Clarify Expectations for Your Work
You and a colleague across the country have agreed: You’ll draft the proposal that’s due Monday, and they’ll edit it. But as you start your work, you realize that there are details you’re not sure about. Will you run an outline by them before you start writing? Does editing mean they’ll insert commas and remove typos, or does it involve substantive changes to content and language? Will they input the edits directly onto the draft or deliver comments over the phone? If they text you at nine p.m. on Sunday with a question, are you supposed to answer right away? Most of these questions are easily reconciled if you’re working in close proximity—you can ask for clarification in passing or have your colleague look at something odd on your screen.
But the flexibility of remote work means that you and your colleagues might be operating under vastly different circumstances—even in different time zones. What’s convenient or natural for you might not be the same for them. If you’re working from home in a pinch and don’t set expectations with your colleagues in the office, they may forget, for example, that you’re off-site and unable to keep physical design sketches circulating. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to establish the scope of your collaboration and institute rules that will help you succeed.
Define the work
Whether you’re completing a onetime project for a client or collaborating on a monthly corporate update, delineating the work is one of the most important conversations you’ll have with your virtual partners. How will you describe your common goals? What milestones will you set for the work? What form will your deliverables take? Getting alignment on these questions smooths the way for your work together and makes all of you mutually responsible.
Start by initiating a discussion with your colleagues with the explicit goal of talking about how you’ll collaborate effectively. To avoid having a long conversation about process over e-mail or phone, for bigger projects draft a collaboration charter—a shared document that everyone in the group can access and edit. (See the sidebar “Virtual Collaboration Charter.”) Ask the person leading the project to circulate this template. Or if there’s no designated leader or the work is ongoing and not related to a singular project, create your own template and invite others to edit it. Push your collaborators to contribute to the charter from their own areas of expertise—for example, the person responsible for each milestone should help set target dates. Then schedule a call to review the document together, resolving disagreements and answering questions.
At the end of the call, ask everyone to verbally sign off, and keep a copy in an accessible location—your Dropbox folder, for example—so that people can refer to the document thereafter. With this collaboration charter, everyone has a common reference they can turn to for basic questions while they’re out in the field (“Is this client request in scope?”) or simply out of touch (“Am I supposed to have this assignment ready on the fifth or the fifteenth?”). And if the communication hurdles of your arrangement lead to misunderstandings down the line, you’ll use this document to resolve disagreements and maintain accountability.
If you can’t orchestrate a conversation such as this with the whole team, or if you’re not part of one, create a charter for yourself. Schedule a one-on-one phone or video conversation with your boss, or setaside a quiet hour for the work. Take notes, and share the document with the people you work with most frequently: It will come in handy if confusion or conflict develops later on.
VIRTUAL COLLABORATION CHARTER
Include the following elements in your collaboration charter:
• Goals. What is the desired outcome of our work together? For example: “We’ll deliver a global marketing plan for a new product to our client.”
• Scope. What are our high-level deliverables or performance targets? What lies outside our scope? For example, “Deliverables are a written plan (20 pages) and slide presentation over video chat (one hour). Design content is outside the scope.”
• Resources. What resources—financial, human, and so on—do we have to work with? For longterm or ongoing collaborations, how do we expect our resources to evolve? For example, “The client has sent a PDF with market research from the developers and has made its R&D staff available. Our teams in India, Japan, and London will contribute input from their markets.”
• Schedule boundaries. What are the major constraints on our schedule? Do we need to plan for time-zone differences? For example, “The client is planning a campaign launch on August 1. In June, we’re ramping up a new project with another client in a different city.”
• Milestones. How will we benchmark our progress? For example, “Approved design by March 1. Contract with vendor signed by March 15. Prototype from vendor by April 15.”
For short-term gigs, where a formal charter doesn’t make sense, run through these questions in an informal conversation with the colleagues who might be affected by your absence. If you’re working from home for a week while the office moves, for example, talk to your supervisor before you leave. The following types of questions help clarify the work:
• “What are our goals for this work over the next week? Here’s what I have planned . . .”
• “What deliverables would you like to see by the time we’re back? What can wait? So far I’m thinking . . .”
• “What resources will I have while I’m out of the office? I need . . .”
• “Are there any schedule issues I should plan for? I already know about . . .”
• “What milestones should we set over the next week? By Wednesday, I’d like to have done . . .”
Agree on roles, tasks, and processes
Now that you’re clear about what work needs to be done, who will complete which tasks? Coordinating roles and responsibilities is inherently more challenging when you’re not in the same physical location. If you don’t check in frequently, your colleague in Cape Town will lose track of what your teammate in Miami is doing. But sending multiple messages to multiple recipients on multiple channels can create confusion and make it hard to track progress. To organize who does what, take the following steps:
• Simplify the work. Streamline things as much as you can, and agree on who ultimately owns each task. If you aren’t in a position to influence these decisions, talk one-on-one with the people you’ll be working with most directly to make sure that you’re all on the same page. If necessary, press your boss for more direction—and suggest the changes you’d like to see.
• Have each person share a “role card.” Itemize important information such as the person’s title, general responsibilities, work schedule, close collaborators, and the key tasks, decisions, deliverables, and milestones the individual is attached to. These “cards” could be individual documents, e-mails, or entries on a shared wiki or message board. Review the info briefly during a meeting to clear up any misunderstandings.
• Agree on protocols. Guidelines are needed for important activities such as group decisions, tracking progress, and sharing updates. Consider these questions: “Who in the group needs to be involved in each of these activities?” and “Which communication technologies will you use for each of these activities?” If you lack the authority to lead this conversation, pose these questions to your supervisor with respect to yourself: “What activities do I need to be involved in? I’m thinking . . .” or “How should I share updates during a meeting? I’d like to . . .”
Establish a code of conduct
When you’re out of the office, you’re free to structure your time to suit your own particular habits and needs. But the routines that work for you also need to work for your colleagues. Set healthy boundaries, and establish a code of conduct to which you can hold yourself accountable. And if you’re out of the office just for the short term, managing your colleague’s expectations matters even more, since they’re used to your regular schedule and routine. Flagging a situation that’s out of the ordinary (“Working from home on Wednesday; back in the office on Thursday”) will allow your work to continue without interruption.
If you’re part of a team, ask your leader to clarify the terms of engagement. If you’re an independent contributor, initiate this conversation yourself with your colleagues. Table 1 outlines the topics to cover in each conversation.
TABLE 1
Shared expectations go a long way toward easing the frictions that exist in every working relationship. But whether you can meet these expectations as a remote partner largely depends not on your good intentions or memory, but on your technology. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to find and use the tools you need to be a reliable contributor.