Enterprise Nation

Entrepreneurship is great; it's empowering, it's exciting and it's an opportunity to reach out for your dreams. So says self-described social Media Consultant, Blogger & Geekette, Vero Pepperrell. She also says to realise those dreams many of us rely on working with a remote team, whether it's a business partner across town, or a developer in another country. Here, Vero offers her 5 tips to working with a remote team.

Developing good long-distance relationship habits can be the make or break for people working in separate environments, though they very much apply to any business partnership.

Five tips for working with a remote team

• Trust and reliability are key to successful team work: How can you delegate a share of the work to a colleague or employee if you don't trust them to come back with answers and quality work? It just turns into hours or days of worries that the work they come back with won't be satisfying. Pick your team well to avoid this, and make expectations clear at the beginning of each project or task.
• Always tell, never hide: Not telling is like chucking a rock up in the air and hoping it doesn't fall smack dab on your head. You might get away with it a few times, but keep doing it and when it hits, it'll hurt badly.
• Help, don't bother: For any project manager, temptation to micromanage is always there. At a distance, there is no visual cue to confirm that your team members are working hard. Encourage everyone to make themselves available by phone, but close down email and IMs to get a few hours of uninterrupted focus a day.
• Be flexible: Being agile and nimble, willing to accept change and adapt to the market quickly is a question of survival in any of today's small businesses! Be ready for change and have a contingency plan if one of your team members is suddenly ill or unavailable.
• Encourage water cooler conversation: This may seem counterintuitive, since we think of business in terms of productivity, but socialisation - what Benjamin Ellis compares with a bees dance - is essential for you and your team to be "in tune" with each other. Who knows, the best ideas might come out of a cheeky chat about last night's news!

No matter what, I think it all comes back to trust, trust and trust. If communication is good and everyone has confidence in their teammates, it's a recipe for success, whether the team's in the same room or halfway across the world.

Vero Pepperrell

Vero Pepperrell is a social media consultant and geekette, with 8 years of blogging behind her. She's the community girl for Taptu mobile search, and writes about gadgets, online marketing and customer care at thatcanadiangirl.co.uk.