At Vimeo, we strive to bring the power of professional video to every employee.  

So, as the Director of SEO at Vimeo, you’d think that people management over video would be second nature by now — as natural as swinging by a colleague’s desk for a chat, or a casual bump-in in the coffee room. 

Just like the majority of remote workers, I run up against challenges forming connections, making sure messages aren’t misread, and recovering from screen fatigue. 

Thankfully, in the past few years of growing a team, I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks when it comes to successfully managing and accomplishing our team goals over video — all while having a bit of fun, too.

In this article:

    The challenge of managing remote teams

    Organizations naturally ebb and flow, scale up, branch out, and evolve to suit the business needs and vision.

    With significant growth comes several challenges — especially in a remote working world. Many team leaders struggle with maintaining the binding agents that keep everyone in lockstep.

    The challenges include:

    • Onboarding many people into workflows and processes at once 
    • Making sure team members are moving towards their own career goals
    • Making myself available for ad-hoc questions, concerns and urgent requests
    • Delivering timely and constructive feedback from a distance with nuance and sincerity
    • Building relationships with a remote workforce and team members I was only meeting for the first time remotely

    And with all that going on, we also want to make sure everyone gets adequate focus time, without constant meetings, contact switching, and the never ending scroll of Slack messages! 

    I can confidently say we’ve found a system that works: supported by synchronous and asynchronous communication powered by video. 

    If there’s one thing I hope you take away, it’s this: video can bridge the intimacy gap when in-office interactions suddenly go remote. 

    Video allows new hires and team members to familiarize themselves with how we do things while freeing up deep work time. It also allows us to accomplish more than we would have if we were sharing a physical space (though we still miss casual coffee run-ins!). 

    So let’s take a look at the 5 people management skills you need to lead a remote team.

    Five people management skills to nail remote work

    Leverage meetings to focus on bigger goals

    There are a lot of regular meetings when working remote. 

    For example, we have monthly company-wide all-hands led by our C-suite and leadership teams. There are localized all-hands and weekly marketing meetings for the 100-member marketing team. There’s also a weekly meeting for the marketing team leadership to compare notes and talk about the department. 

    My team has a weekly standup in Slack, weekly 1:1s with every member of the team, and every two months, those meetings get extended to bigger, broader career chats. 

    It’s a lot. It’s almost too much. 

    But these meetings balance what’s going on, both the individual products and initiatives we’re launching, and to reinforce the larger aims of the company and its team members. 

    During company all-hands, for example, leadership reminds us of our company goals for the year. Even if we’ve seen these slides a million times, it reminds us of the larger company focus and keeps us aligned.

    And while successful people managers know how to manage the department and manage up, our first job is to support our team and make sure they’re moving towards success

    That’s why it’s important to talk to each team member. Not just what they’re working on, but where their career is going and whether they’re moving towards their professional goals, and how we can remove roadblocks to unlock their full potential.

    Form personal connections with ice breakers

    Maintaining the same level of easygoing, casual chatter in the office can be a challenge when we’re all remote.

    When meetings take place over video, people tend to get down to business. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t help with getting to know people at a deeper level.

    So for team weeklies, we devote the first five minutes to ice breakers. 

    Ice breakers are those fun, get-to-know-you questions. We rotate with a different team member bringing an ice breaker question every week. This draws new employees into the team environment and softens people into work mode on a Monday morning. 

    As an example, here are a few of our favorite ice-breakers:

    • What is the scariest thing you’ve ever done just for fun?
    • What is your real favorite movie, and what movie do you pretend is your favorite to sound cultured?
    • Do you have a favorite wine and cheese or chocolate pairing?
    • What’s the best thing you bought in 2021?
    • What’s your go-to coffee shop order or cocktail/wine/beer order?

    It’s also important to spend time just chatting about non-work related things, like bonding over books or swapping updates on how things are going outside of work. 

    There’s a lot of goodwill you can build just by running into someone in the kitchen and bonding over a show you’re both watching, or a brand you both like.

    There’s a fear that you lose personal intimacy when you’re not physically sharing a space with someone. But video has its own way of intimacy. 

    Suddenly, you’re sharing time with people in the comfort of their own homes, several times a week. You’re seeing into people’s lives in a different way than you were before. This is a great opportunity to draw something new out of people that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise — while also respecting their personal boundaries.

    Carve out focus time

    The best work happens when people are heads-down at their desks, empowered to work at their own pace, without constant distractions. 

    Remote work has the advantage in that department: there’s no chance of getting cornered on your way to the washroom or having a colleague swing by, unannounced, at your desk. 

    As a manager, I encourage people to be clear and intentional with their time. 
    Have your team schedule in “focus time” on their calendars and make it clear to others, via their Slack status or email auto-replies, “I’m in focus time. If you have a question, I will give you an answer at 3pm.”

    Full disclosure: I do this too! But I’ve also given my team permission to make noise if they’re struggling and urgently need me so I can check in.

    Deliver feedback promptly, specifically, and carefully

    People really value constructive feedback. It means their boss really cares about how they’re doing, and is making the time to help them reach their goals.

    But the delivery requires balance because of how easy it is for people to get their egos tied up in the feedback they’re receiving. 

    Feedback is really hard to navigate in a remote world. So much happens asynchronously.

    Before, I might casually tap someone at their desk for a quick debrief of how their presentation went, and we could discuss it in person with clarity and nuance. 

    Now, I prioritize delivering feedback and advice with care, without tearing down anyone’s sense of their own performance. 

    That involves taking notes throughout presentations to be as specific as possible. I like to use that time as an opportunity to nurture relationships and reinforce goals of what we’re trying to achieve. 

    The most effective feedback comes as close to the moment as possible, so it’s still relevant to whoever you’re talking to, and doesn’t look like you’ve been stewing on the critique for weeks.

    Pro tip: If you know a team member is extra-sensitive to feedback, or is likely to assume the worst (as we all do sometimes!), try to send them a quick message just to say, “This is good, I promise!” or layer on honest positive feedback.

    Delegate meetings

    According to my time tracker, I spend around 18 to 20 hours a week in meetings. In the past, I was also typically leading my team’s meetings.

    Not only did this cause major screen fatigue, it was also tough to constantly be in the driver’s seat and at the center of focus. 

    Now, I’ve started handing off meetings to team members. This allows other people to flex their leadership skills while I can participate as an attendee. 

    We have a lot of great leaders and calling on them to take charge of weekly stand-ups or even ice breaker activities helps them develop new skills, which can take a lot of the mental load off the manager.

    Three ways to use Vimeo for effective people management

    Vimeo specializes in video communication with tools like Vimeo Record, Video Library, and  Vimeo Enterprise as we strive to bring video power to every company, business, and employee. 

    Here are some practical ways we use video at Vimeo to power our team’s collaboration and help everyone do their best work.

    Vimeo Record

    Vimeo Record is a Chrome extension and a mobile app that lets you record either just yourself, or your screen, or your screen with yourself in a corner. We like to use it in three ways to support our team:

    We use Vimeo Record to communicate with team members across time zones, asynchronously through video.

    This allows us to sit down with someone and give them our full attention and care without requiring the other person to actually be there. 

    We’ve built it into our Asana workflow. 

    That means that if I want to explain a task, or leave a comment, I can just hit “Record” through Asana and it’ll save as a playable video so whoever is watching it doesn’t need to leave the workflow. 

    We can share information widely, save it, and rewatch it. 

    This is particularly helpful when we were onboarding many new team members at once, answering the same questions over and over like, “Where can I find this file?” or “Can you walk me through this process?” 

    In these instances, it’s helpful to screen record the answer, save it to a library, where it can live on for whoever needs to find that file again.

    Video Library

    Video Library lets our team upload all our videos in one place, accessible to anyone on that team. 

    We’ve organized our onboarding and training videos into different folders. We keep libraries for different projects, allowing anyone to find the visual assets they’re looking for. 

    Other companies might keep separate libraries for each department, like one for your Marketing team and one for your Sales team. It’s really easy to find a system of organization that works for you.

    Live Streaming

    We live stream our town halls and other one-to-many meetings with Vimeo’s live streaming tools.

    The chat in particular keeps employees engaged, and auto-closed captions helps people around the world, especially if their first language isn’t English, fully abreast of what’s going on. Meanwhile, the ability to pre-record clips allows us all to work together anywhere around the world.

    Lead remote teams

    So there you have it! 

    Managing people remotely doesn’t come without its challenges — especially if you love the personal aspects of team-building and getting to know your coworkers.

    But video gives us new opportunities to build meaningful connections around the world that we might not have if we were in the office together. It all depends on how you use it.

    Raise your people management skills with video