Remote work is here to stay — leaders, managers, and executives must be able to adapt to this new working environment in order to operate a successful company. Below we discuss some of the tools we use at Leverify to remain effective while being fully remote.
Communication
For any business to operate smoothly and efficiently, communication between individuals and departments must be seamless. Communication in a professional setting comes in many different forms and while there is no substitute to face to face communication, there are a lot of helpful tools to make communication within your organization flow. For the sake of this discussion, I have broken the types of communication with a company into two use cases — quick, informal communication to keep a project moving and communication needed to teach a new hire or colleague a new skill. For the first use case, Leverify uses Slack to communicate quickly and informally. It is the equivalent for us to peeking your head around the cubicle and asking a quick question. This allows our employees to not waste time with the formality of an email and clogging up their inbox. For the second use case, we use a tool called Loom. Loom is an asynchronous video recording tool that records your screen share and the user can narrate. This has given our employees an effective way to onboard new employees and develop new skills within our existing team.
Reporting
There is a big difference between being at work and getting work done. This new wave of remote working has shined a light on managers who are not able to differentiate the two. A lazy manager sees their direct reports at their desk and assumes that their team is working. Whereas an effective manager is able to set clear, measurable KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) for their team and they measure against those KPIs. At Leverify, we use multiple reporting tools from the most basic google sheets to more sophisticated tools such as Airtable and Tableau. These tools allow us to track, measure, and visualize important metrics to our business and do so in real time. They also allow us to annotate the reports allowing for quicker feedback loops. The other tactic we’ve adopted at Leverify is a page out of Amazon’s playbook and that is building a ‘write it down’ culture. Customer support and sales are easy to track via dashboard and spreadsheets, but there are other roles that involve more strategy, critical thinking, and frankly alone time. These types of situations create a lack of transparency that can be difficult to manage remotely. At Leverify, if someone is doing a strategy session or peer brainstorm, we expect them to write down their findings and relay it to the rest of the team. This creates transparency, but also forces the team to critically understand what they’re working on in order for that to translate to a long format memo.
Camaraderie
Lastly, one of the most difficult components of remote work is to build a close-knit team and culture. Zoom happy hours are stale and forced and almost do more harm than good. It’s important to understand what the common interests are for large swaths of your organization and cater to them. For instance, we have a large cohort of employees who love to sing so we created a talent show with fun prizes for the best performances, most creative, and the funniest. We’ve also helped launch fantasy football leagues and video game tournaments to foster a friendly competitive environment and allows for healthy water cooler talk during the week.
