Challenges of remote work and distributed teams

I’ve been working remotely for the last one and a half year, and my first job was in a team that was distributed across three continents. Do I like working remotely? Did I like working in a distributed team? Well, it depends, but I can say that there are challenges that I face(d) in both, which I’m sure are similar to what many of you are experiencing or have experienced in the past.

I’m sharing my reflections on some of those challenges (in no particular order), and also how I felt them changing over time.

Disclaimer: please, don’t take the graphs below too seriously, they are a rough depiction of how I or people that I know faced the following issues.

Office amenities

There’s a reason it’s called an office and why it’s furnished different than your home. An office provides furniture, supplies and an environment conducive to work, which can be hard to replicate at home. This was something I realized soon after starting remote work last year. But, over time I feel that I’ve been able to create a setup similar to an office, which let’s me do my job as required. So, while it’s definitely a big issue in the beginning, it’s something that can be tackled with some spending and daily routine adjustment.

Personal connections

It’s so easy to overlook the value of physically working alongside your peers. If this new world has taught us (at least me) anything, it’s that physical interactions with other people are paramount to one’s mental health. It’s less of an issue if you’re working onsite with a distributed team, but it can take a toll on your mental health if you’re working remotely. This is something which I believe can’t be alleviated, but it’s effects can be diminished by having virtual non-work related activities with peers. Also, the employers can play a big role here by supporting periodic physical get togethers, if situation permits.

Career progression

This one is a bit obscure, I mean why would your work arrangement be an issue for your career progression. It shouldn’t, but I’ve seen it happen and so I think it’s important to keep it in mind. Let me explain: it’s very easy to see someone working or accomplishing things, but when you’re not able to see your peers all the time, a lot of good work can go unnoticed and unappreciated, which can ultimately — and perhaps unintentionally — lead to less positive performance reviews. I think the onus is on all of us as individuals to recognize and appreciate the work of our colleagues. Also, someone in a leadership/managerial/supervisory role has to be mindful of this before making any judgements on the remote people that they oversee. Just to conclude, I think this is one issue that is out of one’s control, and is more of a luck (i.e. are your colleagues considerate enough), but one can definitely contribute to fostering a culture that counters this issue, especially if one’s working as a leader/manager/supervisor.

Work impact

I like to differentiate between the value of one’s work as perceived by themselves and by others. When it comes to other people judging your work, it leads to the career progression issue as discussed earlier (remember, we’re talking in the context of remote work). As for self-judgement, I’ve personally had this feeling sometimes that I was not doing/learning enough. It’s strange, because sometimes you can get this feeling even when others are appreciative of your contributions, and from my experience it boils down to two different things:

• Due to poor organization of remote setup by the employer, you actually end up not doing/learning as much as you would’ve if you were working onsite.
• You’re doing fine, but just because you don’t get to meet peers on a daily basis, the feedback loop is incomplete and it seems like whatever you’re doing doesn’t have a positive impact on the business.

I think this is something that can be tackled by a troika of:

• Yourself, by self-reflection on your work to get an idea of how much you’re actually doing/learning.
• Your leader/manager/supervisor, by them telling you how important your work is for the company.
• Your company, by ensuring that the remote work is setup in a way so as to not disadvantage remote workers in comparison to onsite workers.

Slack

No, not the popular work IMS app, rather, as in slacking off at work. This is a bit controversial, because one would expect that all honest employees wouldn’t take advantage of the liberties of remote work, but sometimes you might observe differently, and in the spirit of having low negative energy in this article, I’m gonna only focus on the case where you think someone is slacking off but they’re not — at least not intentionally. I can say, both from my personal experience and from stories of some colleagues, that if you feel (you can’t obviously see someone slacking off, as we’re talking about remote work) that someone is slacking off, then before you make any conclusions, try to understand if they might be going through some personal troubles e.g. family, finances, health etc. Eventually, this is something that might happen here and there, but I think that it’s no different from similar cases of onsite workers.

Team bond

This is somewhat related to the personal connections discussion above, but I’d like to focus here on the effects of it on a team. Just like an individual needs physical interaction for healthy living, a team needs interpersonal exchanges between the team members to work efficiently. A lack of good bond between team members manifests itself in a lower productivity of the team. This problem might happen out of nowhere, but can be handled by engaging in more collaborative work activities e.g. in the world of software development, remote pair programming sessions can help. Also, it’s very important to have a readily reachable remote communication channel for the entire team (e.g. IMS, video calling etc.) and actively use it.

As discussed above, remote work and distributed teams present some unique challenges, which can be solved but only if you’re receptive to their presence. And, with humans reaching for other planets in the future, remote work and distributed teams are on a path to becoming unavoidable (OK, I admit that this is bit of a stretch, but you get the gist).

Happy remote working!