Distributed work teams don’t work
December 7, 2005So there is this notion that advances in telecommunications make telecommuting that much easier. That high-speed Internet and video conferencing and VOIP will make it simpler for widely distributed work groups to collaborate. But now that I’ve seen up close how a widely dispersed group operates, I’m beginning to think it’s not quite that easy.
To borrow military parlance, remote managers have a very difficult time knowing the “situation on the ground.” For example, I saw recently a remote manager ask his team to start using a new tool to produce content. From his standpoint everything was a success–he saw the new items being produced in the new tool. But because he was remote, the part he didn’t see was that his team was confused about the process. They had received no training in the new tool so they were scrambling to figure that out while also scrambling to figure out what to produce in the new tool. I was providing a lot of technical support for that team, support that the remote manager never even knew about because he wasn’t around to see it. He simply did not realize all the problems they were pushing through to get it done.
In other words, the remote manager was out of touch with what was going on in his team. Now yes, I understand that can happen even when the manager and team are co-located in the same office. But being remote makes it that much harder to understand the day-to-day operations of the group. Technology isn’t going to help–weekly video-conference calls won’t alleviate the manager’s inability to see daily, hourly, the team dynamics.
At least one company, Google, seems to feel the same way. One of their golden rules is to take people that work together on a project, and put them physically as close to each other as possible. I hate the term, but there’s real synergy to be had from the unexpected side conversation, or the chance comment made in passing down the hall, the immediate casual communication that’s possible when you see somebody all the timie. And is so very difficult when you only communicate via email and the occasional video-conference.
Maybe this is an isolated example. But based on what I’ve seen, I think distributed work teams are difficult, if not impossible, to make work smoothly. It takes a lot of personal effort, effort hampered by the nature of being remote from each other. They can function, just not quite as efficiently as a team where all the key players are located next to each other.
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