How to lead your team when you’re all working remotely.
The pandemic has turned our lives and businesses upside down. For many, it was for the worst, for a few it presented an opportunity. For most businesses, however, it forced reinvention to ensure they prevail.
For our business, this roller-coaster meant going from full shutdown to a completely remote mode of operation. It also meant that this enterprise would turn from a side hustle to a full-time business employing several staff and scaling faster than ever before.
Here are a few of the many lessons learned. Some we got right the first time, others we have learned in a painful way not to repeat.
What do you need to run a business 100 per cent remotely?
At 99aupairs, we have been an international team from day one. While being Australia-based and owned, we have worked with global teams to build the platform and the agency with the best available people, regardless of their location.
However, with the pandemic, this thinking has crystallised into a business model. We now are not only able to work remotely but are actively designing all our processes around it when it comes to systems, cyber-safety, hiring and team management.
1. Get a customer relationship management (CRM) tool
Your CRM is the heart and the brains of your business. If there is one regret I have, it would be not having invested in a CRM from day one.
Your CRM not only has a database of all your customers and anyone else related to your business but also has your leads, processes, email marketing, forms and so much more.
“We use our team’s WhatsApp chat to simply call out a great little achievement.”
A big chunk of our projects in the business revolve around improving our understanding of our CRM and its potential and how we can optimise ways of serving our customers.
As an example, any calls our recruiters make through the system are tracked in the system, which they can then convert into notes, then follow up with an SMS and an email. This not only allows us to be on top of each touchpoint with every customer or candidate, but also lets us check the quality of work and improve training.
The mantra that my team has to endure is, “If it’s not in the system, it did not happen”. Every touchpoint must be entered into the database, thus we know where to pick up the next conversation with our customers and ensure we save them their most precious commodity: time.
Research various systems and choose the one most fit for your business.
2. Don’t take shortcuts when it comes to onboarding
While we would consider ourselves a microbusiness, we tend to work with partners on research or implementation projects, where we onboard up to 30 people within a few weeks. They can be all over Australia or even overseas.
Do we get it right? Not every time, and when we miss it, the cracks appear right away. Which leads me to onboarding.
If I can give one piece of advice to other business owners and start-ups, it would be to ensure you invest enough in onboarding new staff. The more your team works remotely, the more critical it is.
You have to ensure you share with the people your mission, your vision, your culture, your ways of working, the do’s and don’ts.
The younger your staff, the more you need to show them the ropes. If in doubt, assume they know nothing. Some of them have never worked in a corporate environment, thus they might not have the work ethic yet. We organise an all-team meeting once a month, where we cover our mission, vision and values, introduce new staff, and talk about projects and who works on them. Here, we also celebrate our wins and share what we’ve learned.
Ask your team members to:
- Check in when they start and check out with a daily report when they finish.
- Share wins daily. We use our team’s WhatsApp chat to simply call out a great little achievement, be it a new google review or a better ranking on SEO; of course, we give credit to the team that worked on it.
- Share learnings regularly to highlight your continuous dedication to process improvement and customer satisfaction. We allow for mistakes and encourage proactivity; there is an expectation that people will fail so that we can optimise our processes.
- Record their tasks daily in shared documents, including actions from your one-to-one meetings. Failure to do that will result in poor communication, tasks not done the way you like, and them getting frustrated. Insist on this.
I’d also highly recommend establishing micro teams and co-working days. When unsupervised and disconnected from the broader team, some team members can quickly feel lost and isolated, and lose motivation. Make time to introduce each new member to the rest of the team and connect them to others who work on similar tasks and establish micro teams.
We arrange online co-working hours where team members are grouped by project or simply overlapping days. The day is broken up by virtual coffees and quiz time to break the ice and relax. On occasion, we also create purely co-working days for staff who are local and want to meet others. Mostly they still join the online co-working hours, but have that coffee in person with a few colleagues.
3. Adapt your office hours and management style
Set contact hours when you want your team to be available (ad hoc meetings) and flex hours. This will allow you to function effectively as a company while giving your staff flexibility.
In addition to your weekly team meetings, ensure you have regular one-on-one time with each of your direct reports . Train them to be prepared. This includes sharing their screen, being camera ready, having their files open and being ready to present. From experience, daily check-ins should only take 15-30 minutes.
Each meeting is an opportunity to review and correct processes and see how people follow. Add a new process to your internal wiki with videos.
4. Invest in cyber-safety
With the recent cyber breach drama around Optus and Medibank, awareness of the potential threat to businesses has been at a record high. With our new business model of working remotely, one strategic pillar has been cyber-safety to guard our customers’ details. Thus, since 2021 we have invested huge resources in understanding cyber-safety gaps with all the digital tools we are using.
Beyond that, we have set out clear policies to ensure all our staff understand their responsibilities and are upskilled in keeping our intellectual property and customer data as safe as possible.
Back up your database regularly. Most incidents happen not because you had a disgruntled staff member but because a staff member forgot to lock their PC and their toddler decided to play office and deleted the database.
Finally, ensure you have an onboarding and exit interview with each team member to check them in and check them out from each of the tools to which they have access
This article first appeared in issue 39 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
