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So for the sake of pretending that the remote team members are able to contribute as much as the local ones you hobble those who are local? I guess if your int

by evgen 9y ago

So for the sake of pretending that the remote team members are able to contribute as much as the local ones you hobble those who are local? I guess if your intention is to prove a point, but the cost in overhead and diminished output from those who are local seems a bit excessive for my taste.

ghaff 9y ago
I'd suggest that if you've made up your mind that distributed teams are not going to work together effectively, you probably shouldn't have distributed teams. Not that best practices are always followed, but it's pretty standard practice that distributed teams should try to avoid things like offline decision-making by co-located workers as much as possible.
- rout39574 9y ago
  For "effectively", substitute "as effectively", perhaps? The gradient is there, for the most cases.
matwood 9y ago
> So for the sake of pretending that the remote team members are able to contribute as much as the local ones you hobble those who are local? Even when everyone is local, I have found the best communication occurs when forcing everyone to pretend they are remote. So many times person A talks to B and they make some incorrect decision or assumption that person C would have been able to head off if they were involved. Having the same conversation in group chat or group email does two things. First, it lets others engage if they need to without being actively interrupted. In my example above person C could have stepped in when noticing the conversation in group chat. Second, the conversation is now perfectly documented. "What was that decision we made 2 weeks ago? Oh yeah, it's in chat/email." I also find that writing really makes people think. Bezos is famous for forcing people to write their ideas down in memos before meetings[1]. The missing person scenario above can be worked around if everyone is in the same office, but people hate sharing open spaces today. It also does not solve the documentation issue. [1] http://www.qcommservices.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-memo-important-skill-master/ http://www.qcommservices.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-memo-im...

by evgen 9y ago

ghaff 9y ago

I'd suggest that if you've made up your mind that distributed teams are not going to work together effectively, you probably shouldn't have distributed teams. Not that best practices are always followed, but it's pretty standard practice that distributed teams should try to avoid things like offline decision-making by co-located workers as much as possible.

rout39574 9y ago
For "effectively", substitute "as effectively", perhaps? The gradient is there, for the most cases.

matwood 9y ago

> So for the sake of pretending that the remote team members are able to contribute as much as the local ones you hobble those who are local? Even when everyone is local, I have found the best communication occurs when forcing everyone to pretend they are remote. So many times person A talks to B and they make some incorrect decision or assumption that person C would have been able to head off if they were involved. Having the same conversation in group chat or group email does two things. First, it lets others engage if they need to without being actively interrupted. In my example above person C could have stepped in when noticing the conversation in group chat. Second, the conversation is now perfectly documented. "What was that decision we made 2 weeks ago? Oh yeah, it's in chat/email." I also find that writing really makes people think. Bezos is famous for forcing people to write their ideas down in memos before meetings[1]. The missing person scenario above can be worked around if everyone is in the same office, but people hate sharing open spaces today. It also does not solve the documentation issue. [1] http://www.qcommservices.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-memo-important-skill-master/ http://www.qcommservices.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-memo-im...