Best management practices for distributed companies

This article is part of our Distributed Enterprise Series

If you have been following our Distributed Companies Series, you have already realized that the model has specific challenges that we must face to truly profit from its many advantages.

Over the past few weeks, we've covered different distributed business models and how to adopt them, some of the most pressing security concerns, as well as key infrastructure issues and requirements. Today, we take a practical look at day-to-day operations and how implementing best management practices can help make your strategy a success.

It's important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution . Ultimately, each company must take stock of its processes and understand what makes sense in its own context. This is also something important to keep in mind: context changes and something that worked for your company a few years ago can be exchanged for another strategy more suited to the current situation.

Here we describe some of the best management practices adapted to the daily operations of distributed companies, considering some specific concerns.

The integration process

It all starts here. Integration has always been a delicate process. When done correctly, it can efficiently get your new employees up to speed on everything required of them and all the tools they have at their disposal.

When done poorly, it can become a slow, inefficient process that takes time for the new team to complete on time – if at all. When we consider the integration process in a distributed environment, there are an extra set of challenges we should turn our attention to.

The Case for Touchless Deployment

Several companies that use remote work as a strategy choose to provide their employees with all the equipment necessary to carry out their duties. The rise of Device as a Service (DaaS) has not only made this possible, but has also turned this strategy into truly profitable business solutions for some companies.

Of course, there are some who prefer to use the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Model . Often, however, the accompanying cybersecurity concerns can leave management feeling exposed and what should facilitate day-to-day processes becomes an unnecessary concern.

Providing company laptops to employees has always been a simple task. New employees would arrive and receive their newly configured devices from the IT department, who could also demonstrate any complicated or specific functionalities that are part of their daily tasks, such as using a VPN or ERP. Although it is the most common process, it is often not viable for a distributed company. That's where touchless deployment comes in.

This technology allows IT professionals to pre-program any and all configurations that a device needs to go through after it is taken out of the box and connected. You can preemptively select the applications that should be installed and the patches that should be downloaded and applied. Once the device is active and connected to the internet, the setup process can begin.

Asynchronous training sessions

Each company has its own particularities and internal processes that employees must know and familiarize themselves with to perform their work well. Training is a crucial part of the onboarding process. But if in a traditional internal environment we could set aside an afternoon for the entire group of new employees to meet in a conference room with a trainer, in the distributed model this is simply not an option.

Therefore, to avoid overloading newly arrived employees, an interesting strategy to consider is developing a series of training sessions that they can complete on their own and at their own pace. With the help of an instructional designer, it is possible to develop practical and efficient training interventions hosted in a Learning Management System (LMS) that will be available to learners, along with assessments to evaluate performance.

Increased activities

Another pitfall is the risk of overwhelming new employees from the start. I understand the importance of getting to work right away, but there is such a thing as overloading your team before they have adequate time to familiarize themselves with their new position.

Developing an acceleration strategy that gradually increases the workload of new employees , as well as the responsibilities and urgency of these tasks, is a way to meet the demands of the role and, at the same time, help them feel confident that they can truly perform its functions.

This is similar to a strategy used in the adult learning world known as scaffolding. As employees advance, you remove the metaphorical training wheels and let them fend for themselves with increasingly complex tasks, rather than throwing everything at them from the start.

Day-to-day operations

There's no point in getting your new employees up to speed and prepared to face any possible scenario if their day-to-day activities don't meet their expectations and leave them feeling lost and disconnected. For the routine of a distributed enterprise to run smoothly, it is important to pay attention to some points.

Well-defined structure

Working in an office environment makes you feel like you belong. Everyone around you works towards the same purpose and you are part of a team with common goals. When you're in a remote location, this sometimes gets lost and becomes especially difficult if you need something and don't know who to ask for help.

Disoriented employees will not only feel frustrated and unmotivated, but they will also lose productivity and waste precious time searching for answers they could easily get if they knew who they should talk to.

Solving this is both easy and complicated. Let me explain. The solution is to have a well-defined and clearly communicated internal structure . This, however, is not so simple to architect and maintain.

Start by outlining the basics and clearly defining the responsibilities of each department so that there are no tasks for which no one seems sure who is responsible. As new things start to emerge, department heads must immediately define detailed processes and assign them to specific employees.

Once you have the outline of your structure, it's time to communicate it. You can do this by making it available to your employee or by defining a specific department as the focal point for this type of information. You may find it more interesting to centralize demands in your HR department. The important thing here is to ensure that each team member is aware of where they should go if they need to clarify something that is not within their manager's scope of work.

Constant Communication

One of the keys to making a distributed company work is to constantly be in touch with your team. Perhaps we should borrow from the famous American playwright David Mamet and say that the secret to success in a distributed model is the ABC: “always be communicating.”

In addition to traditional weekly team-wide status meetings, managers should schedule frequent one-on-one calls with team members. This way, everyone feels like they have a space to discuss details, express concerns, and feel like what they're doing is being seen. They don't have to be long meetings that take up a lot of the team's precious time. It is more beneficial to meet constantly for a shorter period of time than to spend hours on a conference call.

Another way to help keep lines of communication open is to use company-wide communication tools . There are several applications that allow employees to communicate in real time, create dedicated and private groups and maintain conversations exclusively during working hours.

This is an important step to prevent employees from working 24/7 and prevent the dreaded burnout. So stay away from the apps we use most in our personal lives, no matter how practical it may be to adopt something most people already use.

Providing support

Now that you have well-planned and organized operations, you can rest assured that your daily procedures will run smoothly. But what when they don't? Being able to provide quick and efficient support when something isn't working as it should is critical to keeping things running.

Most of the time, a well-equipped IT department will be able to resolve any daily issues that arise. A few details will make a big difference to the way they operate and will also make them feel empowered to do their best in their work.

Remote access

Gone are the days when we needed to walk into the IT department with our laptops or ask a team member to stop by our station and see why something wasn't working as it should. Thanks to remote access, anyone can provide the necessary support by gaining control of your device, running the necessary diagnostics and making the necessary changes.

There are several tools that can provide such functionality, which goes beyond screen sharing to simply demonstrate what is happening. In a distributed scenario, this is essential as no employee other than your IT department is required to have the expertise to keep everything running and resolve any setbacks that will inevitably arise along the way.

Robust team and unified platform

Depending on the size of your organization, you may find yourself with a surprisingly high number of appliances and devices to maintain, and it's not easy to handle each demand that may require your IT department to step up. Ensuring they meet business demand will prevent things from falling apart due to a long queue of unresolved tickets. There are two things to consider here.

Firstly, you need a sizable department . There is no point in believing that a small group of people will be able to handle everything that is thrown at them, especially when we talk about IT support. Things often don't go as planned, some problems take much longer to resolve than others, and the rest of the company can't stop waiting for demands to be met before finding out that chaos has ensued.

Furthermore, the team needs to take advantage of a centralized platform that unifies demands and allows everyone to monitor the progress of their tasks. There are several options available on the market and you can always develop your own to meet specific needs.

The important thing is that whatever solution you choose empowers your IT professionals so they can stay on top of everything that's happening and also keep the rest of the team up to date with your demands.

More related articles in our Distributed Enterprise Series