Managing Teams: Distributed, On-site or In-Between
When Matt Gee, CEO of BrightHive, sits down to meet with his entire staff, they are almost never in the same room. Just down the hall, Rose Afriyie, Executive Director of mRelief, sits down in person with her entire team, as she does each week. Since Gee co-founded BrightHive in 2017, he’s led a fully distributed team—with 19 staff members now working remotely from 11 different states.
Afriyie, on the other hand, who co-founded mRelief with Genevieve Nielsen in 2014, leads a team which meets in person, on-site, each workday. The nature of mRelief’s work—transforming access to social services for the inherent dignity of all people by developing the first end-to-end automated enrollment system for food stamps in the U.S.—requires a level of personal response, sensitive conversations and disclosure of personal identifiable information that necessitates a fully in-person work environment.
BrightHive and mRelief are both members of Civic Exchange, and both have offices within Civic Exchange’s co-working space in Chicago’s Loop. Their two organizations represent different ends of the spectrum of the approaches that leaders of the eight organizations that comprise Civic Exchange take towards organizing and managing their teams. In some ways, that spectrum provides a representation of the variety of approaches today’s companies, particularly startups, utilize. And the founders of each CX company have found that by sharing a collaborative space with one another, they’ve been able to see firsthand the opportunities and challenges each organization faces in their approach.
Three Approaches to Gathering and Managing Teams
Within that spectrum at Civic Exchange, the leaders of each organization employ a variety of different approaches that can loosely grouped into three categories. Recently, the founders of each Civic Exchange organization sat down to discuss their varied approaches and the benefits and challenges of each. While all founders have a clear rationale for why their approach is right for their organization, founders also share the belief that much can be learned from how each of the other organizations manage their teams.
Distributed Teams
Distributed teams—in which the majority of staff members are in different physical and geographic locations each day—rely on tools such as Zoom, Slack and Google Drive to meet and collaborate. In many cases, the entire organization gathers once or twice each year for retreat-style meetings, and smaller teams may organize in-person meetups from time to time. But most days, everyone has a few hundred or even thousand miles between them.
Leaders of distributed teams communicated that some of the key advantages come from the appeal that distributed teams hold for potential and current employees. “Being a fully remote company helps us find and keep amazing people,” says Gee, “because we’re not limited to folks in a 50-mile radius of the Chicago Loop. Our VP of Engineering is one of the best engineering leaders I’ve ever met, but no matter how great BrightHive’s offer to work here in Chicago, he and his family weren’t going to pick up and leave West Virginia. Being a remote company meant he didn’t have to.”
Jennifer Brandel, CEO of Hearken and one of the co-founders of Civic Exchange, says that for her, the benefits extend further, including to the environment and to her team’s work/life balance. “There are huge benefits to having people available in multiple areas and countries,” she says. “We’re able to be in person with partners around the world while burning less carbon, and we’re able to learn from the variety of cultures our team represents. For instance, our Scandinavian colleagues have made us Americans jealous of their work, life and holiday balance, and we’re taking cues from them in how we approach supporting the quality of life of staff.”
On the other hand, leaders of distributed teams acknowledge the challenges, primarily ones involving communication. “There’s more potential for miscommunication between team members,” says Gee. “We make prolific use of Slack and love our GIFs and emojis as much as any other millennially-staffed startup, but sometimes a messaging app isn’t the right medium for delivering your message. We’ve had to get much better, and much faster, at recognizing when communicating via Slack isn’t working, and when a video conference, or even an in-person whiteboard session, is the best way for two or more team members to really understand each other.”
Leaders of distributed teams at Civic Exchange also shared how certain tasks, such as working together to edit a document or news story, can be difficult to achieve without working side-by-side in the same room.
On-site Teams
On-Site teams, as the name implies, gather on-site every workday to connect and collaborate. Team members may occupy different rooms or spaces within the office, but each team member is only a few steps away from each other. On-site teams like mRelief face different external communication challenges that are suited well to team members being in the same space each day. Says Afriyie, “At mRelief, it is much easier to comply with the privacy and security requirements of engaging in manual conversations with food stamp applicants when we are in-person.” Beyond these advantages, leaders like Afriyie also find that they can support work-life balance in other ways, as employees’ time away from work is considered sacred, and the nonprofit provides an unlimited sick-hours policy for appointments and well-being.
“When mRelief’s nonprofit was headquartered in California in 2016, the cost of living made recruitment challenging,” said Afriyie. “When we returned to Chicago, we built our team by recruiting locally and all across the country with a number of our employees relocating to Chicago to join in our mission.”
Hybrid Teams
Hybrid teams involve most staff working on-site each workday, but also include factors like: one more team members working remotely each day or the entire team having the option of working remotely one day each week.Leaders of hybrid teams often try to maximize the strengths of both distributed and on-site teams, as well as account for dynamic challenges they may face, such as the geographic move of a founder or key team member.
Derek Eder, Founder and Partner of DataMade, and co-founder of Civic Exchange, explain his team’s recent transition. “We started as a 100% in-office team, but over the past year we have had to transition to support remote workers now that one of the partners lives in Ann Arbor, MI.”
Leaders like Eder find ways to continue building camaraderie and collaboration even while no longer being on-site every day. “Maintaining our office culture of eating lunch together and socializing on a regular basis was really important to us,” says Eder, “so we decided to dedicate a single day of the week (Wednesdays) where everyone is in the office. On the remote side, we decided to make Fridays our dedicated remote day for everyone, which ended up being a really nice way to end the week and lead into the weekend.”
DataMade’s schedule accounts for one of the challenges hybrid teams often encounter. When specific days for being in-office or out-of-office are not clearly delineated, team members individually choose which days they work remotely, which can lead to friction when certain tasks must be accomplished in person by two or more team members.
Learning from Each Approach
So what is each team at Civic Exchange learning from each other? First, that one approach is neither better nor worse than another. Says Brandel, “It’s been so comforting to see the variety of ways the companies at CX are approaching their team culture. It helps reinforce the idea that there’s no one way to do it, and we’re all figuring it out as we go.”
Second, leaders are often adopting the practices that have worked well for other Civic Exchange organizations, even if their overall approach is completely different. “We’ve learned quite a lot from watching other organizations run and organize their meetings,” says Eder. “A well-run meeting is shorter and more enjoyable. Now at DataMade, we rarely have a meeting (internal or external) without a clear agenda and purpose.”
A few other practices with which Civic Exchange teams are experimenting:
Distributed teams are creating time, resources and expectations for tasks that must be done in person.
On-site teams are finding ways to extend their work outside of their physical location. mRelief, for example, creates “community work hours,” time in which the staff hold office hours at public libraries, enabling food stamp applicants to receive manual support with enrollment and participate in user testing to contribute to optimizations.
Hybrid teams are including a videoconference link in all meeting invites, to make it easier for team members to attend a meeting if they are remote during that meeting.
Teams are providing employees with specific criteria for when they are able to work from home or from a remote location, and revising employee handbooks to clarify the specifics details of their organization’s in-office and out-of-office policies.
In addition to continuing to learn about management approaches from one another, the leaders of Civic Exchange organizations are excited by the potential to continue sharing ideas and collaborating together on projects of common interest and impact. In turn, we at Civic Exchange are excited to continue to share these learnings on this blog.
