| I worked for a company that was mostly a remote workplace for almost a year, and there were a lot of problems i found while trying to manage a team. Time zones, were a huge issue and pain point when trying to get a large number of people on the same page. I found my self often having to give the same meeting twice, which put more pressure on me. Even worse was when i would have to go over points only for someone who wasn't available for the first meeting, to raise issues that we didn't notice, and so on. After 6 months the team basically felt like it dissolved into the European team, and the North American Team. With me trying to ferry information from one team to another. So many times regardless of how amazing the latest tools we tried were, it still pales in comparison to a whiteboard. The company bought me a high end digital whiteboard, that allowed me to pass control to other people, it was a buggy POS. On top of that since i was the only one unfortunately with the white board, it meant i was the one who was always doing the drawing and trying to extrapolate a diagram from what someone says. Sometimes some team members would spend hours drawing up a digital mock up of what they were going to push for only for it to become completely useless within a very short time. I also found some people no matter how hard i tried, some people seemed to interpret working remote meant, they got to work in their own silo, and would ignore 99% of everything going on around them. This lead to numerous conflicts, and other issues. Also one other thing i found, was that 1 on 1's became super impersonal, and frankly felt extremely uncomfortable. |