How to Make Virtual Teams Work: Manage and Empower a Virtual Team That Thrives While Working from Home

By Robert Glazer

A remote book on building a successful virtual culture from USA TODAY and WALL STREET JOURNAL bestselling author, Robert Glazer!

Close to twenty-five percent of professionals today work remotely in some capacity (and even more since the start of the pandemic). There are a lot of benefits to companies who employ a virtual workforce: cost savings on office space and other overhead, improved job performance, better employee morale, and a broader pool of talent from which to recruit. However, there are also challenges: communication limitations, social isolation, and managing distractions, among others.

In his leadership management book, How to Make Virtual Teams Work, Robert Glazer, bestselling author of Elevate, taps into his decade of experience managing a virtual office—and winning twenty "best places to work" awards—while providing leaders with a step-by-step playbook on how to intentionally build a remote workforce and culture by developing core values that provide guidance in hiring talent who works well remotely, creating comprehensive onboarding plans, using technology to communicate and connect with remote employees, and more. This goes way beyond a typical HR strategy book. By employing these specific organizational behavior strategies, leaders can build a remote environment that thrives and make it one of their key competitive advantages.

Praise for Robert Glazer:

"Robert Glazer has led a top performing remote organization for over a decade. With this book, he shares the essential keys to building a world-class remote company." —Keith Ferrazzi, New York Times bestselling author of Never Eat Alone

"Bob Glazer leads from the heart. When the work week drags you down, his clear-cut advice can lift you up." —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals

"Bob Glazer has become one of the finest business columnists writing today, and he's done it while building a truly great company, Acceleration Partners. You can get a taste of both from this wonderful book." —Bo Burlingham, author of Small Giants and Finish Big

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Jul 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728236308

Robert Glazer

Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards two years in a row. He is the author of the inspirational newsletter Friday Forward, author of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller, Elevate, and the international bestselling books, How To Make Virtual Teams Work and Performance Partnerships. He is a sought-after speaker by companies and organizations around the world and is the host of The Elevate Podcast. Outside of work, Bob can likely be found skiing, cycling, reading, traveling, spending quality time with his family or overseeing some sort of home renovation project.

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Copyright © 2020 by Robert Glazer & Kendall Marketing Group, LLC

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Cover design by Jackie Cummings

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To our Acceleration Partners employees and alumni, who helped to blaze a new trail.

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Resources

Back Cover

Introduction

It’s been said that the only constant in life (and business) is change.

For years, remote work has been slowly gaining momentum, moving out of the fringes of the business world and being more readily adopted both by employees and companies—even large, well-known organizations. It no longer needs to be a secret; companies that offer remote work are more comfortable sharing the practice openly with clients and see it as an emerging competitive advantage to attract the best talent. The image in many people’s heads of a legion of remote workers slacking off in their pajamas and avoiding responsibility has been replaced by a track record of performance and results.

At the same time, we’ve come to acknowledge the drawbacks of office life. The average American worker spent 225 hours, or nine days, commuting last year,¹ and commute times have risen steadily over the past forty years.

At the office, the great open-concept workplace experiment has continued to be debunked from a productivity standpoint. One study by the Guardian² found that employees in open-concept offices lose an average of eighty-six minutes per day to distractions, are 70 percent more likely to take sick days, and are more likely to leave the office earlier in the day.

The net result is that employees spend more time than ever commuting to work and getting less done while they’re there. It’s not a positive or productive trend.

All of these developments were already converging before COVID-19 hit in early 2020 and the largest remote work experiment in history suddenly arrived on a global scale. Millions of workers were abruptly forced to work remotely, and there’s every reason to believe this will be the galvanizing event that accelerates the work-from-home revolution. Companies as large as Twitter have already told employees they never have to return to the office.³ Moreover, I believe the organizations that can build a thriving culture in a remote workplace will be the leaders of tomorrow.

When I started Acceleration Partners (AP) in 2007, the decision to make our workforce 100 percent remote was initially an attempt to preemptively solve a pain-point. We were a specialized agency in an industry called affiliate marketing,⁴ which has grown considerably over the past decade but was more of a niche business at the time, with small and diffuse pockets of talent. We were winning large accounts and needed experienced account managers from the industry—talent that was scattered all over the country.

We started AP outside of Boston, but it became clear we would need to hire people from across the United States to acquire the experience and aptitude required to do the job. While we were able to find great operations people in our area, there wasn’t enough experienced and available account management talent in any single city.

Our journey to building an award-winning remote business started out of necessity, not ideology. But as many businesses have learned—and as many more will learn during a crisis—these types of problem-solving attempts can develop into the foundation of a new strategy