[adunn]

"For example, we now know that 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for simply by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members."

As someone who lives in a rural area I see a distributed team as the way to go for hiring talented individuals. I also know that working remotely can hurt communication and collaboration if extra effort is not given. It would be interesting to see a similar study on distributed teams and a comparison of how effective their different strategies and communication tools are. Do any remote workers here have any observational evidence on this?

[toolz]

I work remotely and I would say that communication is much better and easier when working remotely for many people such as myself. Tapping someone on the shoulder is a LOT more intimidating than highlighting someone in chat. I don't want to bother people, I just want to be effective. Highlighting allows me to hit someone up with questions and they'll be able to respond depending on how urgent the task is in relation to their other tasks.

I will say I get more solo work done when I'm around people. It's hard to stay on task if you don't have the ambiance of people with expectations. I go to coffee shops, because even though they aren't my co-workers, if they see me working, they still have expectations. If they look over my shoulder and see me on social media, I've failed their expectations, and just that subconscious feeling does wonders to motivate me. I want to be a people pleaser and remotely that can be tough.

[p0nce]

Thanks, I was wondering how to solve this very problem. I over-perform only when people are expecting something of me, to please them. Else I do simply nothing.

[otoburb]

>I also know that working remotely can hurt communication and collaboration if extra effort is not given.

You've hit upon the key point that many remote workers neglect. It doesn't hurt, and oftentimes greatly helps, to consciously make the extra effort to relentlessly, while appropriately, seek out moments for personal bonding time between team members. Remote staff may need to take this to gentle professional extremes to glean tidbits of personal information on their teammates (i.e. small talk).

Examples:

- Few minutes early to conference calls? Don't always let the line remain silent.

- Schedule formal 1-1 calls and purposely build in some "meandering" time into the agenda (especially for managers of any team who should be scheduling 1-1s with their directs anyway on some cadence).

- Jump on rare lulls, pauses or other appropriate moments during phone calls or IM chat conversational flows.

- Reach out and IM somebody during a known break period (admittedly, this has a low success rate for me due to differing timezones).

Remote staff are starved for information about their teammates. Some remote staff don't care. Others are clueless, in which case they should be classified as-such and you may adapt your style of interaction. From my personal experience[NB] managing remote technical consulting teams, most people do in fact crave more personal connections across teams, but they need to make continuous, concerted (and sometimes disconcertingly) conscious effort.

This type of cognitive overhead is fair to classify as "extraneous" and "bothersome" by certain people, and some extreme cases of successful remote teams (examples: interacting almost entirely via mailing lists, high ratio of long form vs. short emails) do not seem to maintain or require this overhead.

However, for the rest of us working in 99% of other organizations, remote staff can generate the same type of buzz, high-energy and high-performing team outcomes that Dr. Pentland studied, iff the remote team members are collectively willing to build personal relationships with each other.

[NB] Anecdata trigger warning

[jmccree]

I've worked remotely my entire career and one shared aspect of the most successful teams was a chat room named "watercooler" or similar where people were free to chit chat. Everyone knows to ignore the room if busy, so there's not that worry of IMing someone and distracting them. Some times people may reply back hours after you say something, but when a few people have spare cycles at the same time nice conversations can break out.

It's curious to me how when a lot of discussions on remote workers, especially those negative to the idea, I rarely see mention of chat rooms, when I've used them at every single place I've worked remotely. Most of my career success is due to connections I've made on IRC. I don't think this is that rare of a scenario, see the #w00w00 folks.

In the era of "catfishing" where people can fall in love with people based solely on chat and online relationships, I think it's hard to deny it's possible to form meaningful connections online. Emails, conference calls, and video conferences aren't going to do it. If you spend 8+ hours a day "talking" to some one in a chat room, you can learn more than 15 minutes at a water cooler now and then. As well, the whole team/group can read the backlog and know what's going on with everyone else. No need to repeat the same story to x, y, and z.

I agree with what you've said about having some informal conversation during lulls on calls. Those moments can be very valuable. Another thing I've done on some teams is after a major release or milestone achieved, everyone grabs a drink of their choice and joins a group video chat and virtually goes out to the bar to celebrate as a group.

Lastly, one of the things I've done is occasionally send small gifts to other team members. As an example after explaining rubber duck debugging to a team member who solved their own problem immediately after asking me and wasn't familiar with the term, I sent them an awesome rubber duck overnight. (Total cost <$10 via prime)

[otoburb]

The watercooler is a great idea for distributed teams who lean more heavily towards chat as their communication medium.

Because my teams are typically customer facing, we have enough team conference calls (both internal and external) that there are enough moments for people to perform a similar function, albeit most of the time truncated or abrupt.

I share your enthusiasm for chat rooms ala IRC but as you've already noticed this only appeals to a certain subset of [technology] people. #w00w00 is more of an exception in my mind; most IRC channels aren't exactly the hotbed of singularly driven participants, but then maybe the channels I frequented had a low SNR.

>Another thing I've done on some teams is after a major release or milestone achieved, everyone grabs a drink of their choice and joins a group video chat and virtually goes out to the bar to celebrate as a group.

This is a good idea! When a sufficiently important milestone is completed I endeavour to have geographically close clusters of folks fly/drive to meet up, if possible. However, joining a group video chat (hell, video chat in general) would be interesting to introduce. I think video goes a long way to closing the personal gap because you can immediately pair a face with a known name and voice. Sadly (in my view anyway), there are a few folks I still haven't met in my organization face-to-face despite working over 8 years together.

Re. small gifts -- completely agreed.

[russelluresti]

I was interested in this aspect as well. I'm a big believer in the ability for teams to work remotely and asynchronously at the same level of effectiveness as in-office teams; I wonder what the research would look like for those types of teams.