I manage a team split evenly between California and Eastern Europe. In an agile environment with many changes in-flight each sprint, or doing daily hand-offs (

I manage a team split evenly between California and Eastern Europe. In an agile environment with many changes in-flight each sprint, or doing daily hand-offs (for a follow-the-sun support model), the communication overhead becomes significant. It's tough to keep up with what N other coworkers are doing every day, plus do your own work. In my group I've seen some pretty bad resentments build because of the perception that people were left out of the loop. Or, because someone didn't overcommunicate his changes and broke something downstream. Coupled with the fact that there's a 12+ hour turnaround time on even simple communications between the sites, people can feel pretty frustrated. We use a Slack channel for daily standup updates and changelog; that helps if people are disciplined about it. The worst thing though is "othering" -- it's human nature to point fingers at the group across the hall, in the next building, and definitely across the ocean. If you have immature or problematic personalities on the team (don't we all), rifts will occur and deepen without regular face-to-face contact.