Managing a remote data team. I recently finished Remote’s book, and…
By: Adrian Pino
Tags: Remote Working, Data Science, Office Hours

I recently finished Remote’s book, and reflecting on the last 8 months working remotely, I wanted to share a bit the learnings on managing a high performing data team on a remote environment. Those learnings apply to any area, they are not data specific. Since this situation may last for another year, I hope you can capitalize on those learnings.

This pandemic has been the first fully remote experience for many companies. At the same time, we are all locked down at our homes, seeing limitations on their personal freedom. It is an interesting test, albeit not the best experimental setup. We have too many things happening at the same time, and it’s easy to associate a badly performing team to remote. Let’s try to isolate lockdown from remote before jumping to causal conclusions.

The tricky thing is that the efforts to help your team with a lockdown situation may look counter to the standard remote work textbook, so finding a middle point is hard. In standard remote people can travel, see their relatives, go to restaurants, and have meaningful interactions outside the office. This may not be possible now, so on those times, managers need to walk the extra mile and provide the support that they’d get elsewhere. Let’s get right to it.

Check often on your team

Let’s face it, this is a tough time for everybody. You need to understand how your team is faring, relatives may be having a hard time, having the virus, may not have seen their beloved ones in a while, or lost them. Care for your people, but especially more these days. Set up frequent one on ones with them, and if you have the possibility from time to time, meet with them in person. Use these meetings to really know how they’re faring, not for status updates. That can be done over email.

Set up some optional time to talk about stuff unrelated to work. I really believe that will help you to get to know your team better, but bond with them.

Give your team more ownership

You shouldn’t be controlling your team, but leading it. If you have problems with micromanagement, this is really a good time to improve. Give more ownership and projects to the team. This will keep them motivated and sharp focused during those times, and you’ll waste less time coordinating them. Lead and empower, not micromanage.

Control the out-of-office hours

With not that many things to do, being at home the whole day, it’s easy that some of your workers stretch the workday an hour or two. That’s fine, and sometimes needed when an important release is due, but shouldn’t be the standard. These extra hours will burn them down, they will become more negative and jumpy, and this negativism is contagious.

If you use GSuite at your company, one of my great discoveries has been to learn to schedule your emails. Did you find a dashboard broken on Saturday? Schedule your email to get sent on Monday morning.

Give example

Linked to the above, if you as a manager are always on, logged in at 10PM on Saturday, your team will see this as normal, and desirable, and you’ll generate a perverse dynamic whereby they’ll start imitating you, even though you’re encouraging them to have a work-life balance. If you need to finish a report or a presentation on Sunday, set yourself as away, and if you need their input, try not to involve them until Monday morning.

Communicate asynchronously

Learning how to do this has been one of the better improvements in efficiency at work. Prior to lockdown, default communication was Slack, or face to face.

The standard was: you need something from a colleague, you Slack them, this goes like:

Adrián: Hi John, how’re you doing? (return) Adrián: I wanted to ask you something. (return) Adrián: Do you know where that dashboard you sent me about users is? (return) Adrián: I can’t find it :D (return)

There, you just fired 4 notifications to John’s computer, and probably also to his mobile phone, probably distracting him from what he was doing. What about a longer form message?

Adrian: Hi John, how’re you doing? (shift+return) I wanted to ask you something. Do you know where that dashboard you sent me about users is? (shift+return) Adrián: I can’t find it :D (return)

Notice the differnce. This will translate into fewer notifications, and better peace of mind.

Document more

It’s easier to get to know things at the office, you just ask. On a remote environment you default to an instant message. This means a message from anyone interesting on knowing how your project is going. The number of your incoming messages grows linearly with the number of people interested. So do your notifications. Your stress probably grows more than linearly.

Write a document where everybody can see your progress. A question answered in the document publicly is useful for everybody seeing it. You’ll be more productive, your company more efficient, and everybody will be happier.

No meetings unless necessary

During this time, meetings have increased in frequency. There is a lot of non-formal communication happening in the office that now needs to happen in a videocall. I need to ask something to the team, so I’ll set an hour meeting with the team to discuss it. The problem with this is that not only you do this, but everybody else. Calendars easily get packed like a Tetris game and there’s little time left to work on the outcomes of those meetings.

One of the direct consequences that I’ve observed from this is that people tend to put more working hours, because they don’t have time left to finish all they have to do. This can be done on special occasions, but it is not sustainable over time. Try to send an email instead, open a doc and collaborate asynchronously. Leave meetings to solve issues where there are conflictive points and strong disagreeing opinions.

Another trick I’ve discovered is to set the default duration of your meeting on Google Calendar to 30 meeting (even better if you set them “Speedy”, making them to finish 5 minutes earlier) It is a psychological trick, but it tells you how important is to set default values. Now, if you want to fire an hour meeting, you will have to forcefully change it.

Iterate

We didn’t arrive magically to this situation. Try these ideas, and if they don’t work, change them and learn, adapt them to your workplace. Change timings, frequency of meetings, processes, and so on. Ask your team for feedback on whether things are getting better or worse.