Hey everyone, Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And in this outsourcing guide, you're going to learn the five keys to success when it
comes to building and managing a successful high-performing virtual team, make sure you
check out the timestamp table of contents and the description along with some other
helpful outsourcing guides and productivity guides, we'll be referencing along the way.
So let's go ahead and jump right in.
The very first key to success is having a virtual leader mindset.
Now, if you go to YouTube, Google, or any place else, and you just type in how to be
a good leader or good leader, because that's subjective, right?
You're going to get a ton of conflicting information.
So here, I just want to leave you with one principle that really will ensure that your
leadership style matches up with a players, because a leadership style for C and D players
is very different than a leadership style for a bunch of high performing a players.
And so what you need to do is ask yourself this question, as you move forward as a “manager”,
and we've got to the problem with that word in a moment here, but you want to ask yourself,
how do I do less?
Because they're your role as a leader of a virtual team is not to run around like a dictator
telling people what to do or making sure they're managing their time correctly.
Your role is to run around, making sure they have everything they need to be successful
and answering their questions.
And this is a servant leadership approach, as opposed to the traditional boss method
that I'm sure we've all been subjected to.
And this also ties into the best way to communicate with your virtual team.
We'll get more to communication and a later principle are key here, but essentially what
you want to make sure you do is when you're communicating with your team, you communicate
with them as if they're a co-worker, because we've all been talked down to by a boss.
Nobody likes that.
And it's just hard to have people on your team who enjoy their job, when you walk around
acting like a boss, as opposed to acting like a leader.
And when you take the servant leadership approach, your conversation should be one as if your
co-workers, because you're both on the same team and everyone's working towards the same
goal, completing projects and making sure your business is successful.
And a large part of that success is going to be driven by how you empower your virtual
team.
Now, I'm not talking about those corny corporate things or icebreakers.
If you've been subjected to one of those, everyone knows that it's fake and it's just
something that's being rammed down people's throats.
And nobody really enjoys that kind of fake cheesy thing.
So what we're talking about here is making sure that everyone on your virtual team feels
like you actually support them and empower them in whatever their career is.
And there's a very simple formula to make sure that everyone on your team is happy and
motivates them to be more productive, as opposed to less productive.
And the simple formula goes like this, Flexibility + responsibility = freedom.
So let's go ahead and break this down into the three parts.
So the first part is flexibility.
And this is recognizing that someone who is trying to be a part of a virtual team and
work remotely is the type of person who wants to have more control over their time.
So a great way to increase their job satisfaction is to give them as much control as possible
over when they do their work.
Now, I know this isn't going to be possible for every person on your team or with every
project.
Even on our team, we have certain tasks that have to be done on a particular day, but we
always make sure that they have the entire day to do it.
Other projects.
We can give it to them and they can finish it next week, or they could finish it at the
end of the month.
It's just something that needs to be done within a 30 or 60 day window.
And so, while you won't always have that flexibility, you want to maximize the flexibility you can
give to your people on your virtual team.
So you really maximize a large reason why they wanted to join a virtual team in the
first place.
Now, the second part of this equation comes to making sure that your high performance
people really actually enjoy working with you and what to stay and that's responsibility,
because nobody likes being micromanaged.
And so the more responsibility you can provide to your team members, the more ownership they're
going to have over their projects over their tasks.
And that ownership allows for people to take pride in their work, which is really important.
And I think a quote by Steve jobs sums this up perfectly.
“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people to tell them what to do.
We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
So instead of trying to solve all the problems in your business, or instead of trying to
create a environment where you always dictate every last detail of how something should
be done, give people that space and freedom to actually own and use their own intellect
and their own skills to the project.
Now, if it's a new project and it's something that they're still learning how to do, then
give them that leeway and time if possible, for them to actually learn.
And this combination of flexibility and responsibility gives a tremendous amount of freedom to everyone
on your team.
And it increases job satisfaction a lot because, there'll be hard pressed to find a better
work environment.
And so that's something you definitely want to strive for in terms of finding and keeping
people who are really high performing is giving them a work experience that they're going
to be hard pressed, if not impossible to find anywhere else, even if you can't afford to
pay the highest rate compared to some of your competitors.
Now this next one, number three deals with communication, because at the end of the day,
we all have to communicate in order to move the business forward.
And a large part of your role as leading the team will be making sure that you communicate
with them on a regular basis and also make sure that they feel comfortable communicating
with each other.
And so before we get into the three principles of good communication for a virtual team,
we do need to address of course, the elephant in the room when it comes to communication.
And that is the experience a lot of us have had where we hire someone and then we don't
hear from them for a week.
So you definitely, always wants to be clear with how long people can go without communicating
with you and be very clear on response times.
There's some people on our team who they need to respond within 12 hours.
Other people on our team, their projects are not as pressing.
So if they want to take 24 or even 48 hours to respond, that's okay.
What's most important is you make it super clear.
So nobody feels like they're on call and there's no ambiguity around when you should be communicating,
but what's most important here is whatever you tell your team.
You need to hold yourself accountable to as well.
So don't tell someone on your team, they need to reply to you within two or three hours
during your working day when you aren't going to do the same.
So you really have to lead by example here.
So here are the three principles when it comes to communication.
Number one, have all your communications in one place.
Don't make it confusing for people on your team.
Not really knowing the best place to ask you a question.
For us personally, we do all of our communication in our project manager.
And then if there's something personal, we'll use email, but 99% takes place in one place.
Now the second one is all meetings should have a clear agenda.
It should be sent out to everyone before the meeting happens.
And this way everyone on the team has the opportunity to ask questions about the agenda
and Oh!
Almost forgot, have a strict start and end time for the meeting.
So someone doesn't show up and only plan an hour of their time when they should've planned
three.
But with sending the agenda early, going back some a little jumbled here is making sure
that everyone has a chance to either add to the agenda or ask questions.
That way you're not paying three or four different people to sit there while you're answering
a question that could have easily been answered over email or chat.
And the final one, number three here is, require all team members to have a thumbnail in whatever
application that you're using.
So if you're using a project manager like basecamp, Asana or Trello, we require everyone
to have an actual picture, because we need to keep that human element, even though most
of our communication is just through texts.
And a quick bonus here is make a vacation calendar, make it really clear and easy for
people to ask for time off, we use a shared Google calendar.
So anytime someone wants time off, they just let myself or my business partner know, and
then they add it to the calendar and everyone knows when someone's going to disappear and
they can plan their projects accordingly.
Now the second to last one here has to do with hiring.
So all of these first three have been assuming that you already have a team and you're figuring
out how to optimize and really grow them and yourself as a leader here, we're going to
talk about hiring.
And there's a lot of different methodologies with hiring, but really you're not always
going to get it right on the first try, no matter how much time and energy you put into
hiring.
So one of the best things you can do during your hiring process is once you've gone through
all those proposals and resumes, work samples, choose three to four people and have them
do a semi paid audition.
And what semi paid is you just pay them a lower hourly rate than what you would normally
do.
And every single person will do the exact same task.
So you will have actual real world information on how each one of those people performs before
you bring them onto the team.
And this personally has saved us so much time with hiring, because I can't tell you how
many times we've had the perfect candidate and we go into those three or four people.
And that perfect candidate quickly becomes number four out of the four, just because
of their communication style or their quality of work.
And sometimes people, aren't always honest with what they're able to do and the work
that's in their portfolio.
So the only way you know, is if you give them an actual project to do.
And if you want to learn more about how to hire someone, make sure you check out the
link in the description to a full playlist that walks you A to Z on how to hire someone
on Upwork.
You can also use that process in job description templates on something like guru, freelancer,
or at 99designs.
So the final part here is some concrete things or rules that we actually follow for our virtual
team that you can simply copy for yourself.
So a lot of what we've talked about here is a lot of mindset and how to communicate and
how to think and approach yourself as a leader.
So here are some concrete things you can literally copy paste into an operating procedure and
start using right when you're done watching this video.
So number one is team check-ins.
Once a week, have everyone send you a summary of what they're working on and any questions
that they have.
The second procedure is setting up something called a “growth path”.
I'll link up in the description to another video that takes a deep dive on how to do
this.
But essentially what you do is you just create a document.
That's a transparent and open place where you can talk to people on your team about
most importantly raises, but also education opportunities, skills that they want to develop
further and even software or new projects that they want to tackle it or take on.
The next one, Number three here is going to be establishing communication norms.
So whatever the timeframes are, you want people to reply to you, wherever they should be replying
to you, make sure that's written down someplace very clear.
So if there's any confusion or a team member fails to follow it, there's going to be a
place where you can clearly point back in writing and say, “Hey, we agreed on this”.
Now number four here, is going to be creating office hours for yourself.
And this is irrespective of whatever communication norms you come up with.
But this is something that we used to do when I was in a different time zone and I would
be available for one hour a day.
Everyone on my team knew that that hour I was going to be only in our project manager
asking questions and reviewing questions.
So if someone wants to line up their schedule and have a back and forth conversation, they
knew I was going to be there.
Of course, I always make myself available for meetings outside, but for the most part,
we're able to get everything done within those office hours.
And the final one here is going to be use emojis in your communication, because it's
text, especially if you're not happy with something.
I know that sounds pretty juvenile.
And this is something that I didn't do for years, but I found communication when you're
just typing, there's no body language and the other person can sometimes not know if
you're upset or angry or not, or if you're just really, really happy or you're cracking
a joke.
And so using those emojis, I know it sounds silly, really helps humanize or add a least
a little hint at what body language could be behind that text.
So I know it sounds funny, but that is definitely something that's going to help you communicate
better with your team.
So thank you so much for watching.
I sincerely hope you got some value out of this video.
And most importantly, you have a much better understanding on how to build, manage and
grow a virtual-- high performing virtual team.
Make sure you check out the links in the description, because they will be going through how to
hire on Upwork or other platforms if you choose, also our internal systems for how we organize
our project manager and what software we use to keep everyone on track and happy with their
projects.
So comment below if you have any questions.
And until the next, keep building the business you love.