MBA1702 How Your Remote Team Can Work More Efficiently + Free Ride Friday

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Welcome to the $100 MBA show where your business is priority number one. That's why we deliver 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 over at 100mba.net. In today's lesson you will learn how your remote team can work more efficiently. Many of us, of course because of COVID stopped going to an office and started to work remotely with our teams. Well for me, at my business, the $100 MBA and webinar Ninja, we've been working remotely for over eight years. We have a global team across the world, on four different continents and like half a dozen time zones. So we learned a thing or two in the eight years we've been working remotely and how to work more efficiently. A lot of people worry that their team is not really efficient. If they're working from home, they feel like they have to be in front of them, they have to be in an office, they have to do more video meetings. Everything has to be in their face, right? Maybe even monitor what they're doing on their computer with some sort of tracking software. I'm here to say, hold up. There's a whole better way to make sure your team is working efficiently and spending all their time, or at least most of their time, on why you hired them, their secret sauce, their special skill, rather than in countless video meetings, calls and putting tracking software on their computer. I'm going to give you everything I've learned to make sure you have a well oiled machine. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today, too many patients aren't getting the care they need. That's why UnitedHealth Group is innovating how healthcare is delivered, offering creative solutions that focus on patient outcomes, preventing disease before it starts, making care easier to get and less expensive, reshaping care to help more people live healthier lives. Learn what UnitedHealth Group is doing to help people get the care they need@uhg.com mission. Running a remote team is one of the funnest things actually, because you get to hire people from all around the world, different cultures, different backgrounds. You learn so much, you get to know these people, you get to know where they live. It's one of the best things about being an entrepreneur for me personally. But one of the challenges of working in a remote team, especially spread around the world, is how do you make sure everybody is as efficient as possible. Their work is laser focused and they're getting more and more done every day. A lot of people's solution is just a bunch of video calls, a bunch of meetings every single day. Some people even do eight straight hours of like co working on video. Now don't get me wrong, video calls, video meetings have their place. We still do video meetings, but maybe not as often as you may think. There's a time where you have to collaborate face to face on video. But we believe the best way to work remotely is asynchronously. Everybody can get things done a lot more efficiently if you enforce a culture of asynchronous work and written Communication. Let me start with the asynchronous work number one. One of the perks of working remotely is that you have the flexibility of when and how you work. Yes, you're working from home or maybe from a cafe or from a co working space, but remote work allows you to empower your employees to get things done, to accomplish their goals, to really be result based rather than, you know, clocking in and clocking out like they're in a factory. In our business, all we really care about is they get the work done, they get what they're assigned done. Right now, obviously some positions are time based, like customer support. They need to be on a shift. But we're not believers of having to track everybody and what they do on their laptop. You'll know if somebody's doing a good job based on their performance. In the support example, how many conversations did they handle? What was their response time? All that stuff is already built into the software. So you don't really need to pop in software on their computer to know when they clocked in, when they clocked out, what sites they've been on. Some software even grabs screenshots of what's on their computer at any given time. And a lot of people that went from the office to remote work have adopted this type of software that basically monitors all their actions. I'm not a believer of this. I think that if you're going to trust your team members with your company, your baby, you should be able to trust them with their time, right? How they spend their time, empower them and they'll impress you. Now we talked about asynchronous, now let's talk about written communication. Written communication is probably the best way for your team to collaborate before meetings. Your meetings will be a whole lot more efficient and their work will be a whole lot more efficient. This is something that we've been practicing more and more recently, and we didn't make this up. We actually were encouraged by Basecamp, a great company end tool, which is like a project management tool that really allows you to do this easily. And they kind of inspired us to do this more in our business. So what do I mean by written communication? So let's take a look at what normally happens. Normally in companies, there's a meeting on the calendar and there's an agenda to that meeting and people add to the agenda and then they show up to the meeting and people talk about the things on the agenda. This is incredibly inefficient and often the meeting goes over time and you barely have Enough time to discuss all the points on the agenda. And not everybody voiced their opinion. This is incredibly, incredibly inefficient. And it doesn't help your business. It doesn't help you be more effective and actually deliver better results and make better decisions. Instead, post the agenda in your project management app. We use basecamp, so you would post a message with, hey, this is what I want to discuss. Here are some of the questions I have for everybody. And people respond to those things below in the message, like, they reply to it before the meeting. So we kind of hash out and share our own ideas, our own opinions before we actually meet, so that when we do meet, everybody kind of understands how they feel about every part of the agenda. And the meeting is really just dedicated to making decisions. We don't have to spend, you know, hours on end hearing everybody's voice because you already read it. Now, what's great about this is that when you write, your ideas are a lot more efficient. They're a lot more cohesive, they're more economical, meaning that you often will edit what you write because you want to make sure it's delivered properly. Okay? And it forces you to think about what you're communicating when you write things down versus just talking and just, you know, saying things in a meeting. This allows every idea that gets mentioned to be fully fledged and fully formed. It also kind of filters a whole bunch of bad comments. I say bad, I mean, like time wasting comments or things that will lead you to what you're trying to say. You've already kind of worked that out and written it out and edited it and just posted it well before the meeting. And Basecamp calls these pitches, and you kind of pitch something and then somebody comments below and the other people comment below. So when you do meet, decisions are just made. So most of the communication happens by written word, asynchronously, and it's a whole lot more efficient. I don't need to be interrupted. I don't need to have an impromptu call. I don't have all these side chats. It's easy, it's simple. And. And I can reply to these messages. I can give my thoughts to the agenda or to the meeting or to the questions when it suits me. When I'm out of the zone, there's nothing worse than getting interrupted by a message and says, hey, I have a question. Let's jump on a call. When you're in the middle of doing something, when you're in the zone, when you're focused, when you're doing what you've been hired to do. So make sure you give your team the power to reply to things, answer things asynchronously with the written word. Another thing we do that really has helped us improve our efficiency and quality of meetings is we score the meeting every time at the end of a meeting, we give it a score from 1 to 10 and then we say why we gave it that score. If it wasn't a 10, it wasn't a perfect. So that way we kind of self analyze how we did so we can improve the next time around. One of the other things that you can do to help your team is to give them some focus, time or dedicated long periods of time to work on one thing. Content switching is very tiring. That's moving from one idea to the next or one task to another. It's a time waster because you have to readjust to that new task. So one of the things we're implementing in our business is dedicated time, let's say, for example, in development, to create new features. And it's a certain amount of weeks they're gonna work on just that, they're not gonna be interrupted by anything else, so allows them to be intensive and intentional about what they're creating. And then we'll have a period of time, a couple weeks, where we just focus on improvements and bugs and all that kind of stuff. But if you switch from one to another, from a day to day basis, from one hour to the next, it's a huge time waster, it's inefficient, and most of the time there's no major emergency where you have to do that all the time. Now that's just a development example, but this can work. In marketing, you can say, hey, we're going to focus the next week on creating these series of videos and then next week we're going to batch all our social media for the month. The point here is that going back and forth between two tasks is incredibly inefficient and wastes a lot of your team's time. Another thing you can do right now is to look at all the meetings that you have on your calendar in your team, all the department meetings, all that kind of stuff, and ask yourself, are all these meetings necessary? Can we combine these meetings? Can we do these meetings every two weeks instead of every week? Can we do something asynchronously with text, with messages, back and forth on a message board instead of, you know, meeting? Is there a way we can shorten these meetings? Do these meetings have to be 30 minutes. Maybe they could be 20, maybe they could be 10. Maybe we can challenge ourselves and see how short we can get them to. You know, this time we're going to go from 30 to 20 minutes, and then next time we're going to try to make it 15. You'd be surprised how much you can get done when you don't allow yourself so much time. This is going to allow your team members to go back to what they should be doing instead of meeting all the time. Meetings are great and they're necessary, but do them only when necessary. Hey, Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month? With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs. Huh, that sounds easier than I thought. You got this? Yeah, I do. Now. Where did I put my keys? You will find them where you left them. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE SIPC for many people, remote work is challenging. Running a remote team can be challenging because you feel a sense of, hey, I'm not really sure if everybody's doing everything they should be doing. This is why you need to encourage constant communication via text, via written word, whether it's just a check in in the morning saying, hey, good morning, everybody. This is what I'm working on today. And people share that. And it's just a quick one liner and that gives you visibility, that gives you as the manager, hey, I know what everybody's working on and it's not a huge nuisance for your team members to throw a one liner and say, good morning. These are the things I'm working on today. Have a great day, guys. It's a lot more efficient than meeting. And we know our meetings are not always efficient. You know, we spend about five or ten minutes just with pleasantries and waiting for everybody to show up and all that kind of stuff. So I highly encourage you to ask your team to just give you updates so you have that peace of mind that, hey, things are moving, things are working, people are working on things. Guys, thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you love today's episode, share it on Social with your friends and family. Let people know about the Hunter NBA show so we can bring on more listeners just like you. Today's episode's not over, though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is pser. That is the handle on Apple podcasts. Their review says a podcast about business and more. Five stars I've been listening to the Harlem BA show for about two years now and it's always providing me with practical tips. It's inspiring advice not just on business, but also the psychology behind it. I love that he touches on topics like personal growth, mental health, relationships, time management, etc. Thank you so much Omar for the content you've been sharing. That's PSER from Vietnam. You are our Free Ride Friday winner. You want a free Ride to easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over EasyCourse Co, but you just want it for free. Your mission is to email me over@omar00mba.net so we can hook you up with a free ride. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you want. It's that easy. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcasts. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Building a culture of trust. Communication, transparency. This leads to a whole lot of retention. This attracts the best talent. This makes your company worth sticking around with. Okay? If you have great people on your team, they're sought after. And if you give them a reason to stay like the reasons I just listed, treating them like the professional they are, then they'll think twice before entertaining going somewhere else. That saves you time. That saves you energy. That saves you money. All right, have a good one and I'll see you on Monday's episode. Until then, take care. Foreign. Trader plus the next generation of advanced Trading from Fidelity. 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