Biggest problem of distributed teams: lack of spontaneous communication.
Have you ever wondered why many startups love open office plan — when everyone sits in the single large room together? And they do that in spite of many distractions and noise resulted of such configuration.
The answer is because of the possibility for spontaneous communication. In such office you can ask a question and immediately get an answer. Everyone is “in the zone” and knows what is going on, who is present and what everyone is doing.
You don’t have such a possibility for spontaneous communication if your team is scattered over different locations.
Lack of spontaneous communication in distributed teams is the problem that you need to solve in order for your team to be a single cohesive unit.
A distributed team is like a network of isolated autonomous individuals rather than a connected whole. It is like being in the office where teammates are in separate rooms with doors locked from the inside.
If you want to make a close contact you have to “knock”: make a video-conference call. The other party, of course, must answer it.
It makes spontaneous communication impossible.
Text chat helps, but typing is much slower than talking. Moreover, it is asynchronous — you might not get an immediate answer after you’ve sent a message. Another delay. Chat gets overloaded with messages quite fast and it is hard to keep track.
You could make a video-conference call and leave it always on forever, you would say.
Yes, but video calls are not meant to be left forever. The odds are that you will have high internet bandwidth consumption, high CPU load. Moreover, anyone will be able to watch you (in HD) without you knowing about that. It is like if someone could stare right at your face at a breadth distance without you knowing that.
Would you like to be watched that way? I don’t think so. That is why nobody does that always on video-conferencing thing.
Without spontaneous communication, your process of working together slows down dramatically.
Because the opportunities for spontaneous communication don’t exist, a scattered team have to rely on ad-hoc online meetings or on more formal, scheduled online meetings to get their work done.
However, because organizing meetings takes effort, a lower overall frequency of meetings results. This lower frequency of meetings, in turn, results in less work being done by the collaborators on their joint problems, particularly the problem of refining and coordinating their work plan.
Thus the collaborators are not as timely in giving each other feedback on the directions their joint work should go, and hence they take longer to construct and select among the alternatives that guided the course of their work.
This problem never becomes clear to the participants in the remote collaboration because each meeting seemed productive and useful, and they did not have other, spontaneous contacts that they can use to supplement these meetings.
To this date, VideoWorkLink is the only software on the market created to solve this problem.
It links you up with remote teammates by the means of video for the whole working day. Yet, it does that with respect to your privacy.
By default, you are blurred for your teammates. You know when someone unblurs you. You see when someone enters into a close contact with you, and it is done in a smooth slow way, in order for you to prepare for a contact.
VideoWorkLink is a tool that allows you to solve the problem of the absence of spontaneous communication in teams scattered over different places.
With VideoWorkLink your team will be together no matter the distance.
To summarize everything, spontaneous communication is a key component a distributed team needs to have in order to be fast, adaptive, responsive, and productive. Right now, office-based teams have unfair advantage with that in comparison with distributed teams.
