The Work At Home Weblog

Moonwatcher: Making Better Teams by Supporting Remote Members: “Teams built to rely on electronic, and more specifically Internet-based, communication channels can include remote members transparently, and can therefore be comprised of not only the best people in town but the best people period.”

Charlie is right-on in his post. Given the right technology and support of the remote team member, there are few barriers to a successful distributed team. However, the barriers are real and oftentimes lead to difficulties.

Some things I’ve identified as barriers, especially when the team is weighted to physical proximity:

• Team “meetings” where decisions are made during social chat, but never recorded or propagated to entire team.
• Communication breakdowns when team members are in different time zones, causing multi-hour delays to what could be a quick question/answer email thread.
• Difficulties in whiteboard brainstorming because remote members cannot easily view or jot thoughts and ideas.

These are not insurmountable barriers, but some discipline is required to make sure that the team dynamic is supported.

The first item, decisions made during social or “over the wall” conversations, is perhaps the hardest one to deal with. For the remote member, it leads to alienation from peers. For the local members, it leads to frustration because the flow of ideas is continuously broken by the necessity to follow up with a summary of the decision, thus inviting further discussion. I posit that the latter is harder to deal with for the team in general - it puts the burden on the local team to either not make ad-hoc decisions or to include the entire team in every discussion - effectively killing productivity and flow of ideas.

How is this overcome? In my experience with this, the use of quick IMs (now tweets?), regular “here’s what’s changing” emails and simple summaries works well to alleviate both the feeling of alienation for the remotes and the increased responsibility of the local team. However, this requires consideration by both groups: for the remotes to understand and accept that the local members have an informal process, and for the locals to understand and accept that the remote members *need* to have information pushed to them more frequently.