I Have Been Working On Distributed Teams Since Before It Was Cool
In 2020, the world changed and office work changed with it. We were all sent home and required to adapt to remote work. Development teams around the world changed their processes and workflows to this new business requirement with varying degrees of success. But, for me, my first day working from home full time was almost exactly like every other day. I was just in a different chair.
At the time I was a senior Java developer on a team with colleagues in Ohio, Illinois, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Argentina. Only my manager and one other team member were in my office. Any team meetings were necessarily over teleconference. And, any problems had to be solved without walking over to another developer’s machine and looking over their shoulder. The realities of being a software developer for companies who do business around the country and across the world has necessitated a lot of remote collaboration throughout my career. My previous role had me working with engineers in England, the Netherlands, and Australia. Before that, I was a developer for a financial company where half our team was in India. Working from home full time was new for me, but remote work, with team members in other places, was just another day at the office.
Over the years, I have taken part in many different strategies meant to deal with the distance. The least successful ones tend to be those that attempt to impose an awkward simulation of in-person office work. One company I worked for had a sophisticated conference room. One entire wall was taken up by a screen, with cameras along the top. The table ran all the way to the wall where it was joined by an on-camera table thousands of miles away. We could look at the wall and see our colleagues as if they were sitting around the same table. It must have cost a fortune. It looked very impressive – until you tried to have a conversation. One person talking was fine, but the transmission delay combined with gaps in the room’s microphone coverage meant that people were constantly talking over one another and largely incomprehensible. Dialogue was difficult. Discussion was impossible. The real work got done later on, over email. Nevertheless, we kept at it, meeting regularly in the expensive Holodeck room because the business felt that it was important that our team follow the exact same methods that the company found to be successful for colocated groups.
The fact is that working with people on the other side of the country or the other side of the world is a very different thing from collaborating in the same place with people who all live in the same city. The distance in miles is obvious, but it’s not the only one by any means. The time difference goes right along with it, but is often overlooked somehow. And distributed teams also work through differences in language, culture, and living situations.
Since 2021, I have been the technical lead of a development team. I have been fortunate to have a lot of leeway from my own management in how I operate our team. Some of us are in the same city, but we are always collaborating with others around the world. We have been most successful where we let remote work take full advantage of technology and flexibility to accommodate everyone’s various situations as much as possible. People on the West Coast start later. People in Latin America work later, and take a longer lunch. We set up a 3-hour time block where people agree to be online and available wherever possible. Obviously there are exceptions and appointments, and things that happen, but this standard exists to make it simpler to plan synchronous meetings that most people are able to attend. And anything that can be done asynchronously is. We have constant chat threads on Teams where questions are asked and answered as a person has availability. Things that are time sensitive are flagged for attention or a meeting is scheduled. And smaller group meetings with people whose work hours are more compatible can happen outside that 3-hour block. We maintain a “rolling stand-up meeting” channel where each of us give our status, goals, and state any blockers each day. But at the start of the week, the last day of the week, and sometimes an additional day, we have a traditional online stand-up meeting to confirm everyone is well-informed and any unnecessary difficulties can be worked through. All of us have a more complete picture of each team member’s progress with everything documented in text. And as the team lead, I have a better and more current view of where I can be helpful and resolve problems than I would randomly hearing technical conversations across cubicle walls or waiting for someone to come to me, specifically, with a question.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing and spilled pixels over the question of how you create a culture for a company or a team without being in the same place for hours on end. I have found the answer to be the same as it has been since time immemorial (or at least since UseNet was born in 1979) – let people talk and they will build their own culture. Millennials and Gen Z all grew up with text chats. Whether it’s WhatsApp, Facebook, IRC, or AIM, it is second nature for workers under 40 to communicate in text. You do not need to have a Brady Bunch of nodding heads on a Zoom Happy Hour for your team to get to know one another. I don’t require my team members to have their cameras on at any point. My rule for myself is to have my camera on in all meetings with colleagues outside of our division and in any meeting where at least one other person has their camera on. I encourage my team members to do likewise, but some days someone doesn’t feel like being on video, and in meetings where there is a slideshow or a presentation, it seems especially pointless. We maintain an Out Of Office channel where anyone can talk about anything on their mind that’s not directly work related. We share videos, tell stories, make jokes, and get to know one another. Since we have so many colleagues who have learned English as a secondary language, we also maintain an ongoing chat where people can ask questions about the nuances of expression, unusual idioms, and the differences in culture and dialect without embarrassment. All of these things taken together give us ample opportunity to build relationships and team cohesion.
Remote work and distributed teams make people nervous. I can understand that. It’s very different from the traditional work environment many people are accustomed to. But it can have real benefits. Our distributed teams have more flexibility and broader experiences than teams where everyone has to work the same hours in the same place. We have the ability to recruit talented workers who are not in places where they could easily commute to our facility. The nature of a team distributed across different time zones also means that we have the flexibility to respond more quickly and effectively to changing customer demands without excessive overtime work and the attrition that results from it. My team works differently from teams who work all in the same office, but those differences often work out to be advantages that make us more successful.
