The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

Managing Remote Teams: Ideas and Advice for Thriving Online

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Managing Remote Teams: Ideas and Advice for Thriving Online

The dramatic spread of COVID-19 changed what life looks like for millions of people – forcing people to evaluate how thriving online can impact their work, school, and personal connections.

Colleges and Universities embraced virtual learning. Employers are closing offices and encouraging people to work from home in industries where that is possible, signaling a permanent shift in how people interact at their organization.

However, if you are a manager who has traditionally worked primarily in an office with your teams, there are real challenges to moving work online, especially as it relates to working together.

Rachel Happe, Scott Leeper, and Keri Kersten explored the challenges of managing remote teams and shared best practices and advice for thriving in this new hybrid work environment, including how to:

  • Support change, adaptation, and flexibility
  • Create teamwork routines and prompts
  • Institute working out loud
  • Mix work and fun
  • Manage staff and conflict remotely

Watch the Archive of Managing Remote Teams: Ideas and Advice for Thriving Online

Download the presentation.

Dina Vekaria + Maren Beckman on Remote Teams

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Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI and more. 

Find more episodes.

Episode #65 features Maren Beckman, Global Community Manager, and Dina Vekaria, Senior Global Community Manager at Pearson.

In this episode of the podcast, Maren and Dina discuss best practices for time zone management on remote teams, thriving on a dispersed team, the power of using “work out loud” (WOL) practices for accountability and visibility, and their successful “People of Person” vlog series.

Listen Now:

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About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Working Out Loud and Community Management

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Note: This post was originally published here. 

Working out loud (WOL) is essentially any behavior where you share your work transparently with a network of people.

That network can be as small as a work team and as large as the Intranet. From my perspective, it is the act of sharing done with the intent of soliciting feedback, providing value to others, or building relationships with people beyond your current network.

My work out loud journey started in January of 2008 with my first work-related blog,The Social Organization. Initially, I wrote mostly for myself, to work through my thoughts. I soon found that it, combined with Twitter, was the best way to find people who cared about the same things I did, which allowed me to build a strategic network that made me smarter, supported my work, and enabled my success. I would never have started The Community Roundtable without first having that blog.

Like my experience working out loud, it can be done in many places and it doesn’t need to happen in within the boundaries of a community. However, I would argue that it is much more effective when it is done within a community.

Communities create a shared context and, when done well, increase the level of trust between members. That increases a few critical things:

  • Relevancy and resonance of what is shared
  • Likelihood and quality of validation and feedback
  • Percent of people who feel comfortable sharing
  • Complexity or ambiguity of what is shared

Because of this, great communities create spaces where deep conversation and innovation happen – or in business terms, it increases the value generated from working out loud.

So what is the role of the community manager in working out loud?

Simon Terry said it quite succinctly: community managers are the architects and agents of strategic value. They ensure working out loud is easy to do and is rewarded with peer recognition and response. That sounds easier than it is in practice but it is the role of community management in a nutshell.

Why is this so complex to actually do? Because it requires:

  • Developing a shared purpose and value that is compelling and attracts people aligned with that purpose
  • Ensuring people are welcomed and acclimated into the community
  • Developing both value-gained and value-added ways for members with different personality types to participate
  • Creating strategic triggers that ask people to engage in ways that are just a little more involved than they do already – moving them up the engagement and trust curve
  • Measuring the breadth and depth of behaviors across the community and adjusting or realigning the approach as behaviors change, the culture of the community matures, and the purpose of the community evolves
  • Developing peer leaders as advocates for different stakeholder perspectives
  • Moderating and modeling the language of engagement to ensure people feel supported, even when they are challenged
  • Ensuring the community sponsor or host understands and realizes the value of the community’s outputs
  • Managing platforms and channels to align with strategic goals and member needs, to make key behaviors as easy as possible to do

Community management is often seen as a tactical role with member engagement as the primary responsibility. Done well, however, it is far more strategic and responsible for creating the conditions of engagement; building trust in a scaled way, and developing a culture that is agile, engaged, and innovative. A big part of creating the conditions of engagement is supporting individuals on their work out loud journey and helping them understand what possibilities it unlocks for them personally.

It is why I believe that the future of all leadership and management is community management. It’s not about what we do ourselves – but what we support and enable others to do.

Throwback Thursday: Work Out Loud (WOL)

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work out loud

It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of the work out loud concept. We’re in the middle of International Working Out Loud Week and are really enjoying all the great content this week at the #WOLWEEK site. If you’re thinking of how the #WOL movement can be applied specifically to community management, look no further! Below we have a round-up of some of our favorite work-out-loud resources we’ve previously featured.

Case Study: Using The Work-Out-Loud Framework To Measure Adoption & Engagement – We were lucky enough to have Jim Martin of Shepley Bulfinch facilitate a Roundtable Call with members of TheCR Network on how his organization used the Work-Out-Loud framework to measure adoption and engagement in their community.

On the call, Jim shared how he has been using the Work Out Loud (WOL) framework within Shepley Bulfinch. Specifically, Jim shared:

  • How they are using Work-Out-Loud framework metrics to find validators, sharers, askers and answerers on their social intranet, and to better understand what they look like, and articulate the value their behavior has to the firm
  • How they are using the framework to evaluate the success of their process for asking and answering technical questions; #AskFinch
  • Why they chose this framework, what worked and what didn’t, and what they would do differently next time.

This case study specifically looks at an internal employee community use case, but was helpful for everyone facing engagement and adoption issues in their online communities.

TheCR Network Members can view the full case study here. Not a member? Join now. 

The Link Between Communities and Culture Change – Most organizations do not understand how powerful communities can be in support of goals like creating collaborative and innovative cultures or executing on digital transformation.

When you take a community management approach to behavior change, it triggers a series of ‘aha’ moments for individuals that lead them to change their beliefs about what is possible – and leads to even more behavior change.  Operationally, that means instead of investing in getting agreement on a new belief first, the belief becomes a natural result of engaging in new methods. The makes the community approach to culture change more cost-effective and agile.


Community Engagement FrameworkCommunity Engagement Framework – TheCR Community Engagement Framework gives structure to the process, and provides community managers with the goals and metrics they should focus on as their communities evolve.

In each step, there are community management techniques to trigger, establish and reward the behaviors. For example, Sharing Out Loud can be triggered by having a regular thread where people share their priorities for the week, like we do in TheCR Network. That helps community members understand the social environment, get comfortable with how people respond to each other and engage without fear of demonstrating a lack of knowledge – making the community a more comfortable place for members to share.

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: October 2015

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable

If you ever want time to fly by simply plan a community migration — you’ll be wondering what the heck happened to the last few weeks and months. While we prep behind the scenes to launch TheCR Network on a new, shiny community platform our members have been busy learning and working together inside the current community.

Here’s a sneak peek into what’s been going on inside TheCR Network this past month:

  • 10 Fundamentals That Transcend All Community Use Cases (Member Call): We had the talented and charming Lisa Bidder (Lithium) to share her take on fundamentals that are necessary and work in every community use case. It was a very popular call and one of the most popular take-aways was the importance of defining the shared value of the community for its members and the organization.
  • Peer to Peer Coaching Programs: How Social Learning Builds Thriving Workplace Communities (Member Call): Phil LeNir of Coaching Ourselves came in to share how peer to peer coaching models encourages learning and productivity in the company. He had some fascinating stats from a company that has implemented the peer to peer model and tracked the results.
  • Work Out Loud: Every week we host a “working out loud” thread for members to share their top priorities for the week and this past month our WOL threads were on fire! Members followed up with each other asking for shared resources based on what they shared and we were able to connect members with people and resources that support their work. Winning!

Want to access our programming for the benefit of your community work? Reach out and ask us about membership.

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Interested in TheCR Networkbut have a few questions?  Join Hillary for our first webinar focused on TheCR Network, where she’ll share an inside look at membership and highlight best practices for member leadership programs. https://the.cr/1LMb0d2