message to the channel. For example, is it clear what communication channel (e.g., Slack, Basecamp, email, Zoom, etc) should be used if something is urgent? Or what about if someone is going to be offline? Creating some sort of shared document on what these communication expectations are is key. Here are a few examples:
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Be extra intentional with social interaction. As you mentioned, this is the biggest thing that folks miss in moving to remote work is the sense of rapport. To account for this, you’ll want to consider setting up things like a buddy system, or having a dedicated non-work channel for talking about things like pets etc., or doing virtual coffee or board game hang outs. In Know Your Team, we have something called a Social Question which we designed for this exact purpose, that you might find useful.
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Automate your status updates. With remote teams, it’s a burden to hold meetings to figure out what everyone is working on – you’ll waste precious time. Instead, find a way to have a system that proactively asks + shares what everyone in the team is working on. We use the Heartbeat Check-in here at KYT to do this, internally.
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Give an abundance of trust. When you’re remote, it’s easy to wonder, “Is my team working?” You’ll want to nix that nagging paranoia, because (1) you never can really know, even if folks are in person (2) what you should ultimately care about is the results, and (3) extra pressure + surveillance, especially when remote, hurts a team’s performance. Instead, focus on creating clear systems of communication + proactive sharing of progress, and trust your team to do the work you hired them to do.
For a deep dive, you may want to check out these free resources, as well:
- Guide to Managing Remote Teams – it’s 60+ pages I wrote based on data from 15,000+ people
- KYT Workshop Live! Session on How to Manage Remote Teams - it’s a 60 min. recorded online workshop with best practices.
In terms of how I split my time as a CEO, one caveat: My role is likely a little different than other CEOs because I execute all of our content. As a result, I spend about 20% on team communication, alignment, conversation, strategy, 20% talking to customers, 60% writing + researching our content, as well as any growth experiments we’re running.
More broadly, CEOs we’ve surveyed tend to focus mainly on three things: (1) Recruiting / Hiring, (2) Long-term vision, and (3) Communication.