Distribute my team, concentrate my frustration
This one is not about home office. Not about these one or two days a week you can spend in Skype (or Slack or what ever) calls wearing your pyjamas. This one is about teams that mostly never meet in person. Teams that might be distributed over different cities, in different countries, and in different time zones. “Work from where ever you want as long as you get your stuff done.”
As an employee, it seems pretty tempting not having to move to where your company is located. They provide you with the tools you need to work from anywhere: a laptop, and most likely a phone. There you go, all set. Outlook tells you all email addresses you need to know, Slack helps you to contact people, and hey, there’s even a well-kept Confluence with all information about all projects. And there is reality. Three other people of your team of six are doing the same. They work from somewhere during some hours of their choosing. Thus, there is a huge overhead in communication and synchronisation. Even if you’re only a few timezones apart, let’s say, three hours, your window of sync shrinks from 8 to 5 hours, let alone the breaks. And maybe one person of your team has at some point in their life decided to become a digital nomad using a 1 Mbit WIFI connection somewhere at the beaches of Kho Tao or Binh Hung.
At this point you can only pray for your team’s tasks to be somehow solvable by one, max two, persons. Otherwise most of your time will be spent trying to contact that guy in Japan while being blocked by the girl in Napa Valley due to this incredible wine tasting she needs to attend. This leads to frustration. The people of a distributed team might share a common mindset in their private lives — which is totally fine. But when it comes to business, their company should look for a way to handle all this overhead communication, these gaps in synchronisation and the tension built up because of working thousands of miles apart.
Well, you might have recognised that this article kind of depicts the worst of all cases. But in reality, even short distances and people working most of their time from home will face everybody with challenges. Even though, a company that promotes remote work and high flexibility sounds nice, in reality, they need to think about how to dispatch work to not endanger their own business. Maybe there is a chance to hand over non-team tasks to the nomad working from the beach. On the one hand, that guy won’t block others too much. On the other hand, you’ll save a lot of frustration and pain due to a limited number of necessary video conferences.
Or imagine going the approach of an interdisciplinary team. If there’s two or three people close to each other, e.g. in the same city that’s super far from where your company is, help them to find a co-working space to talk to each other. They might not be in the same team (yet) but will already have people from their company to provide feedback and to share their daily challenges. You might have to hire (or assign somebody the task) a person that really keeps track of dependencies between tasks to have them dispatched in a useful manner. But eventually you might profit on both ends. Stuff might get done quicker while your teams grow happier. And see the parallel to being agile? A happy team equals a greater velocity! You have to learn that you might not only want to improve your team but also their environment and the processes surrounding them. All combined, these are great steps towards a great company. Therefore remember: people in the same boat should at least somehow work on something similar. And you won’t need a rower at the beach. In the end, you’re not agile enough.
