MBA1495 Q&A Wednesday: How do I shift my team to remote work?

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Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar Ba Show. Daily business truths every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at omar@100mba.net Today's question is from Barry and Barry asks how do I shift my team to work remotely? We are a business consulting firm that worked out of an office for years. That's not an option. Now with the coronavirus my team is working from home, but I don't have any tools or procedures in place to manage my team. What do you recommend? Thanks Omar. Love the show. Thanks Barry. Great question. Because many people listening are in the same exact situation. I'm going to give you my top tips, my top tools when it comes to shifting from a real office to a remote working environment. I first want to say that we've been running our team remotely for eight years. It's the only way I know how to run a business really. And it's Totally doable and you can have a very effective team and a well oiled machine. I'm going to tell you the must haves and the things that are not really that important when it comes to managing, motivating and running your remote team. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Barry asks, how do I shift my team to work remotely? They were working in an office or a business consulting firm and now they're working from home. The first thing we have to understand is working from home or working remotely is not the same as working in an office. You can actually get more done with a remote team. Why? Because there's flexibility. I truly believe the best way to get the most out of your team is to give them the autonomy to get the job done. You have to have the outcome driven mindset. Meaning instead of telling people you have to clock in and clock out a certain amount of time, like they work at a factory, you got to tell them the outcomes you expect every week. And if they achieve those outcomes in their time allotted, that's all you really care about. So that's really the core of remote work. You really need to have that mindset. You don't need to monitor them, you don't need to make sure they're, you know, clocking in and out. The only thing you really need them to show up for at a certain time are meetings. And even those don't need to be that frequent. I only run one meeting with my managers once a week, and then they run a weekly meeting with their teams and then we run one all hands meeting, which is the whole team, once a month.

Why?

Because meetings are often a waste of time. There's often no reason to meet more than once a week. Everything can be communicated offline or via text. And we'll talk about those tools later. I've hired my experts on my team to do their area of expertise, to write, to market, to write code, not to run meetings or participate in meetings. The more they're in meetings, the less they are being utilized and using their superpowers. So that's where it all starts. Now, when it comes to the tools, the tool we like to use to collaborate with our team remotely is Basecamp. Now, Basecamp is a task management tool. It's a collaboration tool. There are a lot of different options out there. There's things like Jira, there's Trello, which is a very simplified version task management tool. But what we like about Basecamp is that it allows you to communicate and assign to Do's and tasks and outcomes all in one place. It allows us to post messages, chat, discuss, and organize our work. It's incredibly affordable. It's only $100 a month. No matter how many people are on your team. And the people behind Basecamp, their mindset is all remote work. You know, they're really leaders in this space and in this topic. There's two books that I highly recommend that they wrote called Remote. One of them is called Remote, and the other one's called rework, written by David hanemeier Hanson and Jason Fried. Now, when it comes to video calls, you have a lot of different options when you want to do meetings. If you're on a budget, Google Hangouts is free if you're willing to pay a bit. Zoom is very popular for meetings, but the point here is that it's very easily accessible to meet with your team on a call. Make sure you tell your team that this is a transition. You are aware of it, and you're going to work towards this transition. Give them time to transition, give them time to understand. It's going to take time to ramp up. It could take two weeks, three weeks, but they'll get there. One of the best things you could do is to document any procedure you have in your business. This is great now and in the future, even if you go back into an office, these are called standard operating procedures, SOPs. Anytime there's a procedure for anything, make sure you document what that is, whether it's setting up your development environment, whether that's what's the protocol when you post a new blog post, or what about what is the procedure in replying to customers in customer support tickets. The point here is that by documenting it, you can hand it over easily and just say, hey, here's a document. Read it. You'll know what to do in this situation, especially when you hire new people. Speaking of documents, we are big fans of Google Docs and the Google Suite. When you sign up for Google business, which is $5 per user per month, very affordable, you get a whole bunch of free stuff, including Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, which is called Google Sheets, Google Slides, which is like a slideshow thing, and Google Drive, which allows you to share documents easily with everybody in your business. As long as you have the same business address, it's easy to share. Even if you don't have the same business address or email address I'm talking about here, then you still can share. But it's designed for people all in the same organization, so when you sign up for Google for business. You get a business email. So you can have a business email like, you know, johnebinarninja.com and everybody with that domain, webinars.com in their email can easily share documents and send them and put them in the drive. Don't forget to have fun. We have a chat channel inside of Basecamp where we throw in gifs, we throw in jokes, we share celebrations, birthdays, fun things, what we did on the weekend, things like that. It's good to have office banter. And what I love about remote office banter, it is there for me when I need it. It's not interrupting my work. I can go to it when I need to. One of my last tips, a big one. Get used to asynchronous work. This means that you don't all have to work at the same time. You can get the job done. When somebody's working in the morning, somebody works in the evening, somebody works at night, somebody works across the world. And software like Basecamp lends itself perfectly to that because it means I can pitch an idea to the team, they can reply to me later on in the day, I can read it tomorrow, and we can all kind of participate at our own time so we're not interrupted when we're in the zone. When we're working, we're on calls. We are focused.

Okay? Does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy QPC, some McNuggets and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now, so you do what you want.

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ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like, what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.

Guys, to wrap up today's Q and A, Wednesday's question from Barry. How do I shift my team to remote work? Well, use the tools they talk about today, use the mindset that I talked about, but also communicate and be patient with your team. Understand this is a transition for everybody, including yourself. So you may need to meet a little bit more often and communicate these ideas. Even if it's just a 10 minute stand up daily, every day. You know, I don't meet that often every day because I've been doing this for years and my team understands exactly what is expected. So if you want to make expectations clear at the start, you want to maybe meet with everybody quickly. 10 minutes, a 10 minute standup video call to make sure everybody's on board and if they have any questions, they can get them answered. I think remote work is the absolute future. I think what's happening right now in the world is introducing this early and people are going to start to realize, hey, this is pretty cool. There's no need for me to force my workers to come to an office. They can work from home, they can work from a coworking space, they can work from anywhere really, as long as they get the job done. Thank you so much for listening and thank you Barry, for that great question. If you have a question you want to ask on Q and A Wednesday, just email me over@omar00mba.net I'll make sure answer right here on the show. I want to remind you to hit subscribe right now so you don't miss a beat, so you don't miss any episodes. Also by hitting subscribe you get automatic access and free access to over 1400 business lessons in our archives. No matter what you use to listen to podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Overcast, Himalaya, we're on every single app. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. What I love about remote work, it's all about trust. You're trusting your team members with your brand, with your business every single day, no matter where you work. So you might as well trust them to get the job done. As long as your results driven, you have nothing to worry about. Hey, these are the goals for this week. You agree on them, you agree that that's feasible. As long as they fulfill what you need, why worry about how many hours and when they're working? Business is about results. Let's get them and not worry about about how our team gets about to do that or when about. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then.

Take care. Foreign.

Knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work from HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.