Leading Remote Teams

A big thank you goes out to Liv McConnell and our friends at FairyGodBoss.com, for including us in their article, “16 Ways to Lead a Remote Team Effectively, From Managers Who’ve Done It for Years.“

The article is of course quite timely. Remote work has been on the rise for years now, but with COVID-19 social distancing measures across the country, more teams are working remotely than ever before. We’ve been working with clients on setting up OKRs for their team as they move to remote work.

“You need to make sure each individual understands their primary OKRs for their daily work, their month, the quarter and the year, and those objectives need to be in line with the overall mission of the company,” Matthew Turner, founder of Boston Turner Group, a 100% remote company, said. “OKRs that align in this way make sure your entire company is focused on the mission from wherever they work. It also gives you a great way to monitor if they are really successful without relying on just walking around the office to check in on them.”

FairyGodBoss.com: 16 Ways to Lead a Remote Team Effectively, From Managers Who’ve Done It for Years

Our practice for business growth, Enterprise Velocity, provides our clients with specific tactics and strategies for creating alignment in your company, managing goals and making your employees as effective as possible. I appreciate the shout out for our ideas about the importance of OKRs in remote work.

What are OKRs?

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. When an employee is managed through well-designed OKRs, they can work from anywhere and you can be focused more on their goals and achievements than the time they put into their office and meetings.

You need to make sure each individual understands their primary OKRs for their daily work, their month, the quarter, the year and those objectives need to be in line with the overall mission of the company. 

OKR Example

Here is a typical marketing team example. Let’s say your marketing team has a goal of improving SEO. That’s a fine objective, but a remote employee could easily get lost with just that as their direction. Where do they even start? And working remotely, it’s harder to walk up and ask advice of a senior employee.

By adding Key Results into the equation you now have a way to make sure they know what drives success from wherever they work. So your marketing director gives them the objective to improve SEO, but also gives them the following key results to make sure they understand the steps that count as success:

1. Earn 15 new inbound links from other sites
2. Add alt tags to all the images on the web site
3. Improve page loading speed by 10%.

Cascading OKRs For Your Entire Company

We work with our clients to help them build cascading OKRs all the way down. The marketing team example above might have come from something like the following hierarchy of cascading objectives:

• Company objective: increase sales by $5MM this year, which leads to…
• Sales VP objective: increase pipeline by $15MM, which leads to…
• Marketing VP objective: increase lead sourcing by 30%, which leads to…
• Marketing director objective: improve web-sourced lead volume, which leads to…
• Digital marketing specialist (above example): Improve SEO results

Keeping your OKRs in alignment throughout the entire company ensures that your teams are focused on your mission no matter where they work. It also gives you objective measures of success that your entire team is moving forward without having to walk around the office and micromanage your employees.