Transitioning to a Distributed Organization.

Let’s face it, distributed teams…or remote…or virtual…whatever you want to call them, are here to stay. C19 kicked us all in the butt and there’s no turning back. Some companies were lucky and had already adapted to either a fully distributed setup or a hybrid one, but right now, across the board, companies are trying to wrap their heads around how to transition into this new world, where the team and work primarily have an online presence, and physical, face-to-face engagement is much rarer.

Naturally, the Creandum funds’ portfolio is going through the same thing, and recently we held a joint discussion with 20+ founders, in which we all shared our learnings and experiences, and exchanged best practices relating to this. The following is a summary of this discussion, which we think many companies will be able to benefit from.

Think online-first.

No matter if you’re operating 100% or partially distributed, or even if there is only a handful of team members who work from home, you have to think online-first. Software is your office, not the physical building some of you might be sitting in or where the physical post is mailed to. Inclusivity is the key to building a strong company culture, no matter the location. Utilize the advantages of the always-on internet to overcome geographical or time-related distances.

A few virtual office tips to pass on to your team:

• Transparency is important: Encourage conversations in open channels, so anyone can follow them and stay on top of everything that is going on.
• Similarly, discourage private messages (unless it’s really private).
• In a virtual meeting, require individual participation even for those in the physical office — meaning everyone should log in with their own camera instead of sitting in one room with several people behind one camera — it creates an unnecessary distance to team members who are not in the office.

Document everything.

In a remote setting, likely working across different time zones, asynchronous communication is the norm. To overcome this challenge, documentation is essential and you need to assign new importance to the written word. All knowledge, processes, workflows, as well as discussions and decisions, should be put on (virtual) paper, no matter if kept in Favro, Google Docs, Notion, Airtable, GitHub — you name it.

Discourage internal email communication as that creates silos. Instead, default to documenting everything in open destinations that anyone can access through a URL. Further, video/audio-record all important meetings, and transcribe them, so people can skim the content quickly if they couldn’t attend. There are many tools out there to help automate this. The tacit knowledge this is generated in meetings, but then oftentimes lost, can be one of your organization’s most valuable assets.

The all-hands game show host.

As a leader, you know how essential it is to bring the right energy into a meeting, but transmitting this energy virtually is much harder. This is especially critical for the all-hands meetings where the core purpose is to rally your troops. Hence, you need to dial-up your enthusiasm by 3x to ensure the energy transcends the cameras. If you’re the leader of the meeting, think of yourself as a game show host. Disregard your self-respect for the moment, get the humor out, and play the game.

Engage the audience and have different teams present the topics they are working on. People pay more attention when there is a frequent change of speaker, so use different people to present and create natural sections that start and end within a meeting. In addition, make sure to invite more-junior team members to present, in order to ensure that a larger share of the organization feels ownership for the meeting.

If the meeting is long, consider activating the participants by doing physical exercises such as warm-ups, collective breathing, etc.

Foster non-work-related communication.

Naturally, most of the communicating at work with co-workers is about the work which needs to be done. However, building social bonds and knowing the human being behind your colleague's role is key to building trust and eventually efficiencies within teams. Hence, you need to proactively encourage your team to spend part of their work hours to socializing. Organize and randomize buddy 1–1s to get to know each other. Use dedicated products, like Donut, that facilitate this kind of social communication.

One tactic is also to schedule meetings to start 15 min earlier than planned and use that extra time to specifically talk about completely non-work-related things. This is a perfect opportunity to build trust by, for example, centring the conversation around an emotional question like “When was the last time you cried?”, or “What is your fondest memory from your childhood?”.

The playbook for distributed teams is in constant development, and we’ll continue to share more learnings from the Creandum funds’ portfolio. We’re learning more every day that goes by. Do you have any further tips and ideas to upgrade distributed work? Ping us! 👩‍💻💪