How to build an effective remote team that actually collaborates

Posted on September 20, 2018



It may sound obvious, but I just can’t stress it enough. Because when your head is down in development on a project, it’s easy to slip into side conversations and asides that never end up getting communicated to the remote team members you’re leading. You have to constantly remember to project what you’re doing out to your remote team members. Or pretty quickly you end up working from two entirely different playbooks.

That’s why at Table XI, our primary work infrastructure is engineered to support remote work. While most of us are co-located, we want to stay flexible, and we currently have staff working everywhere from Chile to Seattle. Using remote-friendly systems does a couple of good things for us, which I’ll discuss later, but the key benefit is that it keeps people who are remote from being at a disadvantage. All our work happens in a remote-friendly infrastructure. The rest — coffee runs, lunch breaks, movie nights — are additive. You don’t hear people talking about work on coffee runs.

Here are our tips for engineering effective remote teams:

Create a virtual office


We use Slack, because it allows us to quickly spin up these channels where teams can talk about their project, or their discipline, or even just their lives. Alicia, our remote project manager wrote about why she’s joined almost every channel:


Give your remote team a way to communicate availability

Once you’ve established a home for the team, you have to give everyone the ability to communicate presence. Just like a physical office, where people wear headphones to show they’re working and can’t be interrupted, you need remote people to be able to say hello, goodbye, I’m not around. Otherwise someone will ask a question and it will go unanswered. Or worse, you’ll be constantly pulling your remote workers away from their tasks.

Use video communication whenever possible

Keeping connected is one of the biggest challenges a remote team is going to face, kind of by definition. My advice: Always use video. Make every meeting a video conference. We like GoToMeeting for its reliability, but Google Hangouts works too. Just give everyone on the team a chance to see each other. Phone calls work, but you need a format that lets the human part come through. Video lets you see facial expressions and read emotions, so you have a better understanding of how people are feeling and what’s engaging them.


Have everyone work in fully collaborative tools


Develop a way for employees to show their work


We’re lucky, because this is actually already built into the Agile workflow and Scrum methodology, where big projects are broken down into small programming tasks and assigned to individual developers. The only training we had to do to make this remote-friendly was find a tracking system that works well for everyone. We use Pivotal Tracker and Redmine for all of our project management needs, but any software will do as long as it’s something your team will actually use.

Deliver project work to third-party tools, not a person


Create culture and engagement by building in the personal



The benefits of everyone using remote working best practices



  • Everyone knows what work is expected of them
  • Everyone’s work is recognized

A few weeks ago, our quality assurance specialist Robin was in Spain. An urgent question came up that we just could not wait on, so we sent it his way using these tools. He responded right away, keeping the tempo going with a minimum of disruption to his vacation.


1 Reply to "How to build an effective remote team that actually collaborates"

  • Richard Hamlin
    June 10, 2019 (11:01 am)

    Thanks Mike! This was a helpful article to get my team engaged using Slack!

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