The pitfalls of remote work and how to avoid them.
Working remotely when everyone works remotely is not an easy task. Not being able to meet every day often reveals gray areas and malfunctions in a team.
When a team is collocated, organizational pitfalls are often tolerable: you ask a colleague a question over coffee break, or pop-in someone’s office. But those glitches in a team’s organization cannot survive for very long in a full-remote setting.
In order to build a resilient remote team setting, you need to make how you work as a group very explicit .
Open-space vs Remote work, an efficient setting is vital
In open spaces, how a team operates is not always a priority. Physical proximity allows a team to mask the flaws of an organization that lacks clarity. We can see each other, hear each other, talk to each other, gather and discuss.
In the end, even if sometimes shaky or uneven, team members usually more or less know who’s working on what, even though it was never made explicit. You have of course the yearly org chart, but is it really that close to reality ? Does it last more than a month ?
Turning to a 100% remote setting for an entire team means that the implicit structure of responsibilities falls apart and revealing it becomes much more important: identifying what we do as a team, prioritizing our work, clarifying responsibilities and contributions, knowing how we synchronize and document information, how we track progress.
Without this clarification, you endanger the collective solidarity and trust of a team, and risk energy loss, inertia, disengagement and frictions — that were there before, but manageable.
Synchronization tools, in the form of instant messaging or video-conferencing, cannot compensate for the limitations of a faulty organization on their own.
Anyone who has spent their day jumping from video-conference to video-conference knows that it’s not feasible in the long run. They are as heavy on our servers as they are on our attention spans.
Similarly, instant messaging used too intensely is an endless source of distraction during the day.
How do you make your organization more transparent and more comprehensive?
What is a “transparent” organization? What does it mean to be well-organized?
A team is a collection of people that share a common purpose. The realization of this purpose requires that team members investigate different topics — directly or indirectly linked to said purpose.
For instance, if a team aims to provide a service to users, its members will have to design it, build it, promote it, sell it (or not), provide customer success and so on. On the inside, a team will have to think about hiring/onboarding people with skills, handling HR processes, collaborating with partners within or without the organization.
As a team evolves, priorities will change and so will a team’s focus shift relative to these topics. Similarly, no one person could do all of that, so a team needs to delegate topics. What you do differs greatly from one topic to another, and so you need autonomy in how something is handled. Every team faces those challenges, and this inherent complexity can easily endanger its ability to serve its purpose if information isn’t easily available and comprehensible by all.
A team is a living organism and as such is susceptible to change: a new topic emerges, a growing product, a new hire, a new partner, a change in strategy and so on.
We built Crystal for exactly this purpose: to allow teams to reveal the complexity of their mission and see in real time how their team is organized to reach their goal.
If you work in a full-remote setting and feel like clarity and transparency matter and have an impact on your, and your teammates’, efficiency and motivation, don’t hesitate to give Crystal.work a try. 💎
