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by jamesu 5143 days ago
IMO Fully Distributed Teams are only viable when the team is fully distributed. When i was working remotely for a startup which had a central office, i commonly found that decisions regarding development were being made which i had little to no knowledge of, despite there being a chat room and task manager which was meant to keep everyone on track.

My guess is that everyone in the office was discussing bits and pieces outside the chat room and neglecting to keep me in the loop, perhaps unknowingly. Later on they decided to have formal weekly meetings, but this didn't really improve the situation.
2 comments
pixelmonkey 5143 days ago
Yes, this is a problem and indicates that the managers at these companies don't "get it", in my opinion. I refer to this as "out of band communication" (described well here: http://www.sandywalsh.com/2012/03/out-of-band-communications...) and if your "distributed" team practices it, your collaboration environment is doomed.

37 Signals described how they worked around this problem by forcing employees at the parent office to work from home more often, see http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2360-equality-and-remote-team...

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MattRogish 5143 days ago
One easy fix - have every remote person call in to an open mic on either someone's computer or, say, an iPad that is set up with video. Then any ad-hoc chat gets captured by all the remote folks. But, it really is continual effort to get people in the chat room. It's up to everyone on the team to constantly remind each other to "take it to chat".
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dwiel 5143 days ago
Yeah, this has helped us a lot. I am one of a few remote and when I can, I skype into a big screen in the central office. The account there is set to auto answer calls from its list of contacts so I can call in whenever I want. I often leave it open all day on a spare computer.
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GFischer 5143 days ago
Startups with money to burn could buy one of those remote robots for telepresence :) like the Anybots QB

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...

or the texai

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-softwar...

Maybe one day this will become commonplace (when they become an order of magnitude cheaper, I suspect). Meanwhile, Skype is a good idea.

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DeepDuh 5142 days ago
"Startups with money to burn"

What is that sorcery you are speaking of? ;)

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