Leading Remotely is a concept project directed at organizations working with remote teams, particularly in the IT, services and creative industries.

With the change in workplace trends, managers all over the world are having to adapt to working with remote employees, but the transition is not proving easy for everyone; current literature and media coverage on remote employee engagement highlights a common performance problem among managers. 



Those with little or no experience managing remote teams are failing to engage remote employees and are, on the contrary, acting in ways that actively discourage engagement. They are failing to realize that the needs of remote employees are often different from the needs of those working in the office. Common problematic actions include micromanaging, breaching personal-work boundaries, and failing to notice when remote team members are feeling overworked or under-appreciated.



This is leading to a decrease in employee satisfaction and an increase in turnover. Bad news for any business.

After extensive literature research, I worked with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to define an overall goal for managers and their remote teams. I used Action Mapping to guide the SMEs to identify high priority actions that managers should take to successfully engage their remote teams.

Action mapping is a powerful analysis tool that allowed me to design a training solution that encourages behavioral change by focusing on what managers need to do to cultivate engagement and ultimately reduce turnover, rather than on simply what they need to know.

The action map also served as an effective visual tool to communicate with the SMEs. The overall performance goal is written at the center, and the high priority actions are listed on the branches extending from that goal.

Through my work with the SMEs on the action map, I identified aspects of the performance issue that are caused by a lack of skill, and can thus be resolved through training.

I concluded that new or inexperienced managers often lack the technical knowledge and decision-making skills to adequately use virtual collaboration tools and keep projects on track while encouraging connections among team members, maintaining workload balance, and avoiding micromanaging.

I proposed a branched scenario-based eLearning solution which challenges managers to anticipate consequences and make appropriate decisions in real-life situations common to remote work. I focused on situations leading to the most common errors and the most crucial outcomes.

Text-Based Storyboard

Once the action map was completed, I created a text-based storyboard to serve as a detailed guide for the full development process. I included all narrator and mentor’s dialogs, scenarios with decision options and consequences, and detailed notes on programming, graphic design and user interaction.

The full eLearning experience consists of four scenarios, each with three decision options, and each option with its consequence. To make the experience more realistic, I added branched scenarios so decisions made in a given scenario have consequences that carry on to later scenarios. This approach resulted in a complex series of possible outcomes and took significant time to finalize. I also introduced a mentor who guides the learner through the experience and provides on-demand support in each scenario.

Interactive Storyboard

I created two versions of the storyboard to facilitate communication with the SMEs. I used a text-based storyboard as a full blueprint of the project. This version contained many design and programming details that could be distracting, and so I did not share it with the SMEs. Instead, I created an interactive storyboard in Twine to work with the SMEs.

Although it is also text-based, the Twine storyboard allowed SMEs to simulate scenarios, make choices, and experience the consequences. Since the SMEs could experience the full story unfolding, I could gather more effective feedback and complete a refined storyboard before moving to the development phase.

After completing the storyboard, I set to implement all my design ideas to create a fully functioning eLearning experience.

After creating a style guide and wireframes, I developed all graphics, animations, and narrations to create a complete interactive prototype of the first scenario in the eLearning experience. I went through multiple iterations of prototyping while collecting feedback from the SMEs. I refined the eLearning experience incrementally until I included all the instructional and graphic features of the original design.

Graphics & Visual Mockups

The first step in the development process was to create a visual personality for the eLearning experience. At this stage I experimented with colors, fonts, character appearance, buttons, and other user experience (UX) features. I wanted to create a welcoming and professional design to make the experience fun while matching well with the target audience.

I begun with a mood board to guide my initial decisions and later created the final wireframes and style guide. I developed most graphics in Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo, and the mockups in Affinity Publisher. I also used the Adobe suite on occasion.

Characters' Animations

Since remote work necessarily happens online, I wanted to make sure to recreate, in an entertaining and realistic manner, the particularities and challenges of virtual communication. I chose to use 3D characters to emphasize the team members’ body language while on camera, and animations to simulate the cadence of a live virtual meeting.

I used Blender to customize and animate all characters, and to video sequence stills of the mentor’s calls. I customized a director of development, a mentor and five other different characters to give each team member a unique personality. I also researched the names and backgrounds of each team member to create a diverse and inclusive remote team.

Narration & Closed Captions

To further recreate the nuances of remote work, I added narration to the mentor. The learner interacts with the mentor by placing a video call to which the animated and talkative mentor replies with advice. I used Audacity to record and edit the audio, and added closed captions to all the mentor’s calls, and Alt Text to all media to ensure accessibility.

Finally, I chose to combine the video and audio files, from the animations and narrations, directly in Storyline 360. This facilitated closed captioning, and also gave me more flexibility when working with the Storyline timeline.