Ask HN: Good books on managing a hybrid/remote team?
I am going through a promotion process at work and a large part of the interview process centres around solving the challenges of hybrid working (which in this context means that each team member will spend some days in the office and some WFH). To complicate matters I am based in a different office to the rest of my team so even when I'm in the office I am working remotely.
I'd like to read some expert insights about how to manage this situation. Can anyone recommend some good books by business leaders or management experts about how to approach management in a remote working or hybrid working environment? I'm not in a STEM field so it doesn't need to focus on STEM (and in fact would rather it is not too closely tied to STEM or any particular industry).
Thanks in advance!
19 comments
[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 58.1 ms ] threadThe hybrid just means you also get the nice parts of going to the office, but for any remote work to work, async remote kinda needs to be default for the whole company, and the office are just perks
And to the second point, I'm not sure there is a real hybrid model in the sense of people wandering into an office now and then when they are in the mood. I do think one or two scheduled days in a week--assuming a co-located team which often isn't the case--or scheduled team on-sites once a quarter or whatever make sense. But, for most people, just camping out in an office now and then with people they mostly don't know doesn't add a lot of value.
For the general public it seems like a new thing. But many of us have been working fully or mostly remote for decades, used to be called distributed. There is a lot of knowledge out there for anyone who want to learn, extensively tested in many organisations. The gitlab stuff, linked above, is one example.
I've been building and running globally distributed asynchronous organisations for 20y, and I've learnt some of my tips/tricks/tools from people doing it very successfully for many years before I started.
My best tips: ditch the traditional management dogma, it's quite inefficient anyway. Trust your people. Make sure they have the information and training they need. Flatten out. Push for transparency. Go async! Especially for decision making.
For me it has been exceptionally rare that people are less productive when they are given control over their own circumstances.
I've never worked in a truly async company but I imagine there are a lot of hurdles not there in a synchronous company.
* We only care about where you live for payroll/tax/etc purposes.
Every team will work differently in a remote fashion, so I would actually say the books will give you ideas, but just talk to your peers to see how they want to ideally work.
* 1on1s are very important - There is no water cooler for remote teams, so you have to manufacture it. Take 30min with each team member each week to just chat without an agenda. If the conversation gravitates towards work, fine. If it doesn’t that’s fine too. But I would take an interest in my employee’s life outside of work. I would make it a point to know what their hobbies were, their family’s names, their life story, etc.
* Protect your work time - Each Slack message is an interruption. Have at least a couple hours a day where notifications are muted so you and your team can get into a “deep work” state. If something is urgent, pick up the phone.
* Trust your team daily, hold them accountable weekly - Don’t micromanage your employees and ask what they did each day (outside of a daily virtual standup if they like that, where they post 1 message about what they’re working on and what they might need help with). But at the end of the week, evaluate their performance and adjust your management style to fit. With remote work, it is possible for folks to push the envelope on work/life balance, so be ready for that, but don’t assume it or be so worried about it that your policies become stifling.
I’m sure there are more, but those are a few that served me well through the years.
Good luck!
This is reasonable advice, but what do you recommend if we find a pattern where at the end of each week, we made maybe 25% progress on that weeks commitments? Dates committed by the team itself - not forced on them from the outside or management.
I was an IC on a team where this was happening at a big tech company. It killed morale for the few of us that were focused on delivery. We all left the team over it, and 6 months later the team was re-org’d.
I'd typically handle this in a weekly sprint call, or during 1on1s.
I'd typically take responsibility for my team's missed deadlines too, as there's almost always something more management can be doing to make their teams successful (barring bad faith performance from an employee, which deserves a different conversation).
If it was an honest missed deadline, I might say something like: "Hey team, I know we missed the deadline and that's had [this specific impact] on us and [this specific impact] on our client. I want to apologize because I should have caught this delay sooner. I also want to offer up [suggestion 1] and [suggestion 2] as ways to get back on track. But I'm open to other ideas as well."
Obviously, there's nuance to every situation and that isn't a 1 size fits all, but it's a general theme I'd typically use.
Some suggestions I'd typically offer were:
* Reallocating complex tasks from Jr. members to more Sr. members
* Reducing the scope
* Offering to help personally with some tasks
* Bringing in additional resources
* Revising our expectations for next week
> It killed morale for the few of us that were focused on delivery. We all left the team over it, and 6 months later the team was re-org’d.
Yep, I've seen this happen myself too. Sorry you went through it. I hope the move was a good one for you. In my experience top-performers really don't like it when other team members bring the speed / strength of the team down. It totally kills morale. But, I do put a lot of that responsibility on the manager. They should see this happening and adjust before the top performers get annoyed.