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Being a manager requires empathy, authenticity, and flexibility. In times of crisis, these qualities are even more necessary. Your reports will be anxious and stressed, your business will be facing new challenges, and the world at large will be…different. We've reviewed a number of resources, listed at the bottom of the article, to compile suggestions for how managers can help their teams through a crisis. If you're reading this, you likely have a lot going on, so we're listing the tips up front. Keep reading for more detail and specific strategies for how to implement them. Take care of yourself first Prioritize human connection Support individual needs Maintain and amplify team rituals Lean in to prioritization Make time for moments of gratitude Take care of yourself first It's classic oxygen-mask-on-a-plane wisdom: you need to take care of yourself before you can help other people. Your team takes its cues from you in terms of how to act and feel, and you ...

From day one, Zapier has always been a distributed team. Even though my co-founders, Bryan and Mike, and I lived in the same city, we had different schedules and were bootstrapping Zapier on the side of our day jobs and school. We worked on Zapier in every spare moment we each had, but those moments didn't magically line up at the same time where we could work in the same room. Plus, side projects can't afford offices. So we just worked from our apartments, coffee shops—wherever we could get things done. Me, Bryan, and Mike back in 2012 In June of 2012, we moved out to the Bay Area from Columbia, Missouri for Y Combinator . That summer, we were all three in the same apartment—the only time in the company's history where the whole company has been together. At the tail end of that, Mike moved back to Missouri to be with his then-girlfriend/now-wife as she was wrapping up law school. He was too important to the business to leave, so we kept on doing the remote thing, coll...

We know a lot about online team building here at Zapier. We've been a 100% distributed company for nearly a decade, and we have a lot of fun. Not like we're-all-hermits-and-we-don't-know-what-fun-actually-means fun—real fun. At Zapier, we have a Slack channel called #wg-zapier-social ("wg" stands for "working group"), where we come up with ways to hang out virtually. So if you're looking for remote team activities, here are some tips from the experts. Related: How to build culture on a remote team with automation Set up a social calendar The spontaneity of a co-located office provides lots of hidden opportunities for watercooler chat. You can go for drinks on Thursday after work with your team. You can grab a few walk-and-talk coffee meetings throughout the week. Hardly a day goes by when you don't have lunch with one of your work friends. For remote team activities, you have to be more intentional about it. Zapier does this with a shared ...

Meetings get a bad rap—for a good reason. They never start on time. Someone always dominates the conversation. Discussions inevitably go off-track. People start tracing their hands in their notebooks. And almost always, the meeting could've been an email. On a remote team, you're less likely to be caught tracing your hand in your notebook, but the chances of having ineffective meetings only increases. Video conferencing apps often have time limits on free plans, meaning every wasted minute is precious. It's even easier to talk out of turn when you can't read body language in a virtual meeting. Small talk can eat up half of the meeting because everyone's a hermit the rest of the day. Remote work requires better meeting hygiene. By putting a few structures in place, you can run more effective remote meetings, freeing up time and making everyone just a little less grouchy. 1. Decide if you need a meeting at all When working remotely, it's easy to fall into the...

People are spending more time in video calls than ever, but the big questions are going unanswered. Specifically: when are you supposed to mute yourself? And when is it okay to leave the camera off? From what I can tell, even the Very Tech Savvy People have no idea what the etiquette is, so it's time for a definitive ruling: If there are five or fewer people on the call, don't mute yourself. If there are six or more, mute unless you're the person currently talking. That's it. That's the rule now. Thank you for reading. Wait, did you want me to explain myself? Fine, let's get into why I think this is the objective, definitive rule for any and all video calls going forward, then outline a few exceptions. After that, we can talk about video. Related : 10 tips and tricks for Zoom Why five people is the definitive line for muting yourself on video calls Everyone can agree that muting by default is necessary for large meetings. At Zapier, we regularly have all-...

Saying good morning, in person, to a coworker you don't know is perfectly normal. Sending a private message to a coworker you don't know to say good morning is…weird. If not downright creepy. Look, that's just how it is. I don't make the rules. Seriously, though: the difference between these two interactions is real, which is part of why remote work is lonely. There's also not really any context for serendipitous small talk—you won't run into anyone in the hallway, for example. All of this makes it hard to connect with coworkers, let alone make friends with them. But that's not to say it's impossible. I've been working from home for over a decade. Learning to reach out to the people I work with is a key part of how I've made it work. The conversations keep me sane when things get hard. The connections give me more reasons to care about what I'm doing. And the friendships I've made along the way have lasted much longer than the jobs the...

I have a friend who once said something like this to her daughter: "Would you like me to dedicate my limited memory to remembering your birthday or checking whether you've put on your socks and shoes each morning?" I laughed. But I also wanted to cry. The sheer number of things I now have to hold in my head would have been incomprehensible to pre-parenthood me. An abridged list of the things in my brain on any given day: Have the children been fed? Are they dressed appropriately for the weather? Did they do their homework? Is there a lunch plan? Who is making dinner? Do we have a plan for dinner? Did we pay for that thing? Should I get my son a cell phone? How much video game time is too much video game time today? Have I told everyone at work who needs to know that I'll be away from my computer to deal with a kid thing? Are the chores done? Whose turn is it to empty the dishwasher anyway? The good news: there's a way to automate some of those tasks so you can...

No matter what business you're in, leads—those special contacts that seem most likely to purchase your products or services—are what you most strive for. The more people in your sales funnel, the more potential for new sales and customer retention. But maintaining the flow of leads can be an extremely tedious job with lots of manual work. There are many moving parts in the lead management puzzle: forms, CRMs, email marketing lists, eCommerce platforms, and so much more. Moving information between these apps can quickly become overwhelming. A few simple automations can do some of this work, leaving you with plenty of time to help move those leads down the funnel. Here are a few ideas for getting started—and some real-life examples of how businesses automate their lead management with Zapier. Add leads from multiple sources to your CRM One of the biggest challenges of lead management is dealing with the many places your leads come from. Most businesses use a combination of web fo...

As more people transition to remote work, we've received lots of questions about what work from home apps we use internally at Zapier. While different teams will require different tools for working remotely, we thought a peek into our tech stack would help you figure out what you might be missing. So here's an excerpt from the Zapier Playbook about the apps we use to work from home—and how we use them. Main communication tools Slack Our virtual office. Use Slack to chat about your work. Async Our home-built internal blog. Use Async to show your work. Quip Our internal knowledge base. Use Quip to document your work. Zoom Large company meetings or external meetings are usually conducted on Zoom . For smaller internal meetings, we sometimes use Slack video calls . Other communication tools Google Calendar Keeping your Google Calendar updated helps your teammates schedule time to meet with you. The latest Google Calendar update has a lot of features that make it e...

At Zapier, our "default to transparency" value means that we communicate in public channels, share information, document our work, and ask questions in a way that helps others do their work more effectively. Emphasis on in a way that helps others do their work more effectively . If you miss that part, it's chaos. In an effort to make sure no one is out of the loop on a distributed team, it can be easy to double down on sharing information—to the point that no one can find anything. Or get their work done. Or breathe. We're not immune to that at Zapier. Slack posts saying "I've looked everywhere and still can't find…" happen on the regular. But after almost a decade of working remotely, we've come up with some communication strategies that help curb the overload. 1. Be specific When you work from home, Slack can get really busy, really quickly . No one can read every message (please don't try), so you need to be specific. Who are you talk...

A successful onboarding program is the first step toward employee satisfaction and productivity. But no matter how well you've streamlined your process, everything changes when you have to do it remotely. How do you make new team members feel supported and included when they've never seen any of their coworkers face-to-face? How do they get to know the company when they can't turn to the people around them to ask questions on the fly? How do you get them to feel comfortable sharing their real opinions on the pick for the newest Bachelor? At Zapier, our onboarding is entirely remote. We use Sapling for asynchronous tasks and Zoom for live sessions. I did an interview with Sapling about how we do remote onboarding, and here I'll share some of the tips I gave them, along with a few more insights. Whether you've been forced into remote onboarding or you've chosen to take your team remote, this should help you tackle work-from-home onboarding in a way that work...

When we talk about remote work, we focus on the remote part. You can work from wherever you want, wearing whatever you want, and in some cases, on whatever schedule you want. But what about the work part of remote work? When I started at Zapier, that's the part I wasn't prepared for. I'd done plenty of customer support work in the past, but none of it had been from the comfort of my own home. In my interview for the role, I distinctly remember being asked, "What do you think the biggest challenge will be when switching to remote work?" My response: "How do you actually get things done?" After just over a year of getting things done remotely, I'm happy to say: the getting things done part is easy. What takes time is figuring out how to manage your schedule, the people you work with, and that always fun voice inside your head. Here are a few tips. 1. Be careful what you say. Not because you're likely to say something wrong, or bad, or whatev...