Companies with distributed teams are future-proof.
Creating a remote team is just the first step towards taking your company into the future. It requires a whole new set of skills to lead a remote team. Great leaders can become frustrated when their team members are not in their office as before.
These are 2 challenges leaders of distributed teams face and how to overcome them.
Building culture: Getting team members to embrace values isn’t easy, whether they work in the same building or remotely. Something that has worked great with our team is defining every month a value in specific. We encourage them to share related content they find interesting about it. We meet together on video calls, and we share different stories when we had put that value into practice. We laugh and we get to know each other better.
Building trust: it takes time to trust your friends, imaging building trust with a coworker you have probably never met in person before. So it is important that you start small with baby steps. If you are starting a project, make sure you determine and discuss expectations. In addition, encourage informal conversations over video calls, take time to know your team members at a personal level. Try switching most remote communication to regular video calls, which are a better vehicle for establishing rapport and creating empathy than emails or voice calls.