Lesson 21: Building External Teams

Building External & Remote Teams

Building external teams can be tricky. You never really know what you will get. Candidates could be responsible, industrious, and skilled, or they could be a great resume with nothing behind it. When you build a team external from your core team and culture, you must do more work to keep everyone aligned, but when it works, it can be a very beneficial circumstance.

A few potential benefits to having remote resources or remote teams include:

•               Less sensitive to company culture changes because they aren’t living it every day, this can be both a positive and a negative.

•               Higher general productivity because they aren’t subject to the distractions of working around a large group of people.

•               Cost less because you don’t have to pay for an office or lights, or a desk, or lunch, or other perks you offer your local employees.

•               Put in more hours because they usually feel that their work must speak for them since they aren’t local to speak for themselves.

These benefits seem attractive and might make you wonder why everyone doesn’t hire remote resources. Well, the reason is that finding quality remote workers can be difficult. When you open your pool of prospective hires up to include the entire world, you must do a great deal more sifting to identify who can add value to your organization. So, how does one do that?

Recommendations for Remote Hiring

Make sure you are communicating well and often.

Remote teams need constant contact to function well. Whether you use Skype, Appear.in, Slack, or some other platform, make sure you communicate with your teams often. Create a culture of oneness in a group that is never together. Making sure you’re doing daily video check-ins and chatting.

throughout the day will go a long way to making this happen.

You have a company culture that guides everyone that works there, but teams also have their own distinct cultures. For local teams, people create this by being in the same place.  They laugh, they joke, they work through problems, and they do it all while they are physically together. Remote teams need culture, but they start at a disadvantage.

Try to nurture an integrative culture with your remote team. Play online games together, watch a movie in a chat room together, do anything you can think of as long as you all do it together. Because if you don’t have a culture, you don’t really have a team. If you can afford it, bringing in your remote teams to your HQ once or twice a year and leaders at least quarterly is a must.

Keep on top of the work.

A remote team will get away from you quickly. Everyone is in a disparate location and it’s hard to corral everyone together at the same time to discuss the status of a project or a problem that needs to solve.

Make sure you have a clear and documented list of deliverables, requirements, and a plan to achieve your goals. Remote teams are chaotic, so take as much of the chaos out as you can. Do that with transparency, communication, and documentation, and you will gain much more control over their direction and performance.

Ask for references.

You probably will not be hiring people with no experience for remote roles. A person just entering the workforce is unaccustomed to the requirements and responsibilities of having a job. This means they need someone to mentor them and show them what it means to do a good job for you. Without that, you can expect them to be unproductive.

If you are hiring someone with experience, then it means that they got that experience working for someone else, and likely with a team. Ask them for references so you can get an assessment of their abilities from someone that has paid them. People who take pride in their work will have no problem connecting you with someone who will sing their praises. If someone refuses to give you references, it is a red flag.

Ask the tough questions.

An interview is where you get to know someone and get an idea of where they will fit within your organization, and how they will interact with others on your team.  Don’t shy away from asking tough questions. If you hire them, they will get into some challenging circumstances, and someone is likely to do just that. Don’t wait until they are under the gun, and you are relying on the outcome. Ask them tough questions early.

If they are being interviewed for a technical position, give them a technical challenge to work on with some of your technical leaders. See how they do and get those leaders opinions afterward. You are hiring them for their work product, so let it speak for them.

If they are a salesperson, have them sit in on some sales calls and give you feedback about your process and team. How would they improve things? What do they think your teams are doing well? Do they think they can do the job to the standard you expect?

If they are in marketing, have them bring their portfolio of work and sit down with your marketing department. Let them round table the campaigns they’ve created and managed. Ask them why they decided they did and what mistakes they made. How did the campaigns perform? What were the most important metrics for those campaigns? See if they understand the mechanics of the job, you want them to do before you hire them to do it.

Be honest about your expectations before you hire them.

Lay out what you want from them and what success means to you, because if they will be on your team, you will spend a lot of time and energy on trying to make sure they are successful. If you both start off with different ideas of what doing a good job means, you are both going to end up disappointed.

Make sure you both see value in each other.

Hiring remote resources can be good, but it comes with risks. Because they are remote, they probably won’t develop bonds with their co-workers that are as strong as they would have been if they were local because they don’t spend as much time together. Remote workers don’t get asked out for dinner, drinks, or a movie with their teammates like local workers do. There isn’t as much socializing, so the team bonds aren’t as strong.

Those bonds keep people with you when it’s crunch time, and they are what incentivize people to put in the extra time and give the extra effort when it’s all hands-on deck.  Remote workers don’t have that same drive, so find other ways to create them.

Ask what drives them.

Listen to how they talk about previous teams and what made them invested. The importance of this can’t be overstressed. Figure out what is a value proposition for them and offer it to them if you want them to be fully committed to you and your vision.

Gauge your risk.

Before you hire someone, you need to pay close attention to danger signs.  Do they talk about how no one on their previous teams performed up to their standard? Was their last manager a jerk? Did they not get paid enough, or have bad leaders, or not believe in the product, or many other red flags in their previous work experience?

These are just a few examples, but any of these may be a reason to pass on making someone an offer. Bad attitudes are infections, and you don’t want to bring toxicity into your organization.

Check out their reviews.

Depending on where you find your people, there may be reviews of their previous contracts. Many hiring portals have systems like this, and if you are getting your workers from a service like this, then you should take advantage. Look for people who have successfully completed multiple contracts for several employers. Look at their ratings. If they have a portfolio of work, have your leaders test it. Taking the time to do research early can save you much more time working through a bad hire.

Know what you’re getting into and be deliberate.

Remote workers and teams are just that remote. They may try to work within your time windows of operation, or they may not. Sometimes this is necessary, and sometimes it isn’t. Decide which works best for you. If you are hiring sales teams from Argentina and you are in the US, then the time difference may not be a big deal, but if you are hiring software development resources from a company in India, then it may be an enormous deal. They may not work in your time zone hours of operations. That means you will have to allocate a local resource to interface with them. It also means that your local development resources will only be able to talk to them for a brief period each day, if at all.

Know what you are getting into and fully analyse the challenges it will present and the difficulties you will have to overcome if you make whichever choice you make.

Group and grow your remote teams and make them local to them.

Just because a resource or team is remote doesn’t mean they have to be an island unto themselves. Don’t overlook the opportunity to create a new office one team at a time. If having a remote team works out for you, there is no reason you can’t hire more remote people in the same location. Then, calculate whether it is worthwhile to get an office there and have them all become remote-local. That is a great way to diversify your locations and open your company up to the talent you would have otherwise never had access too. Some people just don’t want to work remote, so having an office near them means they will be a potential hire.

Having a remote office also enables you to overcome the loyalty problem inherent in remote teams. You create a new division that can operate on its own, with its own set of KPIs. Long term, if you become adept at creating remote teams and aggregating them, you could sell that division off and go do it again. Yes, remote teams can be a revenue centre if you’re good at it.

There is much to consider when creating and maintaining remote workers and teams. They can either benefit or detrimental, sometimes both, but they are always worth considering.  The financial advantages of hiring teams that are remote are too great to overlook. Take your time, consider your options from all sides, and make the best decision for you and your company.