How to manage a remote team successfully

From the very beginning, the founders of kiban learned to work remotely: at the beginning, Alex Grin, CTO of the company - also my partner and friend - was based in Paris and I stayed in Mexico. However, about a year ago I decided to move to France for personal reasons.

Although we were able to work successfully out of the office during the pandemic (at kiban we started working from home a few days before the quarantine was officially declared), for many there was concern about whether we could sustain kiban with the managers in one part of the world and the rest of the team in the other.

Letting go of the illusion of control

A year later, I can say that the main challenge of living on the other side of the world is not working at the same time as the team: currently, the time zone difference between France and Mexico is eight hours. But I have no doubt that with this difficulty came an enormous learning experience, as it forced us to organize ourselves better, to learn to delegate more things and to have even more confidence in the team. Letting go is always a problem for founders, but these decisions put us in a situation where we had no choice.

It is essential to accept that it is not possible to have everything under control when you are away from your team, but neither when you are close. Many of us have had the illusion that we control all the factors when we are in the office but this is not the case: with covid we learned this lesson and with my move to France, we confirmed it.

On the other hand, it is very easy to detect when someone is not working remotely. There are not two of us in the company, there are 30 of us in total, so it is easy to compare the performance of one person with the others. Again, with covid we learned that a person does not produce because they are in the office, they produce because they like the company and the project and are committed to it.

The MUSTS of telecommuting

From our experience in kiban, there are four musts to perform successfully even if we are in different parts of the world:

1 Document everything, don't wait to have meetings. For example, now that we use Jira very efficiently, we are less likely to have meetings. By using Jira we leave a trail of what we do, it forces us all to be more efficient with written communication.

2 Touch base between five and 10 minutes daily. At kiban we talk daily, we have dailys with our heads and additionally we have weekly meetings that allow us to be in contact with the whole team.

3 Accept that there are times when people are less productive. Also accept that we are going to make mistakes and that sometimes things have to wait until the next day.

4 Be well aligned on what the priorities are.

After this year in which the founders of kiban have managed the company from another country, we also confirm that we have a very strong team that is very committed to the project. This has allowed us to operate successfully in this way.

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