The two biggest challenges for remote employees are distractions and procrastionation.
Their managers most often struggle with engaging their team while also managing their performance.
Of course, these challenges aren’t unique to a remote environment. A shared office has its fair share of distractions, and presence alone doesn’t translate into engagement.
And yet, the office has an intrinsic advantage over your remote set-up: going to an office creates structure and encourages office-triggered patterns. Or, in other words, by working together with colleages in a physical space, you end up creating habits and routines that are based on the office environment and help you stay focussed.
When leading a remote team, you need to create these habits and routines deliberately. That doesn’t mean you’ll mimick the office, instead you want to create the patterns that help your team to focus independent of their location.
Luckily you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Scrum is an agile product management methodology that helps product and engineering teams to quickly and efficiently work on their goals. Traditionally, scrum relies on certain routines, or ceremonies that revolve around “sprints” - deliverables and goals that can be reached in a defined timeframe, e.g. 2 weeks.
Sprint planning: The team gets together to hash out what exactly is going to be part of the upcoming time frame. This is where you define what success looks like, and what needs to be done to get there.
Daily stand-ups: Every morning team members share what they’ve accomplished so far, what their next steps are, and whether they see any blockers. The idea here is to get a really quick overview. That’s why traditionally this meeting was done while standing in a circle.
Sprint review: At the end of the sprint, the team gets together to review what has been accomplished. This includes demos and showcasing the results.
Sprint retrospective: Where the review is all about celebration, the retrospective is about learnings and change management - a.k.a. what are we going to do different next time.
I have purposefully left these descriptions non-team-specific. As a Scrum Master I know that this approach works for product and engineering teams. And I also know that it can be successfully implemented for your Marketing team, your CX team, or your Sales team.
So - how does this look like remotely?
Scrum combines a clear temporal structure with a tangible sense of accountability.
Quarterly or yearly goals are difficult to grasp for team members who are focussing on day-to-day work. Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, are a lot easier to keep track off.
Which cadence you choose is entirely up to you.
As a product manager, I have led one-week and two-week sprints, as well as six-week Shape-up cycles (with two weeks of cooldown phases in between). I’ve also led quarter-long quality implementation programs and two day long website redesign sprints.
It’s not about the timeframe in itself, it’s about the timeframe matching the results you want to achieve as a team.
Remember: focus and accountability are key ingredients for your team members to be successful in their tasks. Helping them to define every day what they will be focussing on today can help employees centering themselves, while managers know where things tand.
At the end of the day, remote work is still work, and work has to happen at some point.
So here’s my approach to using scrum as a process for remote teams, once you’ve decided on your cadence.
Most engineering teams work with one- or two-week sprints. Those may be too short-lived for your marketing or sales team. So here's an example that presupposes a monthly sprint cadence.
Sprint planning team meeting: A collaborative conference call designed to define the goal for this month. This is not about sharing information. This is about together creating a plan for the next four weeks. The result of this call should be a clear document that states:
- a measurable goal for the month
- the deliverables that go with it
- who is responsible for which part
This meeting happens on Tuesday in week one. This means that everyone has Monday to research and prepare for this meeting. It is participatory on purpose: it allocates work to be done!
Daily standup: Even if your company has fixed work hours - I recommend written updates, doubling as the input for your retrospective later during the month. Geekbot is a popular Slack app for this task, and most project management tools also include an option to collect the data.
Daily (optional) focus blocks: For those of us with ADHD or ADHD-adjacent, having a real-time accountability tool can make all the difference. Encourage people to meet for work on a video call, video on, mic muted. Use 5 min for everyone to share what they want to get done during that hour - and then start the timer for 45 min of focus work. The last 10 min are for decompressing.
Sprint review team meeting: At the end of the months, this team meeting is specifically designed to review everything that was accomplished during this month, showing the results. Make it visual, hype it up.
This meeting happens on Tuesday in week 4. That way people can finalise their demo/presentation etc on Monday.
Retrospective: This is a stand-alone meeting, not to be combined with the review meeting - to avoid the emotion trap. Where you celebrated before, now is the time to critically look at what worked and what didn’t.
This meeting happens on Wednesday or Thursday in week 4.
Social team meetingsa: At the mid point of your sprint, have a team meeting that is not related to the sprint at all, but simply brings people together to socialise and bond.
A big driver of distractions and procrastination are uncertainty about the next step, or a lack of urgency to get something done.
By dividing work up into smaller parts, with clear deliverables and tangible deliverables, it is much easier to figure out the next step. The stand-ups and focus blocks help with accountability and avoid last-minute late night pressure cooking.
For managers, the scrum methodology offers visibility of progress and regular opportunities to work together and coach team members. Combined with a more structured performance management approach, this can make all the difference.