Elliott & Associates Research Gl Lee

One of my designers lives in Turkmenistan. Every day, he wakes up to email and assignments to create beautiful front-end designs from our commercial team in New York and San Francisco. When he’s done, he sends them to a developer in Ukraine to implement. Throughout the day they work on various projects, and when they go to bed our design and development teams in New York take over. The system runs smoothly and it means that my team happily works around the clock — without any one person actually working around the clock.

People often ask me about how I managed to build this global engineering team at RebelMouse, and before that at Huffington Post, relaying their outsourcing horror stories and wondering how I got around them.

A lot of it comes down to being really intentional about how our globally dispersed team communicates. We can’t take remote team members out for a beer to show our appreciation, so we use other methods. In my 15 years managing remote teams, I have learned to:

  1. Live and breathe your email and make sure the team does too. Currently my team is spread across more than 20 countries. Instant messaging relies on everyone being there at the same time. Email, on the other hand can be totally asynchronous as it fits our time zone difference and odd working hours in general. The only way I’ve found that works is when everyone on the team keeps their inboxes open and checks emails as their absolute highest priority. Without that we operate blindly to each other since there is no tapping someone on the shoulder as there would be in an office.
  2. Give the benefit of the doubt. My team has huge cultural and language differences (although everyone does have a working knowledge of English as the basic way we communicate). We all were raised with different ways of approaching projects, handling conflict resolution etc. It’s essential we forgive each other constantly for odd grammar, odd behavior and instead try to make the beauty of building something together lift us above any confusion.
  3. Overcommunicate. Especially as part of a startup, it’s sometimes hard to understand where we are going and what we are building. Asking questions all the time helps. I want people to always be inquisitive while also working on the little pieces of concrete stuff that we definitely know. If a quest