Ask HN: Good books on managing a hybrid/remote team? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good books on managing a hybrid/remote team?

48 pointsNoboruWataya19 comments

Hi HN,

I am going through a promotion process at work and a large part of the interview process centres around solving the challenges of hybrid working (which in this context means that each team member will spend some days in the office and some WFH). To complicate matters I am based in a different office to the rest of my team so even when I'm in the office I am working remotely.

I'd like to read some expert insights about how to manage this situation. Can anyone recommend some good books by business leaders or management experts about how to approach management in a remote working or hybrid working environment? I'm not in a STEM field so it doesn't need to focus on STEM (and in fact would rather it is not too closely tied to STEM or any particular industry).

Thanks in advance!

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I’ve managed remote teams since 2008. Never read any books, but here are a few tips I learned along the way:

* 1on1s are very important - There is no water cooler for remote teams, so you have to manufacture it. Take 30min with each team member each week to just chat without an agenda. If the conversation gravitates towards work, fine. If it doesn’t that’s fine too. But I would take an interest in my employee’s life outside of work. I would make it a point to know what their hobbies were, their family’s names, their life story, etc.

* Protect your work time - Each Slack message is an interruption. Have at least a couple hours a day where notifications are muted so you and your team can get into a “deep work” state. If something is urgent, pick up the phone.

* Trust your team daily, hold them accountable weekly - Don’t micromanage your employees and ask what they did each day (outside of a daily virtual standup if they like that, where they post 1 message about what they’re working on and what they might need help with). But at the end of the week, evaluate their performance and adjust your management style to fit. With remote work, it is possible for folks to push the envelope on work/life balance, so be ready for that, but don’t assume it or be so worried about it that your policies become stifling.

I’m sure there are more, but those are a few that served me well through the years.

Good luck!

> Trust your team daily, hold them accountable weekly - Don’t micromanage your employees and ask what they did each day (outside of a daily virtual standup if they like that, where they post 1 message about what they’re working on and what they might need help with).

This is reasonable advice, but what do you recommend if we find a pattern where at the end of each week, we made maybe 25% progress on that weeks commitments? Dates committed by the team itself - not forced on them from the outside or management.

I was an IC on a team where this was happening at a big tech company. It killed morale for the few of us that were focused on delivery. We all left the team over it, and 6 months later the team was re-org’d.

> what do you recommend if we find a pattern where at the end of each week, we made maybe 25% progress on that weeks commitments? Dates committed by the team itself - not forced on them from the outside or management.

I'd typically handle this in a weekly sprint call, or during 1on1s.

I'd typically take responsibility for my team's missed deadlines too, as there's almost always something more management can be doing to make their teams successful (barring bad faith performance from an employee, which deserves a different conversation).

If it was an honest missed deadline, I might say something like: "Hey team, I know we missed the deadline and that's had [this specific impact] on us and [this specific impact] on our client. I want to apologize because I should have caught this delay sooner. I also want to offer up [suggestion 1] and [suggestion 2] as ways to get back on track. But I'm open to other ideas as well."

Obviously, there's nuance to every situation and that isn't a 1 size fits all, but it's a general theme I'd typically use.

Some suggestions I'd typically offer were:

* Reallocating complex tasks from Jr. members to more Sr. members

* Reducing the scope

* Offering to help personally with some tasks

* Bringing in additional resources

* Revising our expectations for next week

> It killed morale for the few of us that were focused on delivery. We all left the team over it, and 6 months later the team was re-org’d.

Yep, I've seen this happen myself too. Sorry you went through it. I hope the move was a good one for you. In my experience top-performers really don't like it when other team members bring the speed / strength of the team down. It totally kills morale. But, I do put a lot of that responsibility on the manager. They should see this happening and adjust before the top performers get annoyed.

The GitLab Handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

I'd just go with remote-first async material from companies like Gitlab, etc

The hybrid just means you also get the nice parts of going to the office, but for any remote work to work, async remote kinda needs to be default for the whole company, and the office are just perks

Yeah, so much is recent, companies/employees are making it up as they go, and situations vary so much that you're not going to find anything like an authoritative tome on the topic.

And to the second point, I'm not sure there is a real hybrid model in the sense of people wandering into an office now and then when they are in the mood. I do think one or two scheduled days in a week--assuming a co-located team which often isn't the case--or scheduled team on-sites once a quarter or whatever make sense. But, for most people, just camping out in an office now and then with people they mostly don't know doesn't add a lot of value.

> Yeah, so much is recent ...

For the general public it seems like a new thing. But many of us have been working fully or mostly remote for decades, used to be called distributed. There is a lot of knowledge out there for anyone who want to learn, extensively tested in many organisations. The gitlab stuff, linked above, is one example.

I've been building and running globally distributed asynchronous organisations for 20y, and I've learnt some of my tips/tricks/tools from people doing it very successfully for many years before I started.

My best tips: ditch the traditional management dogma, it's quite inefficient anyway. Trust your people. Make sure they have the information and training they need. Flatten out. Push for transparency. Go async! Especially for decision making.

For me it has been exceptionally rare that people are less productive when they are given control over their own circumstances.

You touch on it a bit but there is an important distinction between "remote" and "async." I work for a remote-first company, but not an async one. We all start at roughly the same time (give or take an hour or two maybe) and most work is either development related (code, git, reviews, etc.), documentation, or meetings. Very little email or async chat, for better or worse.

I've never worked in a truly async company but I imagine there are a lot of hurdles not there in a synchronous company.

* We only care about where you live for payroll/tax/etc purposes.

Not sure if this is under your scope/radar, but working hybrid IMMO benefits a lot from two focused improvements in a team or company: shared culture, and clearly recognised framework (ceremonies). And I can’t think of a better way for improving both aspects than studying, understanding its foundations and applying Agile. I particularly recommend Scrum both for STEM and outside of STEM. So any book or advice on this would help a lot in my opinion. Also following the huge amount of podcast interviews by Vasco Duarte.

I liked "The Long Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry. It had several tactical tricks related to communication medium that I found useful.

High-Impact Tools for Teams: https://www.strategyzer.com/books/high-impact-tools-for-team...

I imagine that "best practices" will evolve a lot over the next few years

"Best Practices" strongly persists trailing 20y behind. About the time it takes to generationally change collective training and dogma.

"Remote: Office Not Required", David Heinemeier Hansson, Jason Fried (the authors of ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever). It is an old book but still very applicable to today (or maybe even more applicable).

Some good thoughts on hybrid teams: https://youtu.be/kvUcyFcA6Bo

in the video he says that everybody was disadvantaged to the same extent by work from home at the beginning of the pandemic. I disagree with this, I think that younger professionals were more disadvantaged than older professionals as they were less likely to have a dedicated space for working at home. Students were impacted even more. Imagine 6 people living in a 3 bedroom house, all attending lectures remotely.

Additionally more junior teammates probably had a harder time getting mentoring time from more senior teammates, for example.

All this reminds me of the workflow era (and the 2008 revival), I wonder if people have bpem based async helpers to manage operations.

Just consider a remote first mentality in everything you do. That means doing synchronous things asynchronously where it makes sense. It is the most flexible from the hybrid perspective. Accommodating both is an uphill battle. DHH books, Atwood/Spolsky blogs, and a few management / communication books will go a long way.

Every team will work differently in a remote fashion, so I would actually say the books will give you ideas, but just talk to your peers to see how they want to ideally work.

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