Remote Team Collaboration: Best Practices I’ve learned at Pivony

Even though I’m not a fan of remote work settings, in today’s reality, especially for small startups, finding productive team members and bringing them together in one office is like walking to the sun. You will burn more as you make an effort to make it happen. So let’s face reality and adapt yourself in Remote work. Here I am sharing my experience at Pivony. There is no one single truth, however, these are our best practices based on the last 4 years of huge amount of work and online collaboration.

How to build a remote team?

There are great websites such as wellfound.com (formerly angel.co). Candidates who prefer remote work settings prefer these websites. The good news is that WellFound is free and you can list as many jobs as you want. At Pivony, I hired 90% of my employees from Wellfound.com and I’ve been using that since the first day.

Team building activities for remote work

There are challenges in keeping the team members productive in remote work since it’s not possible to go out for a lunch break or a coffee break. So you need to be creative in finding team-building activities. In order to make it happen, you need to start by asking your team members about their hobbies, and specialties, like playing chess or singing songs. I still remember the online Karaoke party we organized at Pivony. People were free to choose their songs, and that was also reflective to discover the diversity of the team. That helped to create strong bonds within the team.

How to collaborate effectively if your team is remote?

I think there is not enough information on the Web about the hidden secrets of using the remote team solutions such as Slack, Discord, Google Chat. At Pivony, we tried them all and we found Google Chat is better since we are also using Google as the email service provider and we have our online meetings via Google Meet instead of Zoom. So let’s come to the point. You need to have

• Dedicated channels regarding the job dynamics such as
  • DEV-PRODUCT: Developers who contribute directly to the product
  • DEV-DATASCIENCE: Data scientists and engineers who contribute to the AI models
  • BUG-FINDER: Anyone in your team reports the bugs here and the developers get assigned
  • INTERNAL-ALERTS: That’s a channel having posts auto-created by your system-generated actions. They can be regular statistics about user subscriptions, internal key metrics that are critical for your business.
• Conversations containing more than one people
  You cannot discuss everything in the channels, otherwise there will be plenty of messages and it will take time for everybody to follow the discussions. In order to make things clear for a specific task, it’s better to communicate this in 3-people conversations. In our case at Pivony, it consists of 3-people, the CEO, the CTO and the Team member since we are a small team and our team members feel more valued when they are in direct contact with the founders.
• One-way conversations: The Announcement channel
  It’s highly important to keep everybody in the team motivated. Having an announcement channel makes it easier to share the recent good news about your work. That can be anything about an achievement, awards, new customers etc. Note that this should have a one-way conversation, the content is to be posted only by the founder and the rest of the team could only react with emojis. By doing that, they will feel equal in terms of reaching the information.
• No room to 1-1 conversations
  If you have anything personal to discuss, make it through 1-1 online meets, not written conversations. In remote work settings, seeing each other helps us to do more empathy. Other than online meetings, I don’t suggest discussing anything in private. Why? According to our experience, regardless of whatever is being discussed, that conversation will be shared with a 3rd person and you need to explain to the 3rd person from the beginning the entire conversation. So we ask our team members to always have 3-people conversations.
• Cameras to be always open in meetings
  This requirement might seem odd, however, it’s a way of showing respect to others to have cameras open. Virtual backgrounds are great for hiding the background, so you can feel comfortable sharing your face at spontaneous meetings during the day.

Are you interested in getting help to make your remote team more productive? I believe in the value of productivity in all senses. Visit my UpWork profile to get engaged with my consultancy service.