Best Way To Manage Multiple Remote Staff?

[GetShitDone]

I've hired multiple remote staff to work for me (VAs, salespeople, lead generators, etc)

What's the best way to manage (multiple) overseas workers in your opinion? (Eg. when you have 5-10 staff or more)

Eg. softwares, tips, processes, etc.

I imagine this is a good question for the current C0VlD-19 times we're in - as lots of teams are working remotely.

 

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[BigRomeDawg]

Microsoft 365 stack is great, it’s what we use and recommend to our clients. We were using Slack for chat until recently but really enjoying Teams now.

Frequent video calls. A good meeting rhythm and getting that face-to face is crucial. Rockefeller habits has some crucial reading on this

Scheduling is big for us - we try to get everyone to schedule just about everything, time blocks or even specific tasks. Even if it’s rough, I love being able to see the whole week/month planned out across the whole team, helps me visualize progress.

Metrics/goals: really helps to see the needle moving with trend lines or to have some KPIs that are reviewed daily/weekly. Gives everyone an extra level of accountability.

 

[aeden]

I've hired multiple remote staff to work for me (VAs, salespeople, lead generators, etc)

What's the best way to manage (multiple) overseas workers in your opinion? (Eg. when you have 5-10 staff or more)

Eg. softwares, tips, processes, etc.

I imagine this is a good question for the current C0VlD-19 times we're in - as lots of teams are working remotely.

We are a distributed team with 19 people (many full time, a few part time). Here are some things we do that work for us:

Clearly communicating objectives and key results. We do this through a Trello board where each column is the objective and the cards represent the key results. Each key result has a rating from 0-10 on likelihood of achieving the key result during the current time period (we use quarters). We have all-hands call every 2 weeks to go over current status for the work that is being done towards each key result and we adjust the rating accordingly.

Each key result has a list of projects or action items associated with it. Projects include extended descriptions about the work being done. All projects we undertake are documented using the same structure - what is the problem? what does success look like? what are the MUST/MUST NOTs? deadline? who do you ask for help? have we done this before? These projects in turn are linked to individual implementation tasks.

I hold a one-on-one with every full time team member every two weeks. The purpose of this is not to go over their work tasks but instead focus on their personal and professional growth. This has the added benefit of making it very clear if something is holding them back allowing us to brainstorm ideas on how to improve things.

My business partner is a big part of keeping things running because he keeps me honest (and I do the same for him) about how we are organizing our time and the time of the team members. We have a weekly check in on this (FWIW he's in Italy, I'm in the US, so like everything else, this is done through a zoom or slack call).

We strive to document all significant decisions in writing. For me a decision that is significant always involves at least two people. We record our decisions in GitHub issues as the majority of our task work is tracked there.

We use Slack for everyday chatting, and Zoom (or other video solution) for face-to-face conversations (although we try to limit the number of these) but decisions must always be documented.

Caveats: my business is an Internet infrastructure business (DNS) is now 10 years old, so our choices of how we operate are influenced by the history of the company and the requirement of very stable systems.

HTH