Distributed Teams and Organizations Are Just Like Any Other, Only More So

There’s a lot chatter about the costs and advantages of distributed teams. Getting them to work requires that you acknowledge all the things that you do unconsciously when you are chatting by the coffee pot, but they’re the same things you need to do to properly run a team anyway. So why not own it?

Remote work has its own Maslowian hierarchy.

At the base is infrastructure and workspace that is conducive to attentiveness. That means quiet when the person requires quiet. High bandwidth and low latency network connections, sufficient processing power and storage to work when the network is partitioned. Sufficient redundancy is also critical, so that when one channel fails, there’s a fallback. I recommend at least two fallbacks.

Second is local community. Working in isolation day after day is draining. It also retards personal/professional growth. I encourage my staff to write, blog, present at meetups and conferences. For those that don’t like that stuff, I recommend almost any kind of hobby that gets them out of the house and interacting with their community (even introverts have peeps).

Next, the remote workers need connections with their team. Human beings have evolved to read complex cues from their environment; facial expressions, body language, intonations, group dynamics. In a physically present environment, we process this data without even thinking about them. In a remote setting, most of these “channels” are missing or limited so we need to explicitly aware of them; digital analogs to physical spaces. Always open video channels helps. Online whiteboards and sticky-notes that are bookmarked to our workspace. We have scheduled “water cooler” time to just chat.

Lastly (or at least for now so this does not become a blog post of its own), remote workers need more conscious/explicit contact about company goals and priorities. A culture of writing things down. Pair programming is another way of passing memes from one person to another. More frequent product planning sessions where the team is involved.

While in situ managers can just look out their office door to get a sense of what’s going on, distributed leaders have to act more like engineering directors. You have to be conscious of these actions, where you used to be able to do what we’ve instinctively known how to do for thousands of years.

My talk addresses all of these fractal layers. I make the case that you can still get more bang for your salary bucks with distributed teams, but you need more sophisticated and skilled managers to do it.