Remote Operations: Processes, Comms and Performance

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Managing at a distance is not office management with the camera on. It has one root problem, and everything else in this course follows from it.

You cannot see the work

You cannot see somebody thinking about a problem, or two people settling something in a corridor, or a third who has been stuck for a fortnight and is embarrassed to say so. In an office all three are visible out of the corner of your eye and get fixed in a minute. At a distance none of it is visible at all, and three consequences follow. The process has to be written down, because you cannot lean across a desk and explain it. The conversation has to be in the calendar, because it will not happen by accident. And performance has to be evidenced rather than noticed — if you cannot observe, you have to collect testimony from people who can. That is why this course ends with 360 assessment rather than treating it as an optional extra.

What this course covers

Forty-six lessons. The frame first: what actually changes when work leaves the office, the transition checklist, rules of the job, agreements with the people you live with, control against self-control, the tools and the meeting types a distributed team needs, motivation and socialisation without a kitchen, looking after people you cannot see, the skills distance demands including written communication, hiring and onboarding somebody who will never visit an office, retention and low performance at a distance, and culture and security. Then the processes: why an operations function appears past fifty people, mapping the key processes, minimum sufficient regulation and the cost of over-documenting, input against output against outcome metrics with named owners, where a week actually disappears — queues, downtime, context switching — operating rhythms and how to keep meetings from becoming formalities, resistance and sabotage during change, when a spreadsheet beats a platform, and proving the function pays for itself. Then the conversation: what the research found, seven distinct types of one-to-one, building rapport with somebody you have never met, the coaching mode and when coaching is the wrong response, feedback that lands over video, and rolling the practice out. Then the review cycle: whether it is worth it, evaluating on critical incidents, objectives and key results, competencies through 180, 360 and assessment centres, running the meeting, automation, and what the results are actually for. Then evaluation technique in depth: the performance agreement and cascaded goals, feedback models, assessment centres, the conversation about dropping performance, the improvement plan, coaching afterwards, the annual meeting, rating mistakes and the nine boxes. Finally 360 assessment end to end: design through critical incidents, observable behaviour, scales, response rates, assessor bias, delivering results without ambushing anyone, and the tooling.

Every example comes from a corporate setting

All six blocks were recorded for people who manage inside companies, and the examples assume an employer and employees rather than a network of contractors. The promise in the title is that setting: remote operations means processes, conversations and evaluating results — which is to say, work with people you cannot see. The operations block is the one part about the function rather than the people, and it has no industry attached. The three evaluation blocks were recorded for those building an appraisal system, and a distributed manager needs them in full measure, because without observation the evaluation becomes the only reliable account of what happened. There is very little to translate here. If you run a team of three freelancers, the machinery will be heavier than you need.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 46 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the remote transition checklist, the process mapping approach, the input-output-outcome metric set, the seven one-to-one types, the performance agreement, the improvement plan, the nine boxes, and the full 360 design method

• Evaluation taught as the substitute for observation, at the length it deserves

Where to start

Name the person on your team you are least sure about right now, and write down what evidence you actually have. If the honest answer is a feeling, that is the gap this course closes. Enrol now and start today.