#4: The 5 essential Principles for Thriving Distributed Teams 🚀

👉 Discover your Distributed Work Score for free 👈

💡 “Distributed work” tip of the week

Expert of the week: Marek Grygier (Co-Founder & COO of Remote-how)

Essential Principles for Thriving Distributed Teams

The DNA of a company's culture is unique, shaped over time through trial and error. Based on Remote-how's experiences, here are five principles that have proven invaluable for their remote operations. While these principles might not be universally applicable, they can serve as inspiration for teams venturing into remote work:

🔍 Transparency:
• Financial: Weekly financial reports detailing revenues, costs, and balances.
• Communication: Avoid private project-related discussions. Keep them in open threads.
• Organizational: Share daily tasks and progress with the team.

📞 Choosing the Right Means of Communication: Embrace asynchronous communication. Reserve real-time interactions for urgent matters. Videoconferencing remains vital for team alignment and casual interactions.

📆 The "AD HOC STOP" Principle: Ditch impromptu calls and meetings. Opt for structured virtual meetings with agendas and advance notice, ensuring participants come prepared.

⏳ The "ASAP STOP" Principle: Not everything labeled 'ASAP' is truly urgent. Focus on genuine priorities to maintain organization and avoid neglecting responsibilities.

⚖️ Equality: Every team member, irrespective of role, has an equal voice, and their input matters in decision-making.

→ Remember, these principles not only drive productivity but also foster trust, inclusivity, and reduced stress in a remote setup. Tailor them according to your team's unique needs for the best results.

🚀 The story behind Remote-how AI

As we marvel at the transformative power of AI in distributed work, it's essential to understand the journey that brought us here. It's a journey marked by innovation, user feedback, and continuous evolution, all aimed at optimizing the distributed work experience.

Our story began in February 2023 with the genesis of the Remote Work Score, an assessment framework to check remote readiness for companies. This tool has been tested with 300+ eary users companies worldwide. We did extensive interviews with 40 of them and listened to our users and realized the need for more personalization and future recommendations. This feedback sparked an idea: what if we could automate this process and make it more widely available?

I had the unique opportunity to team up with four brilliant high school students for the AI Google Hackathon. Yes, you read that right, high school students! Huge kudos to Gerald, Michał, Mikołaj, and Staszek 👏👏👏👏

These young minds, all 19 years old, are some of the most talented individuals I've had the pleasure of working with. Their passion for technology and their drive to innovate was amazing! We took our idea to our first AI hackathon with LabLab.ai in June 2023 and launched the Alpha version.

This version featured an OpenAI-powered conversational bot and a scoring system to assess remote work readiness. But our journey didn't stop there.

In July 2023, we participated in the Google Vertex AI Hackathon, a pivotal moment in our journey. Here, we built the Beta version, integrating Vertex AI for sentiment analysis and improving existing Langchain technology to guide user conversations. This marked a significant transformation in our journey, bringing us one step closer to our vision of optimizing the distributed work experience with AI.

Today, Mentor AI is helping distributed work managers all over the world to evaluate their distributed work habits and skills to boost their team’s productivity and collaboration.

🧑‍🏫  Mentor AI

Identify your remote or hybrid work challenges by talking to our AI-powered chatbot. Get results in a few minutes.

🎯 Comprehensive Assessment: Understand your readiness for distributed work across multiple dimensions.

📊 Personalized Score: Get a score that reflects your distributed work readiness.

💡 Tailored Recommendations: Receive personalized advice to improve your distributed work practices.

Do you want to try it out for free?

Have a great week,

Iwo & the Remote-First Institute team 💙