Been working for a fully-distributed remote work company for about 15 years. I think one of the difficult things a lot of orgs are going to discover is that there’s a big difference between “surviving WFH” and “being a remote-friendly company.” Individual workers are getting tons of advice right now, my only input is for people trying to wrangle teams:
- Don’t judge or micromanage what people are doing moment-to-moment. Let them accomplish their tasks however works for them.
- Others have said this, but it’s true: move as much explanatory communication as possible to shared docs with commenting/suggestion turned on, and a deadline for “closure.”
- Realtime meetings (esp with video) are cognitively and psychologically intensive, esp when team members are working in new/stressful/unfamiliar environments. Whenever possible save them for celebration, connection, ideation rather than information-dumps.
- As a team lead/manager, dialing up the amount of time you spend in 1:1s seeing if people have what they need, and how they’re doing, should be going up rather than down. When remote, you can’t rely on “pass in the hall” nods and greetings to weigh how everyone’s doing.
- Finally, as a lead or manager, you have to be gentler on YOURSELF under current circumstances, too. Lots of things are going to fall through the cracks because there are more and bigger cracks. Tho it’s not remote-specific, @rands has lots of great advice in “Managing Humans.”