Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

[type12]

We use Slack for internal comms, but it's used mostly for chit-chat conversations and real-time issues. Is there a product for slow-thinking updates where I can share teams news and align my +40 people team? How can you be sure people don't actually miss things in the noise of Slack/Email?

[gwbas1c]

When I worked for Intel, we all went through training on how to run effective meetings.

Why? In a distributed team, meetings can become a severe time sink. A lot of people hold meetings to feel busy and important, and even less people put in effort to keep the conversation focused so that the meeting ends on time.

Some basic things are:

- Determine an agenda in advance. The agenda must be part of the meeting invite. An agenda is more than "Talk about XXX." You should have a list of 3-6 topics that will be discussed in the meeting.

- Make sure that everyone on the invite list needs to be there. Explain why you're inviting people in the meeting invite.

- During the meeting, make sure that, as time progresses, the topics on the agenda are discussed. If one topic is discussed too long, there's different techniques for moving to another topic. (Binning it, declaring it a rathole, ect.)

- Decline poorly planned meetings.

And, I shouldn't need to say this, but meetings begin on time and end on time. Don't make everyone wait 45 minutes to start what's supposed to be a 30 minute meeting, but then it really drags out to 90 minutes.

Furthermore, have a 0-tolerance policy for latecomers and people who always need 15 minutes to figure out the teleconference software. Hold your interviews in the teleconference software you use with your team as a way to filter out the idiots.

[peteradio]

I'd be weeded out as an idiot because Webex is not supported via linux even though it claims to be. I use it fine on my work laptop but if that had been used as a filter I'd have been gone.

[mandeepj]

> 15 minutes to figure out the teleconference software

We just Skype for Business and Zoom at work. Both are just one click. Webex is also good. It's little confusing though (too many options). My partners use it so I have to also use it.

Maybe, you need to evaluate your teleconf s\w.

[jrhusney]

> Is there a product for slow-thinking updates?

I've been working on a distributed team for 4 years now. I product manage an open-source online retrospective and meeting app and went _way_ deep on researching other distributed teams last year. What I learned about sharing updates is it's as much dictated by culture and ritual as much as it is by a tool.

Zapier is almost 1,000 people now. Here's what I learned they do:

- Every Friday non-managers write a short update of what's changed that week

- Managers read them, extract a few highlights, and roll them up to leaders

- Leaders do the same and roll it up to the CEO

- The CEO writes a blog post and sends it to the entire company

- That post is commented on and questions are asked by everybody

Some folks within Spotify write a daily update answering the same prompts:

- This is what I did today I think you should know about

- This is what I learned and I think you'd find useful

- This is what I need from you

- This is what I am doing next

For our company, we prefer weekly updates to daily updates (we value time autonomy vs. having an always-on culture). Our fully-remote team foes something similar to Zapier and end up posting our company updates publicly at https://focus.parabol.co (if you want to see an example)

I don't think a separate tool is really necessary. Pick your poison between a stand-up bot or something more flexible like missions.ai (at time X create doc, share doc, prompt people to get started...)

One more tip: if you find yourself writing an answer to the prompt "this is what I need from you..." you probably have an item to add to the team's meeting agenda. Full disclosure, we started our company to make capturing items for meetings easy, so, I have a dog in the hunt.

EDIT: formatting

[james_at_plaid]

At Plaid, I'm in a unique situation where I manage a division of the engineering team which is dedicated to being distributed; the rest of engineering team is not. My goal is to ensure not only that my team is aligned, but also that important information is flowing between my team and the rest of the company.

For this, I use a weekly update that's sent to the team and also the "periphery" of the team -- all those who care about and influence the team's success. Each weekly update is prepended to a Google doc, and I send an email out (just with a link to the doc) when I update it.

The update has three sections: "Last Week" (everything I experienced last week that I think is relevant) "This Week" (a list of my priorities for the upcoming week with a cut line) and "Biggest Mistakes and Missed Opportunities" (just what it sounds like). It's intended to be comprehensive and often runs more than one page.

To make sure "people don't actually miss things," there are two parts: 1) I make sure the update contains all the things I don't want people to miss 2) I make sure the weekly update is valuable enough to everyone so that they read it.

On occasions where I've been late in updating it, I've found that I'm repeating the same information to multiple people more often and also having to say, "Sorry, you'd have known that already if I'd gotten my update out on time."

[sz4kerto]

First of all, make sure that the management itself is aligned. Patterns reproduce themselves across the organization and that process is mostly top->down.

Have your most important values written down. Technical and non-technical. Ask new joiners read them and refer to them when discussing short and long term plans.

Don't believe that a fully flat hierarchy is the solution for all problems. A distributed team makes communication harder, so you might need more process than usual -- for 40 people you almost certainly need other managers to help you.

Have a strategy for the corporation that everyone understands. Team leads will then understand what their team has to contribute, and individuals will understand how to contribute to the team. If the company strategy is not well-known, your remote team is doomed.

Focus on alignment to values and vision, not to what you tell people directly. You're doing your job well if people and teams become autonomous.

Find and remove anything that blocks lateral communication (i.e. that goes outside of the hierarchy chain).

Be skilled in people management. Recognize isolation, burnout, depression, tension early enough and be able to solve them. If you are not skilled, learn from professionals, not from blog posts.

If needed, break rules. An important rule in a distributed team is that people don't meet often. If necessary, break this rule.

[d0m]

Usually, one manager/lead take care of 3-7 people. So rather than making everyone on the same page, I'd spend more time with these leads and making sure that you guys are on the same page, and it will percolate down to the rest of the team. On top of that, well written document with clear goals and high-level strategies help to re-inforce it amongst everyone, but imho it should still be the mid-level manager's job to communicate in 1:1 and in other ways to their team.

[jedberg]

> Is there a product for slow-thinking updates where I can share teams news and align my +40 people team?

Email. Email is perfect for this. If you use GSuite, groups with the email gateway is ideal for this. You can have threaded discussions with a long history.

Stripe was(maybe still is?) really good at this. They made a policy very early on that every email had to CC a mailing list (unless it was truly a personal one on one communication). The lists has a structure were some were designated as archival only. Even if no one read the list, at least the archive was there for the new employees. Or for an employee who was on vacation to read and catch up when they came back.

> How can you be sure people don't actually miss things in the noise of Slack/Email?

For Slack, make sure it's truly just for real time discussion. If something looks like it's going to be a long discussion, move it to email.

For email, if you're using groups/lists for everything, then there shouldn't be a lot of noise. You should be able to just go to the groups interface or filter on the group the message was sent to.

[codemac]

Email is great, along with keeping a google doc of all previous updates sent in reverse order.

Then author the email in the google doc, paste it into gmail and send - along with a link at the bottom to previous notes.

[tootie]

Interesting. My first job in like 2000 or so used Outlook groups for this. It was basically a private usenet sort of thing. Worked fantastically well.

[fhbdukfrh]

I think some touch on this but you cannot possibly align 40+ people directly. If these are all devs, at this scale you need 3-4 engineering managers or 5+ leads. That's were you should be focusing and empower them to carry your message outward.

Looking for a tool to do this is wishful thinking

[ManuelHeL]

One key aspect is a single source of truth. A place/tool were all processes, requirements and relevant Q&A are open for the whole team, with no gray areas. Use any kind of methodology, but try to keep your team informed about how the general rules of communication and collaboration work.

Split communication in small teams/groups and design just one person per group to deliver periodic status. Meeting with the whole team are absolutely inefficient and costly for the company.

Create a policy where any change must be documented and informed to all stakeholders.

Tools vary depending on your business, but sites like Trello can be really usefull.

[imroot]

I've managed a team of 30+ -- both on-shore and off-shore resources -- and I can tell you some of the things that I've liked, and some things that I hated.

I have been in consulting for a while -- and while I don't mind it, that brings in its own set of rules (with regards to non-billable time) and challenges (Fixed price contracts usually mean low salaried workers to maximize profits).

- Short team-based standups. There's no reason for your US team to meet with Offshore unless there's a blocking reason to do so.

- Bi-weekly team meetings with both groups. I tried to alternate between the On-Shore and the Off Shore's lunch period, but, regardless, one team is staying up late. Don't be a dick and make that team come in at their same time the next day if you're holding a 2AM meeting that lasts an hour.

- If you are sending important, team-wide, communications, let them know in stand up.

- I have no problem waking up early (or staying up late) to have 1:1's with my team, even if they are offshore. Keep them simple (What have been your big challenges this week? Are you blocked or do you forsee any roadblocks down the horizon? Do you have anything for me?)

Sadly, most companies that we've been in have frowned upon Slack, but, I don't have any issues in using it on a daily basis.

If your team members are burned out, isolated, depressed -- work on them. Give them time away from the project or lighter work (to a point). If they are consistently burned out and depressed, try to figure out if this is a company/project/management issue (hey -- I'm far from perfect, maybe they don't like my management style!), or, if this is something that can be resolved by a placement to a different project/team.

Encourage them to use the 'free' resources available to them -- be it cloud services, books, education, mental health, physical health, etc. The company provides those for a reason.

It took me a long time to realize that my initial management style doesn't work with everyone...so, I changed. Don't be afraid to look in the mirror and change your operating style when you think it's not working.

(edited for formatting)

[cowpig]

We're not quite that size yet, but I've found that carefully curating our organizational culture has really paid off, starting with a document of principles[1] that we all agree with, and then on putting a lot of mental effort into training new hires to understand what the culture means and why it's important.

[1] https://gist.github.com/cowpig/8d8194ac55e3789d9a3c4136d1e1a...

[gtirloni]

Oh, this is really nice! Did you use a process to have everybody agree on it? I usually struggle with top-down where some people disagree and work against it vs. bottom-up where consensus is really hard and nothing is done/decided.

[koudos]

From a tools/infrastructure support perspective, standardizing on tools and clearly declaring and assigning a single tool for each function. Clearly ask people to pitch in to adhere to this. Set clear standards for yourselves.

From a people perspective, clearly defining goals and constantly asking clarity questions to gauge if there is alignment is the only real way. Also if you notice people are not aligned but they think they are, declare that you're not sure they're aligned. They'll hash it out themselves.

It also helps for people to declare when they're unavailable in something like a slack channel. Finding out someone is not there when you expect the to be is very jarring/frustrating.

[jfasi]

Are you personally managing 40+ people, or are you a director with a layer of managers beneath you? I can't imagine how stressful it must be personally to manage 20 people, never mind 40...

[speedplane]

> We use Slack for internal comms, but it's used mostly for chit-chat conversations and real-time issues. Is there a product for slow-thinking updates where I can share teams news and align my +40 people team?

With distributed teams, I don't think communicating big vision ideas are all that difficult. They can usually be solved with a monthly all-hands.

The problem with distributed teams is the lack of informal interactions. When you come up with a seed of an idea, that may well be a bad idea or isn't thoroughly formulated, it's an immense help to walk over to someone's desk and run it by them.

Slack and email are poor tools for this type of early innovation because they require you to write your idea down. At the very early stages of innovation, you may not even have a clear enough vision of the solution (or the problem it's trying to solve), to commit it to writing.

Most of these early ideas are originally flawed or down-right incorrect, but low-risk informal chats with co-workers can help crystalize or disprove the idea far more efficiently than any written medium.

[mac01021]

I'm not convinced that an idea (or a seed thereof) that is not formed well enough to be written down is ready for discussion with another person.

An idea that has navigated through the internal dialogue I have to engage in to put it to paper is much less a waste of your time.

And, if you want me to provide well thought-out feedback on your idea, don't ask me to respond to it in real time or in the timeframe of a meeting.

The ideal process for ideation may be informal and low-risk, but it is also asynchronous and via the written word (possibly with pictures).

Write down whatever you can about your problem or your idea and then send it to me, saying "what do you think?". I will read it at the time when I am most able to give it my full attention, cogitate for as long as I think necessary, and then reply with the best possible feedback.

Maybe some cases benefit from the rapid iteration that can happen in an oral conversation. But in my experience, most or all of those work just about as well with a rubber duck.

[up_and_up]

You might need to prune and/or curate your slack channels better. For major projects/initiatives we use a new ephemeral slack channel for the duration of the project. All chat comms about the project are stored there. The project roadmap is kept in google docs with tickets in jira.

We have 12 teams and 150 people and prob 50+ channels.

[cimmanom]

One thing we do is keep a slack channel for announcements only. We require everyone to acknowledge they’ve read and understood said announcements by adding an emoji response. Then you can follow up with anyone who fails to respond. (And discuss in 1-1s with anyone who makes a habit of failing to respond.)

[decebalus1]

> We require everyone to acknowledge they’ve read and understood said announcements by adding an emoji response. Then you can follow up with anyone who fails to respond.

Office space - millennial edition

[nilkn]

Surely you're not trying to manage 40+ people yourself. Your "team" is actually a division or sub-organization that should have a number of managers or leads within it. You are not a manager but a director/VP. Your actual team consists of the managers who should be reporting to you.

Each of your leads should probably be sending out a weekly email detailing the work that their team has been doing. You should be working closely with your leads so that they are distributing the right information downwards. You need to empower the managers below you rather than trying to take this all on yourself.

[ensignavenger]

A lot of good advice on the human side of things. I want to mention that Zulip is an open source team chat solution that is designed to facilitate the "slow-thinking" type of communication you mention.

[planetburgess]

We have 30 people across 9 countries and several teams who have very limited real time cross over. We don't send internal emails. We use: Slack for asynchronous discussion. If someone posts something in Slack they should expect a response within 1-2 days. Salesforce chatter for operational discussion. Comments on here should get answered within 1 work day. Skype chat for real time chat. This should get answered asap (let's say 15 minutes). Zoom for all meetings.

[phereford]

Tools that have worked in the past for me: - Confluence for long lived documents - JIRA for time boxed groupings of work. - Slack for real time comm if anything arises. - "Culture" and Process Living Document

I ran a team of about 25 in the past and followed the following agile principles to help with alignment: - retrospectives - "sprints" (preference on the 3-4 week range) - Sprint Review

Alignment, while tricky, isn't all that hard so long as processes are evolving from retrospectives and you have a single source of truth for long form documentation.