The Science of Small Wins
Without the conventional trappings of what work is (an office, a commute, etc.), remote teams are questioning and reimagining the future of work.
Here's how the best remote teams get stuff done.
The multi-million dollar company WooThemes started with a single email, as a small side project of Magnus Jepson in Stavanger, Norway, Adii Pienaar in Cape Town and Mark Forrester, then in London.
From that one email sprouted a bootstrapped company that produces a rich catalog of WordPress themes and plugins, serving 450,000 users. And this impressive success emerges from a distributed team of only thirty people, spanning seven countries.
All too often, to-do lists end up with more things to do and less things getting done. Humans are awful at completing lists. We often convince ourselves that we can complete our to-do list if we just buckle down and try harder.
Yet tomorrow, or next week, or next month rolls around, and the list is just as bad as it has always been. Probably worse, if you are like me.
So when we found iDoneThis at Zapier it immediately clicked.
– No more over bearing to-do list? Check.
– Transparency into what everyone on the team is doing? Check.
– Email based? Check.
– Built-in motivation to do meaningful things each day? Check, again.
I loved it.
Recently, an internal memo from Yahoo announcing a ban on working from home has sparked a feisty debate about the merits of working remotely. The explanation given for the policy change comes down to one sentence in the memo: “To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side.”
As a distributed team ourselves, serving many great companies with flexible work arrangements, we don’t think people’s physical presence in one place is necessary to create the best workplace or the best work. Where we do agree with Yahoo is how vital communication and collaboration are to a company’s success.
The nature of remote work actually compels companies to grapple with and figure out how people communicate and collaborate best. Fortunately, connection and communication are what technology and the web have made so much easier. Finding the right communication tools becomes even more pressing for distributed companies since that toolbox helps create our shared space.
As a follow-up to our ode to distributed companies, we thought we’d share what communication tools we use to stay connected, creative, and collaborative together. These communication tools are great not just for managing remote workers but for any teams, since no matter the physical working arrangement, strong team connection and communication are key to accountability, productivity, and innovation and great customer service.
There’s not much mystery behind how a distributed team works. We show up, in our respective locations, talk to each other, and make stuff happen. The alchemy of coming together to make it work is the same that any team experiences when they build something together. There are a lot of ingredients that go into that magic, and these days, people’s physical proximity to each other is not necessarily one of them.
Like many of the teams we serve, our own iDoneThis team is dispersed. While we experience both the challenges and benefits of the form, what stands out is how naturally that form compels teams to consider and resolve the process of daily collaboration. When we get down to it and count the ways we love distributed teams, we see the alignment of four elements — company culture, communication, productivity, and the right people — that help make the magic happen.
half of the magic-making iDoneThis team
Ravelry is a website for knitters, crocheters, spinners, and other people into fibers, with close to 2.7 million users, or “Ravellers”, around the world. The site houses a rich database of patterns and reference information, ways to keep track of projects and stock of your yarns, and a forum for its Ravellers to interact.
In fact, Ravelry has been called “the best social network you’ve (probably) never heard of”. In talking with Mary-Heather Cogar, VP of Operations/Do-Gooder, that sense of close-knit community shines through, distinguishing Ravelry as an example of what can be so great about the internet.
“There’s something really amazing about connecting with people that are into the same things that you are. A lot of Ravellers have struck up friendships, sometimes in totally different countries, or met people in their own communities that they didn’t know were out there. They were used to knitting in front of Netflix or whatever — we all love to do that but sometimes you feel like you’re the only one passionate about this in your neighborhood. It turns out that there’s a group of people that are super into crocheting also, or new spinners and they’re all learning together.”
Reddit, the popular social content site and community, hands power to the people to decide what’s important and what’s not. iDoneThis likewise hands the reins to Reddit’s team to use how they see fit.
With the Reddit team scattered, from San Francisco to New York and in between, the challenge may be to get a remote team on the same page. Yet, the main use of iDoneThis for the Reddit team is as a personal record, and then by extension, as a reference for the team.
Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin explains, “We all wear a lot of hats. We’re only about twenty people. All of us do a bunch of different things, so it’s hard for us to jump around. It’s nice to be able to track how that’s going, maybe not what we’re spending time on as much but what we accomplish on any given day.”
Building a business from scratch is a huge challenge and doing it with a virtual team is even tougher. The interaction and information exchange that happens when people work in the same room often get taken for granted. It’s something that’s tricky to replicate when the team is straddled across different locations and timezones.
So why bother with a remote team? For founder Laura Roeder, having a virtual team is a competitive advantage. It gives her greater flexibility in hiring to make that she’s focusing 100% on quality and fit. It also suits her hands-off management style. Everyone in the company has the autonomy to do their own thing, so long as they’re openly and actively communicating with the team.
The reason why we exist is to help companies like Pipedrive work richly. They have an amazing story — they’ve gone from Timo selling books door-to-door in San Jose to a company that spans three continents and has created one of the hottest and most useful CRM tools on the market today. We’re so proud to be an ingredient in their success.
I love the guys at Pipedrive because their ambition is global. They know that sales is a problem that knows no boundaries—not language nor culture—and so from day one, their scope has been international. Pipedrive was founded in Estonia, but at any given time, its founders are in Tallinn, San Francisco, Santiago, or Nairobi to spread the good word about Pipedrive, a simple CRM that people actually use.