Read time: 3 min, 24 secs

Hey there - it's Brian 👋

We have SIX new hires starting in January.

Hiring builds insane leverage… (if you lead them right).

It’s a brutal drag if you don’t.

Have you thought about how your remote teams work best?

If you don’t do this right you…
➟ Quality slips
➟ You don’t know if people actually work
➟ Don’t know where the problems are in your business

It’s frustrating.

So I’m writing this to you from Bariloche, Argentina right now.

Revising all our onboarding materials so these people are running effectively from day 1.

Today’s issue is focused on HOW remote workers work differently than in-person.

At the end of this you’ll know:
• How to keep people engaged
• How to actually have good communication
• Maintain quality while remote (& have less meetings)

You want less meetings too?

Then let’s get into it:

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

For my friends: what’s up with Brian?

I’m writing this from Bariloche.

Building and managing remote teams from the mountains.

I’m typing from the most beautiful coffee shop in Latin America.

But I’m on a mission to meet founders.

It’s tough to do that in the mountains. So I’m heading back to Medellin.

Check out the view:👇

How am I managing my remote team?

Let’s get into it.

What makes remote hard?

Working remote is fundamentally different than working in person.

If you run a remote-first company you cannot treat it the same as an in-person company.

So what problems do we have with remote teams (and what can we do about it)?

1) No culture. No community.

Do you feel less engagement when you work remote?

You get less support.

Less feeling like a tribe and wanting to push and support each other.

We need to fix that.

2) Less informal training.

Training is one of the highest leverage things you can do.

Most of my training came from managers pulling me aside in the hallway and giving me quick feedback.

That doesn’t happen now.

3) More reliance on low forms of communication.

Only 30% of what you say are the actual words.

70% of communication is in non-verbals. Your tone, pacing, body language etc.

So the highest form of communication means ALL information gets passed (in-person conversation).

So what happens when you cut out 70% of the information in your conversation?

That’s the lowest form of communication, only the written word.

When your business is entirely remote you have two options:

1) Live (“Sync”)

Spend your day in meetings and calls so things move fast and you don’t have miscommunications.

2) Not live (Async)

This means no meetings. We use written communication and record our screen with Looms.

But there’s a huge risk that we miscommunicate.

I have talent all over the world. So my culture is async.

But here’s the thing: we CANNOT run like a normal in-person + sync environment.

So what do we do differently?

How we run our remote + async business

On my team, you don’t start async right away.

You need to learn the skills to work without immediate communication.

If async communication is not exceptional, the business suffers.

So we have training on problem solving and communication.

Pass the training and prove you can do it on the day-to-day and you earn async privileges.

So what training?

Steal ours: 👇

1) Training to improve written communication

I built these 2 trainings for our team in-house:
1) Problem solve for yourself (link here)
2) Communicate changes and needs (link here)

Master these and you can work async no matter the time zone.

How do we train?

1. Teach

2. Focus on one thing per week

3. Have 1:1 feedback sessions to ensure that ONE thing is improved on

4. Once it’s in a good spot add before we add on another

5. Ensure we don’t regress on old ones.

2) Relying on mid-forms of communication

What’s a mid-form of communication?

Video messages. Audio messages.

Things that are more async, but you can hear/see non-verbals.

It takes longer, but you get less miscommunication.

3) Would you rather have live meetings or more reporting?

So back in my consulting days (in-person) we’d start every day with the to-do list.

We’d break it down into who does what (by when), ranked by priorities.

Send updates as things got checked off, priorities added, and moved around.

End of day (EOD) before we left the office we’d review the task list live and make sure everything got checked off or moved to the next day.

That level of rapid-fire passing the ball back and forth is much easier to do in person.

But here’s how we’re incorporating it into our day-to-day:

Morning stand up + EOD wind down

Meet for 15 min before signing off to knock out all the to-dos in Asana (live in person).

Week 1: Brian does it and team shadows
Week 2: Team does it and Brian shadows
Week 3: Team does it offline (with Brian feedback)

Boom. No more meetings.

But the team needs to learn fast on how to improve low form of communication. If low forms isn’t clear enough, we go back to live until it is.

If the quality of the reporting starts to go down, we need to re-group live and train on how to report.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

Now what about time zones?

I hire my team in LatAm so time zones aren’t as much of an issue. But I’m fully nomadic and I love for my team to travel too.

But… time zone freedom has to be earned through improved communication.

It’s a trade-off. If reporting + communication is great, meetings become less of an issue.

Time-zone free.

Remote work is not in-person

Treat remote work like you’d work in person and you’ll struggle.

Re-design your culture so it’s made to work remote.

You’ll get more success that way.

We have.

See you next week 👋

Brian
[email protected]
Twitter
LinkedIn
TalentHQ

P.S. Want help finding amazing marketers & admin people in LatAm? Let’s chat

🙋 Vote: How did we do?