• Read more about Why Weird Marketing Works

How do you get noticed when money is tight and the bigwig is who you’re after?

By talking to them in big bold letters. Add a fuchsia backdrop, plaster it on a board, throw in a few GIFS, and put it in the center of NYC---directly across from their window. That’s how!

Last Monday, Intridea launched our first billboard experiment; talking to a hopeful client through the art of bright banners and GIFS. It's unlike anything we've done before and completely out of the norm, but sometimes that's what it's all about...

As entrepreneurs, we have to get creative to stand out these days. Marketing is crazy competitive and long gone are the days of mere emailing, phone calls, and Google search.

So what’s a young business to do? Get weird, that's what.

If you want someone’s attention, reach out to them in any way possible. Don’t be timid and don’t second guess yourself. Market in an unconventional way and you’ll get unconventional (and more often than not) - positive responses. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.

Uber | Kittens + Cupcakes

Uber is great. Add kittens and cupcakes to the mix and you’ve just made a friend for life. On National Cat Day, Uber went out of their way to celebrate their feline loving fans. On this day, NYC, San Fran, and Seattle Uber users could “request a kitten” and enjoy a cupcake --- all because Uber said so! Talk about odd, out-of-the-box, and interesting.

Airbnb | Hollywood + Vines

Back in 2013, after a series of renter mishaps, Airbnb turned its focus to user experience. With their campaign, titled Hollywood & Vines, Airbnb created a four minute short film utilizing six second Vine videos from users all over the world. It was an uncommon route, but excellent platform for partnering with Airbnb users and capturing their adventurous spirits.

Ben & Jerry’s | Tweet for Ice Cream

I love B&J’s CORE ice cream campaign. Traveling around the US and setting up shop in various cities, BJ is giving out free ice cream to anyone who tweets them. Its awesome, fun, and super convenient for their lovely fans. Plus not only is it free, but they hand deliver them to your specific location - talk about customer loyalty!

Don’t get wrapped up in the details. Go out there and do something crazy; it's the only way to succeed as an entrepreneur. Too much thinking wastes too much valuable time.

Drops mic.

Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about E-commerce with Rails and Spree

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: Do's and Don'ts for Keeping Distributed Employees Happy

In our last blog, we pointed out the three most important traits for successful remote workers: self-motivation, autonomy and curiosity. We call these highly desirable employees SMAIPs (Self-Motivated, Autonomous, Inquisitive People).

So once you’ve built a killer distributed team of productive SMAIPs, you can just let them do their thing right? Not so fast. Even if you’ve populated your team with the most self-motivated, autonomous and inquisitive employees known to mankind, you have to consistently nurture these traits.

Here are five do’s and don’ts we at Intridea follow to keep our distributed employees motivated, engaged and happy:

1: Don’t Micromanage. Do Give Guidance.

Because SMAIPs require very little direction, they absolutely detest micromanagement. That’s why we try to foster self-directed behavior by giving our team members plenty of independence and elbow room to get the job done.

If you hover over your employees, get involved with every small task and nit-pick every detail, you’ll stifle their creativity and send their confidence into a tail spin. In fact, people who believe they are being watched perform at a lower level, according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. So, back off. The more you micromanage, the less productive your team will be.

When leaders expect remote employees to follow overly complicated processes, this can also crush self-motivation. After all, enforcing inflexible rules and procedures is really just another form of micromanagement. We’ve found that if employees have to jump through hoops to get something done, they're less likely to try.

2: Don’t Play It Safe. Do Embrace Failure.

If you punish your team members for each and every failure, you’re going to end up with overly cautious employees who do the bare minimum. And who could blame them? They’d rather play it safe than face your dreadful wrath.

Far too many remote managers paralyze their teams with the fear of failure. Not only does this suffocate their inquisitive and self-driven behavior—it eventually transforms employees into brainless automatons.

At Intridea, we think it’s important to embrace failure and turn each botched attempt into an important lesson. In his book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, economic journalist Tim Harford writes, “Biologists have a word for the way in which solutions emerge from failure: evolution.” Harford says we need to learn to accept failure and constantly adapt, which involves lots of improvising. “Success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time.”

In fact, some research shows that failure is often the quickest path to success. People and organizations that disastrously miss their goals perform much better in the long-run, according to a University of Colorado Denver Business School study.

“We found that the knowledge gained from success was often fleeting while knowledge from failure stuck around for years,” Professor Vinit Desai, the leader of the study, wrote in the Academy of Management Journal. “Organizational leaders should neither ignore failures nor stigmatize those involved with them. Rather leaders should treat failures as invaluable learning opportunities, encouraging the open sharing of information about them.”

3: Don’t Overburden Them. Do Enforce Work-Life Balance.

SMAIPs are often prodigious in their output—which can be both a blessing and a curse. While leaders may be tempted to let highly driven team members pull long hours and work their fingers to the bone, this will quickly lead to employee burnout.

As we mentioned in a previous blog, it’s important to ensure your employees achieve a healthy balance between their work life and personal life. In the long run, work-life balance leads to happier, more productive employees.

“The business climate has become so fiery and competitive that leaders are focused on competition and getting the most out of their people,” John Izzo, author of Values-Shift: The New Work Ethic and What It Means for Business, told CNNMoney. “Everyone's working to their max.” This extreme pressure will quickly derail even your most productive and driven SMAIPs.

Izzo warns that an employee suffering from burnout becomes part of the “working wounded.” Because they’ve lost all of their motivation, they apathetically limp along through their work day. “Ultimately the biggest price companies pay for burnout is a loss of talented people,” he adds.

Because we realize SMAIPs will create Intridea’s most innovative work, we make a point to nurture these employees—not work them to death.

4: Don’t Dishearten Them. Do Give Positive Feedback.

Distributed leaders have to be careful about demoralizing SMAIPs with too much negative feedback. If you only offer a worker feedback when he does something wrong, you’ll quickly crush that employee’s spirit and deflate his motivation.

It’s important to give distributed employees positive feedback, even for normal day-to-day work. When you reward your team members for a job well-done, this will encourage further self-driven behavior. It also ensures they’ll sit up and listen in the instances when you need to offer them negative feedback.

Warren Greshes, author of The Best Damn Management Book Ever has also emphasized the importance of positive feedback. “If you want to point out the mistakes people make, get them to listen to you and fix those mistakes, you better be ready to recognize them when they do something right,” he writes. “Employee recognition is one of the greatest drivers of employee motivation in the workplace. Do you know anyone who doesn’t like to be recognized when they’ve done something right or achieved something special?”

If you only speak up when an employee has done something wrong, they won't bother to take risks that could turn into big wins for the company. In the end, your employees will stop caring because they know no matter what they do, you’re going to criticize them.

5: Don’t Dismiss Their Ideas. Do Set Expectations.

SMAIPs often formulate groundbreaking ideas, and they’re usually bursting with excitement to share these ideas with their manager. So when a self-motivated employee comes to you with her latest brain child, it’s important to give the idea the thought and consideration it deserves.

If you ignore or constantly shoot down an employee’s ideas, she’ll more than likely stop sharing altogether. In fact, more than a third of U.S. workers don’t speak up for fear of retribution, according to a DecisionWise Benchmark study. “These perceptions typically stem from a culture that stifles the free expression of ideas, and from leaders who contribute to or create that culture,” points out Paul Warner, Director of Consulting Services at DecisionWise. “Fear of speaking up is extremely detrimental to organizations, often causing an escalation of dissatisfaction among employees leading to absenteeism, non-productive work behaviors, low team identification, and eventually reduced performance and turnover.”

We’ve found that while it’s critical to listen to our team members’ new ideas, it also helps to set expectations upfront—even before the employee’s idea is hatched. For example, we encourage our team members to use a program called sparktime—an Intridea initiative to encourage side projects and exploration. When one of our employees submits an idea for a side project, our “approval” is contingent on a well-defined plan as well as good timing with other projects. This helps focus our employees and also teaches them how to set themselves up for success.

Check out our next to blog to learn how to spark self-motivation in distributed employees.

• Read more about On Code Cleanliness and Readability

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. - Abelson / Sussman

I like my code so clean you could eat off of it (if you could eat off of code). When working on a codebase I'm ruthless about deleting unused code, unnecessary comments, debugging statements, etc. Yes, it may be painstakingly detailed, but this is all a benefit to my future self, my coworkers and anyone who reviews my code in the future.

When doing a code review of a pull request, I make notes of all the places where code could be cleaner; I also expect the same to be done for me. If I'm pairing, I make sure we do code reviews of every line of a commit before making the commit. I run a tight ship, and I appreciate when my coworkers do the same.

It's just common sense; a clean codebase, free of cruft, is easier to read and understand. A codebase that is easy to read and understand is easier to debug, extend, and modify. Ultimately, a clean codebase makes for happy developers.

What is "clean" code?

Code that is "clean" is code that is written to be read and understood with relative ease. You could say this is code written with the reader in mind. Every person and every organization has their own definition for what exactly clean code is, so I won't be giving explicit examples. What is important is to find some common ground on a project and all stick to it.

Every developer has heard the old saying that goes something like "Always code as if the person maintaining it is a maniac serial killer and knows where you live". With respect to that, clean code is code that keeps you safe.

Rules for organization

Everyone in an organization has their own rules for how code should be organized. It doesn't matter all that much what these rules are, so long as everyone in the organization can agree on some set of rules and everyone follows them.

If you do not have some rules I suggest listening to the ruby rogues podcast episode in which Sandi Metz discussed some rules for keeping code clean.

They are:

• Your class can be no longer than 100 lines of code.
• Your methods can be no longer than five lines of code.
• You can pass no more than four parameters and you can’t just make it one big hash.
• Your controller (in a Rails app, when a call comes into your controller) can only instantiate one object to do whatever it is that needs to be done.

Note that these rules are not really rules but more like guidelines. They are there to guide you when you don't know where to begin with writing clean code; they are there if you have no rules; they are there as a conversation starter within your organization.

To quote Charles Max Wood from the Ruby Rogues episode regarding the rules:

So, one thing that really strikes me with these rules is that for the most part, if you really try, you should be able to follow them. [If you say] “Oh well, I’m sure I can find an instance that breaks this rule.” The whole point is when you break the rule, you should be able to explain exactly why you need to break the rule. In that way, then you can justify what you’re doing. But otherwise, you’re not forced to think about what you’re coding and that’s really what the issue is.

Style Guide

A style guide goes hand in hand with code rules, such as those defined above. A style guide, however, covers a much greater set of situations. I think the guidelines defined in a style guide are just as important. If everyone codes using their own style (say 4 space or hard tabs instead of 2 space tabs) on a project, it makes the cognitive overhead that much greater from file to file. If I have a standard style that I know the code will conform to, it makes it that much easier to scan the code and figure out what is going on.

Ruby style guide

At Intridea, we have a Ruby style guide that we follow to make sure that the code we write all follows the same convention. (you can find it at Ruby Style Guide). This is a non-confrontational way to let your developers know there is a standard for the way their code should look when they are writing it, you are reviewing it, or you are both writing it via pairing.

Rspec style guide

It is not only important to keep your ruby and rails code adhering to a consistent style, but also it is important that everyone write their specs in a consistent way. I suggest using a resource like betterspecs.org as a starting point for a conversation about how you want tests to be written.

If you want to differ from what is proposed on that page, it is open source on github here. So you can fork it for your organization and make any changes you would like.

Humbleness and code reviews

The best way to fight against spaghetti code, or a big ball of mud, is to have someone review your code, whether through pair programming or an explicit code review (a git pull request being most common these days).

It's important to remember, don't take comments personally, criticisms of code are not criticisms of the person. Critiques of code logic or style should be looked at as a moment in which you can grow as a developer. You may not agree with the examination of your code, but it will at least spark a conversation in which case all parties can see each others viewpoints and come to a consensus of what the end result should be.

On more than one occasion I have come across a piece of code that I thought could have been a bit cleaner, or refactored differently, and thought "oh man, I get to correct someone!" Only to then check the author through git blame, and realize it was written by me. My point is that no one is perfect and change isn't going to happen overnight; it takes time and deliberate effort. You should look at comments regarding code organization or style not as an attack, but as an effort to make the end result better for everyone.

Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about Play with Angular

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: Three Must-Have Traits for Distributed Employees

There’s no question, our awesome team of employees is what makes Intridea tick. Of course, any company could say the same, but being fully distributed takes a truly unique individual and it’s definitely not for everyone.

That’s why during Intridea’s hiring process, we keep an eye out for professionals with three essential traits: self-motivation, autonomy and curiosity. We call these highly desirable candidates SMAIPs (Self-Motivated, Autonomous, Inquisitive People).

In fact although we’re a technical company, we value these three employee characteristics even more than a specific set of programming skills. That’s because SMAIPs seek out and learn new technologies on their own, inspire other employees and produce killer work.

A Remote Chance

In addition to the top three critical traits, we also seek out employees who are most likely to work well in a remote setting. Okay, we know what you’re thinking. Wouldn’t a self-motivated person naturally be a kick-ass remote worker? Believe it or not, the two don’t always go hand-in-hand.

This is especially true for certain extroverts. While an extroverted worker might be extremely self-motivated and independent, he may also need to be around others to thrive. Many of these super-outgoing types will shrivel up and wither away in a secluded work environment.

So we’ve found the most desirable candidate for a distributed workforce is not only self-motivated; she also has the ability to remain engaged and inspired in spatial isolation. That’s why we look for team members who are content working in solitude for long stretches of time.

Slacker Alert

Of course, traditional brick-and-mortar companies also strive to hire self-motivated, autonomous and inquisitive employees—but these traits are particularly important for distributed team members. Because non-distributed supervisors share a physical space with their team, they can easily spot when employees are slacking off. This breathing-down-the-neck supervision is not possible when your employees are spread out across the nation or even the globe.

As a result, unproductive remote employees often fly under the radar. This slacker-effect is one the greatest dangers—and sometimes the ultimate demise—for many distributed businesses. To make matters worse, the unmotivated remote worker may not even realize that his status quo is disappointing his boss. It could take weeks before he’s called out on it, and by then a lot of damage could already be done. This is why it’s vital for distributed teams to hire self-motivated, autonomous, inquisitive people.

“The challenges of identifying candidates who will perform at a high level in office jobs are multiplied exponentially when hiring for home-based jobs,” writes Brent Holland, Vice President of Research & Consulting at FurstPerson, in an ERE article. “Regardless of the job or corporate culture, remote workers must be independent, self-motivated, conscientious, comfortable working in social isolation, and capable of solving problems.”

Tracking Down a SMAIP

When it comes to building a distributed team, the old cliché is absolutely true: One bad apple spoils the entire barrel. That’s why it’s essential to hunt down SMAIPs (Self-Motivated, Autonomous, Inquisitive People) when you’re hiring for a remote position.

Here at Intridea, we use rigorous interview and screening techniques. Throughout the interviewing process, we look for clues that the candidate is self-motivated, autonomous and inquisitive and will thrive in a remote work setting.

So how do you pinpoint a SMAIP? In our experience, a candidate might be the right guy or gal for the job if he/she:

• Contributes to side projects, either in his/her field or outside of it.
• Attends or hosts events or meet-ups.
• Founded a start-up in the past.
• Actively blogs or publishes in other formats, such as books, podcasts, etc.
• Pursues passions outside of work (rock-climbing, cooking, carpentry, etc).
• Freelances, either on the side or as a full-time job.
• Learns for learning’s sake and take classes for fun.

Take Them for a Spin

Still not sure if that candidate is a SMAIP? Take him for a test drive! We’ve found it’s extremely beneficial to arrange a trial run with a potential hire whenever possible. When a prospect is willing to work a one-month trial gig on evenings and weekends before she comes on full-time, this in itself is a sign that she’s a SMAIP.

A trial run gives us a chance to assess the employee’s quality of work, communication skills and reliability. It also helps us determine whether or not the candidate is the right fit for our team.

Every now and then, a candidate’s personality simply doesn’t harmonize with the rest of our employees. In some instances, these trial runs have helped us rule out candidates who are not respectful of their teammates’ time or who don’t effectively communicate their progress.

It’s always better to discover these issues during a trial run than to hire an employee and realize it when it’s too late to pull the plug. And you don’t want a bad apple spoiling your beautiful bunch of SMAIPs.

Once you’ve built a powerhouse of SMAIPs, how do you keep these awesome remote employees happy? Find out in our next blog. In the meantime, got any tips for hiring remote employees? Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about JS Fundamentals: JavaScript Objects and You

One of the most utilized, but not fully understood features of JavaScript is that, with a couple of exceptions, everything that you interact within the language behaves like an object.

This functionality can be seen most easily with Arrays and Functions. For example, the simple primitive version of Array (var arr = [1,2,3] for example) has object methods that can be used:

var arr = [1, 2, 3]; arr.indexOf(2); // >> 1 

Can I Use This Anywhere?

Before we get much further, let’s cover the things that aren’t objects. Simple primitives (boolean values (true and false), undefined, numbers, and strings) and null (which is it’s own type) are not objects. Numbers, Strings, and Booleans can act like objects, in that they have methods, but these types are immutable. True objects are changeable (mutable), and their properties are a collection key/value pairs, expressed as {key: value}, or accessed through dot or array notation: key.value or key[‘value’].

Here is an example of how Strings are not objects, but they are object-like:

var twoCities = "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" twoCities.split(','); // >> ["It was the best of times", "it was the worst of times"]  // You can't add properties to Strings, but it acts like it's stored twoCities._author = "Charles Dickens"; // >> "Charles Dickens" twoCities._author // >> undefined 

This last case is important, because that aspect of mutable objects is what enables things like very simple caching on functions that perform complex tasks:

function renderTemplate (path) {   if (!renderTemplate.templates) {     renderTemplates.templates = {};   }    if (renderTemplate.templates[path] != null) {     return renderTemplate.templates[path];   }   var template = openAndReadFile(path);   return renderTemplate.templates[path] = template; } 

Because Functions are Objects, we can do this. If we wanted to do something similar with Strings, we cannot (and really, there’s not much need for it).

Leveraging Object-like Behavior to Your Advantage

Let’s walk through our caching example in more detail to see how it helps us run more efficient code.

The renderTemplate Function

Here we have a function named renderTemplate, which returns an HTML fragment that’s read from a file stored on the file system. Since we’re not focusing on how that’s done, but rather on how Functions being Objects is helpful, we are delegating the heavy lifting to a different method named openAndReadFile which handles the actual finding and opening of files. However, reading a file can be expensive and potentially redundant work, especially if you’re looping through a large list of items that all use the same template.

Here’s the function again, for reference:

function renderTemplate (path) {   if (!renderTemplate.templates) {     renderTemplates.templates = {};   }    if (renderTemplate.templates[path] != null) {     return renderTemplate.templates[path];   }   var template = openAndReadFile(path);   return renderTemplate.templates[path] = template; } 

The first two lines, if (!renderTemplate.templates) { renderTemplates.templates = {}; } put this “everything is object-like” concept right in the forefront. First, the function is checking to see if it has a property named templates (note that you can reference named functions from within themselves, which is what we’re doing here). If that property doesn’t exist, it creates it, and stores an empty Object primitive as the initial value.

The function then checks the templates Object to see if there’s a reference to the template stored in the cache, and returns it if it’s there. Then, if the template isn’t stored in the cache, the openAndReadFile function is called and then simultaneously stored in the cache and returned to the context from which it was called.

Actually, Everything isn’t an Object

This is a common misconception. JavaScript has six primary types: string, number, boolean, null, undefined, and object. Arrays and Functions are actually a variant of object, with Array being a sorted Object (and with it’s own sub-set of rules) and Function a callable Object.

Further Reading

This is a topic that’s been covered in greater depth by other authors, and I highly recommend that you check out the following (and not just for this specific topic, either!)

• Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja (John Resig, Bear Bibeault)
• JavaScript the Good Parts (Douglas Crockford)
• 2ality - JavaScript values: not everything is an object

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: Two Things All Successful Leaders Have in Common

In our last blog, we discussed four common mistakes bad bosses make. Now it’s time to take a look at the flipside: What about the good bosses? Believe it or not, there are still plenty of them out there. And we believe the most accomplished leaders have two qualities in common: They are accessible, and they are explicit.

Here's how the Oxford Dictionary defines these two terms:

ac·ces·si·ble: (of a person, typically one in a position of authority or importance) friendly and easy to talk to; approachable.

ex·plic·it: (of a person) stating something in a clear and detailed way.

In our experience, one of these leadership attributes is pretty much useless without the other. No matter how friendly and approachable a manager might be, she can’t be effective if she gives employees ambiguous answers and vague instructions. On the other hand, even if leader delivers precise instructions and well-defined expectations, his team will never thrive if they’re afraid to approach him with questions or problems. To lead a team to success, a manager must possess both of these essential qualities.

Don’t Be a Joker

A leader who is not accessible and explicit will quickly lose his followers—and as author and business consultant Steve Balzac has said, “A leader without followers is just some joker taking a walk.”

Yet far too many jokers, I mean, business managers just can’t seem to nail these two essential leadership skills. As a result, thousands of U.S. employees are jumping ship each year. As we mentioned in our last blog, the number one reason American employees quit is because of a bad boss or immediate supervisor, according to a Gallup poll. The poll also revealed teams under lackluster leadership are half as productive and 44 percent less profitable than well-managed groups. “In the end, turnover is mostly a manager issue," writes the Gallup team. “The effect of poor management is widely felt.”

Leading from Afar

As if effectively managing a team isn’t difficult enough, leading a distributed team is even more daunting. How does a manager establish authority, earn respect and forge a bond with employees who rarely lay eyes on him? The answer is quite simple: He does the same things traditional managers do—but he does it much better.

“Managing in itself doesn’t really change that much [in a distributed environment],” explains Glenn Dirks of Teletrips, Inc. in Managing a Remote Workforce: Proven Practices from Successful Leaders, a Citrix Online-sponsored Future of Work report. “Managers just have to accept their responsibilities for being a good manager—which means de?ning the work that has to be done, assigning the work to the right people, setting clear performance goals, and then holding people accountable for getting it done.”

Dirk says a leader’s abilities become much clearer in a distributed business where they can’t peer over their team’s shoulders all day long. “In short, the more you go ‘virtual,’ the more the quality of management matters,” he adds.

Explicit Instructions & Big Rules

When remote employees are uncertain about the company’s rules and norms, they can quickly become paranoid. Remote managers have to explicitly communicate expectations to remove that sense of insecurity.

In our experience, most effective distributed team leaders always provide each employee with well-defined, written expectations for their job, explicit instructions for what they should be working on, and clear-cut deadlines for their work. These awesome bosses also define deliverables and schedules—even for areas that don’t generally have defined deliverables.

In a report called Managing a Remote Workforce, authors James Ware and Charles Grantham identify the primary attributes of an effective remote manager based on their conversations with distributed work experts. They say the most successful remote managers not only set clear expectations and goals, but they also establish “explicit ‘Big Rules.’” (There’s that word again: explicit.)

Ware and Grantham say it’s important to clearly define acceptable etiquette, protocols, expectations, norms and values. “Do not assume everyone will understand ‘how things get done around here,’” they emphasize.

Répondez S'il Vous Plaît (Within 24-48 Hours)

But as we mentioned before, the best leaders aren’t just explicit—they’re also accessible. Not only are good bosses easy to approach, but they’re also diligent about responding to their employees’ emails, calendar invites, voicemails, IMs and any other communication within 24 to 48 hours.

In other words, a good boss never leaves his staff hanging. That’s because he realizes that without his advice or guidance, an employee may hit a brick wall or reach a stand-still on a critical project.

This 24 to 48 hour response time is especially critical for distributed teams. Here at Intridea, we’ve found that the use of scheduling, email task-management plugin or CRM tools can help with this quick response time.

Because remote managers don’t work shoulder-to-shoulder with their staff, there are no chance encounters or casual meetings. So if you don’t respond to an employee’s email or request in a timely fashion, you might run the risk of forgetting about it completely. In the meantime, the employee might perceive the delay as sign that you’re not taking her requests seriously.

Bonding Time

Because distributed teams are not physically in the same space, it’s even more important for leaders to make themselves as accessible as possible. At Intridea, all company leaders mark out several hours a week when anyone in the company can schedule a time to talk with them via phone, Skype or other methods.

Additionally, whenever our CEO and Managing Directors travel to New York City, they make a point to let the local team members know they’ll be in town and invite them out to lunch or dinner. This helps them build those personal bonds.

Many people are under the misconception that a distributed company is absolutely 100% remote, and no one ever sees each other in person; or worse, that we never want to see each other. To the contrary, we genuinely value the times we get to see each other face-to-face, and we try to make it happen as often as possible. In fact, unlike traditional companies, we make the most of these encounters, which leads to richer relationships.
Tune into our next blog to discover the three most desirable traits for distributed employees. In the meantime, got any stories for leading distributed teams? Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: Four Fatal Leadership Fails

American workers are quitting in droves and more frequently than ever. According to the Department of Labor, the average tenure of a U.S. employee is a meager 1.5 years. As the old saying goes, employees don’t quit jobs; they quit bosses, and the numbers continue to validate it. In fact, the number one reason U.S. employees quit is because of a bad boss or immediate supervisor, Gallup reports.

Despite the avalanche of advice online and stacks upon stacks of leadership books available to them, bosses in both traditional and distributed businesses continue to fall short. So what gives? What are all these bad bosses doing wrong? More than likely, they’re making these four leadership fails:

Fail #1: They Set Unclear Expectations Or None At All.

According to a Gallup survey, only half of employees know exactly what’s expected of them—and remote workers are significantly less likely to have clarity about work expectations than in-house employees.

“One of the biggest challenges managers of remote workers face is unclear expectations,” writes Jennifer Robinson, a Senior Editor of the Gallup Business Journal. “Managers often worry that an employee's work will suffer without their supervision or direction, while employees may feel uneasy with a lack of direction or communication, suspecting that they're missing out on valuable information or feedback. These feelings of unease can be prompted by unclear expectations, and it is a clear understanding of ‘what's expected’ that is at the core of any work relationship.”

Fail #2: They’re Poor Communicators.

When it comes to setting clear expectations for your employees, communication is key. Unfortunately, many leaders are communication challenged—and as a result, their employees often leave conversations feeling confused, ignored or flat-out offended.

There are two primary types of communication: written and verbal. The written word is not only more permanent, but we believe it’s often more impactful than verbal conversations. We’ve found that there is great power in writing something down and making it accessible to your company—especially when it comes to sharing your company vision, expectations and core values. When you provide written materials, your employees can refer back to it at as often as necessary. On the other hand, if you choose to communicate these messages verbally, the details can easily be misconstrued or forgotten.

Still, when you choose written communication—whether it’s an email or a training manual—it’s important to write succinct, easy-to-understand messages. Oftentimes, a remote manager’s first reflex is to send a long, drawn-out email in lieu of real-time conversations. If you find yourself typing up an email that could be mistaken for a Melville novel, a conference call might be in order.

Fail #3: Their Doors Are Closed.

Even virtual managers should have an “open door” policy and offer explicit office hours when any staff member can schedule a time to talk. Because distributed teams are not physically in the same space, it’s even more important for leaders to make themselves as accessible as possible.

At Intridea, all company leaders mark out several hours a week when anyone in the company can schedule a time to talk with them via phone, Skype or other methods. By the same token, we also let our team know when we’re not available. We’ve found it helpful to communicate through our calendars, letting everyone know when we’ll be in a meeting, at a doctor’s appointment, or intensely focused on a project so they know not to disrupt us.

Fail #4: They Don’t Bond with Employees.

When a boss takes time to develop relationships with her team, she becomes more approachable. Of course, bonding with distributed employees poses a unique challenge. In fact, nearly half of employees who work on virtual teams say they had never met their virtual team cohorts, according to a report by RW3 LLC. Entitled The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams, the survey also found that nearly all virtual team members (90%) said they don’t have enough time during virtual meetings to build relationships.

This is why it’s important for distributed companies to set up some type of “virtual water cooler” for social conversations amongst employees—whether it’s Campfire, an IM chat room or a Microblogging group. Managers should make a point to regularly engage in these conversations. This is a huge part of our culture at Intridea. Our virtual water cooler gives us a chance to learn about each other as humans, not just worker bees.

How can distributed leaders avoid these four fails? Find out in our next blog! In the meantime, got any stories for leading distributed teams? Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: 7 Ways to Enforce Work-Life Balance

In our last blog, we talked about how important work-life balance is to every company, especially for distributed teams. In our opinion, the power of work-life balance cannot be over-emphasized. If you want to cultivate a team of well-adjusted, engaged employees, it’s essential to not only suggest or strongly encourage work-life balance—but to enforce it. Here are seven surefire ways to do just that:

1: Be Flexible

According to an Accenture study, 80 percent of employees say having flexibility in their work schedule is important to achieving a positive work-life balance. Fortunately, when you’re running a distributed team it’s not necessary to force employees to work a traditional 9 to 5 timeframe. Let your team members choose their own hours so they can work when they feel the most productive.

While one employee may prefer to work from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm when her kids are at school and the house is quiet, a night owl may be the most energized after midnight. Of course, to accommodate these varying work hours, it’s important to minimize scheduled events—such as mandatory conference calls at 3 pm each Monday. Here at Intridea, we do that by relying on email, Hipchat and other forms of asynchronous communication.

Over the years, we’ve noticed an interesting trend: When we allow employees to work reasonable hours each week and give them time off when they need a break, they’re more willing to put in extra hours when necessary.

2: Look for Signs of Burnout

Some researchers say distributed workers might be at higher risk for burnout. In the absence of defined work hours, remote workers often end up working longer—leaving them less time for their personal endeavors, according to a MIT Sloan Management Review article by Jay Mulki, Fleura Bardhi, Felicia Lassk and Jayne Nanavaty-Dahl.

Because distributed team members don’t work in clear view of their supervisors, they also tend to take on more projects than they can handle. “The rapidly increasing prevalence of distributed workforces can make demonstrating the extent of your workload incredibly hard, and often even harder to resolve,” writes independent business consultant Oliver Marks in a ZDNet article. “The result is burnout, and the impact of 'always on' work patterns in organizations of all sizes can ultimately have a significant negative effect on results.”

So how do you ensure your team members don’t lose steam? At Intridea, we strive to make employees feel appreciated and connected at every opportunity. It’s also important to establish clear goals for each team member, revisit those goals frequently and offer encouragement and acknowledgement when the employee reaches certain benchmarks. In other words, if you don’t continually stoke an employee’s fire, it will eventually flicker out.

3: Ensure Employees Catch Enough ZZZ’s

Most Americans don’t get nearly enough shuteye, and the lack of sleep has an adverse effect on their work. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 30 percent of employed U.S. adults don’t get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep a day. Of course, it’s no surprise that the longer a sleep-deprived person stays awake, the more their productivity level plummets.

In a study by Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, researchers asked sleep deprived participants to perform certain tasks, such as finding information quickly and accurately on computer monitors. As their level of sleep deprivation worsened, the participants’ ability to find the information slowed dramatically.

At Intridea, we strongly encourage our employees to get plenty of sleep. Because our distributed team members have greater control over their working hours, this makes it easier for them to fit a solid eight hours of slumber into their schedule. In the event that one of our employees has to pull an all-nighter on a tight deadline or if they are recovering from a cold or injury, we advise them to catch up on sleep however possible.

We also find it perfectly acceptable for employees to take power naps during the work day. In fact, an increasing number of companies, both distributed and non-distributed, are allowing power naps. For example, Google gives employees an opportunity to nap at work because the company believes it increases productivity—and recent research proves that this notion is absolutely true. In a NASA-financed study, a team of researchers found that allowing subjects to nap for as little as 24 minutes improved their cognitive performance.

4: Encourage Exercise

A study by Jim McKenna from the University of Bristol showed that when employees took a break from work to exercise, their work performance was consistently higher and they demonstrated better time management and improved mental sharpness when they returned to the office. These employees also reported feeling more tolerant of themselves and more forgiving of their colleagues.

At Intridea, not only do we encourage employees to get active—we take it to the next level by holding company-wide Fitbit competitions. If you haven’t heard of this awesome little gadget, the Fitbit tracks steps taken, calories burned, floors climbed, activity duration and intensity and more. Our employees wear it on their wrist all day and then plug it into a wireless base station to upload the data into the Fitbit website. From there, we can see an overview of each employee’s physical activity. At the end of the week, we crown the employee with the most impressive exercise stats as Fitbit champion. It’s a fun way to tap into our team’s competitive spirit while promoting physical fitness.

5: Support Family Time

For many professionals, the definition of work-life balance is simple: they want a fulfilling job that allows them to spend more quality time with their families. Sadly, half of working dads and more than half of working moms say they find balancing work and family responsibilities “very” or “somewhat” difficult, according to a Pew Research report. Based on the report, 46 percent of fathers and 23 percent of moms say they don't get enough time with their kids.

We at Intridea do everything possible to accommodate working moms and dads. While traditional businesses typically offer two weeks or less of paternity leave (if any at all), we work with new parents to create a customized schedule to fit their needs.

For example, our flex hours allowed one team member to care for his newborn child and create an alternating feeding, changing and sleeping schedule with his wife. This gave him the opportunity to bond with his daughter, support his wife and still be a productive member of our team.

6: Make Vacations Mandatory

It’s really no wonder why there are so many unhappy employees in the U.S. Our nation is the only advanced economy that does not require employers to provide paid vacation time. Consequently, almost one in four Americans do not receive any paid vacations or paid holidays, according to a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. And according to a Harris Interactive study, more than half of American workers have up to two weeks’ worth of unused vacation at the end of the year.

While some employers might applaud this behavior, it’s a lose-lose when workers don’t take some much-needed R&R. Many studies show that a person’s happiness level spikes after a vacation, resulting in a recharged and mentally refreshed employee. The average traveler experiences a 25 percent increase in work performance after returning from vacation, according to the Travel Leisure Monitor.

We give Intridea employees unlimited vacation time. Our vacation policy is quite simple: “Take what you need.” We also offer “workations,” which allow employees to travel the world and work from wherever they are. Like vacations, research shows workations also offer many valuable benefits. For one, multi-cultural experiences and exotic surroundings often generate more inspired and creative work, according to research by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

7: Get Rid of the Commute

If nothing else, distributed businesses offer improved work-life balance simply because employees don’t have to waste hours on end fighting traffic. According to the Department of Transportation, the average American driver logs 37 miles a day. To make matters worse, the typical commuter spends more than 38 hours a year stuck in traffic congestion—and that number is even higher in big cities such as D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco, at 60 hours a year.

By not commuting last year, our team saved a combined total of 9,816 hours. Check out Intridea's YourTime to see examples of what our team members do with the extra time they save by NOT commuting.

Tune into our next blog to learn about the 4 Fatal Leadership Fails.