Going the Distance: Five Tactics to Compensate for Distance on Distributed Teams
©2006 Esther Derby
This article originally appeared in Stickyminds.com
When people
communicate face-to-face, they not only hear words and inflections, but also
see facial expressions. This helps each communicator understand what the other
is saying and gives clues to assess when people are mad, sad, or glad.
Teammates know what each other looks like; they learn about each others
families.
But it’s not always possible to have a
team working in the same room. When people aren’t co-located, you can’t just
hope that communication will work and the team will gel–that somehow,
miraculously a group in the U.S.
will hand off to a team in Hungary
without missing a beat. Some teams can achieve round-the-clock attention
through seamless hand offs, but it’s rare and takes a lot of work.
When teams aren’t collocated, they face
challenges about contact, time, context, and culture. To compensate for the
distance, extra effort is required to make contact with distant members,
leverage phone time, adjust for time zones, and learn the differences in
context and culture. Below, I’ve detailed five tactics that can help you
compensate for distance on your distributed team.
1. Make Contact
When people are in the same room, or at
least close by, they get to know each other. They develop relationships that go
beyond work-related transactions. They may not be best friends, but there’s
some social element that ties them together.
You may never get to meet your
distributed teammates in person, but you can make contact. Post a map that
shows where your far-flung team members are located. Post pictures of them. (We
tend to trust what we can see, and this little gesture can help build trust.)
When you can, share a meal together–even
if you are on different continents. Schedule a call, post the pictures, and set
the table. Breaking bread together is an ancient sign of hospitality and good
will. This simple gesture can help knit the team together.
2. Make the Most of Phone Time
There’s an old adage, “Children
should be seen but not heard.” It seems that conference calls go even
further: people who aren’t seen are often not heard. One team I work with has
pictures of every offsite team member in stand-up frames. When they have a
conference call, the frames are placed around the table to remind the people in
the room of who else is on the phone. This way they are less likely to forget
the people they can’t see.
Until everyone on the team recognizes
each other’s voice, it’s good practice to say your name each time you speak.
Yes, it feels awkward, but it really helps the people on the other end of the
phone who aren’t in the room and can’t see who is speaking. Be careful to have
one conversation at a time; a babble of voices emitted from a small, black box
is impossible for most mortals to decipher.
Appoint a facilitator for each call.
Having someone monitoring the flow of conversation and participation helps the
quality of conference calls immensely. Poll the people on the other end of the
line when it’s time to generate ideas or give input. Don’t rely on them to
break into the conversation.
Utilize wikis–Web pages that users can
edit on the fly–to build a meeting agenda and post decisions, action items,
and other meeting outcomes. My team–there are six of us in six different
states–uses a wiki to keep track of meeting outcomes and any other important
information that each of us needs to know.
Don’t use conference calls for serial status
reports. In my experience, the people who aren’t talking during these regularly
scheduled calls also aren’t listening. They’ve hit the mute button and are
probably checking their email. Save phone time for when you need to have
conversations.
3. Adjust for Time Zones
Most of the time, I can keep track of
time zones within my own country. I have a harder time minding time zones
across the world. Along with your map, try posting inexpensive clocks that show
what time it is where each group is located. The clocks remind us that the end
of our day may be the beginning of someone else’s.
Make every effort to schedule meetings in
the slice of time that overlaps “normal office hours” for as many
people on the team as feasible. When there is no overlap, don’t always expect
the “other” team to get up early or stay up late. Be willing to trade
off for the extra hours of work.
4. Understand Context
Even if you work for the same company in
different locations, you work in different organizations. Learn as much as you
can about your teammates’ work world. What is the organizational structure?
Don’t assume it’s just like yours, even in the same division. What are the
physical arrangements? Having a picture of your teammates’ physical
surroundings–their cubes, floor, and building–is another way to make distant
people more real.
Look for commonalities between your
organization and each teammate’s organization. They may share similar values,
or they may not. Knowing where there is overlap and where there isn’t helps you
manage expectations.
5. Be Sensitive to Culture
Some cultural differences are readily
apparent, while others are subtle. Watch out for words or expressions that mean
one thing in your language and something different (and possibly negative) in
another’s culture.
A Canadian friend of mine tells a story
about how he inadvertently offended half his team by offering a virtual
toast–”Cin cin!”–after a successful code release. His toast had a
completely different meaning in Japanese–one that I can’t write in this
column.
Making a distributed team work takes
extra effort, but putting all these tactics to use can help any team traverse
distance. Differences in context, culture, and organizations are magnified when
there isn’t day-to-day contact to build familiarity. Compensate for the
challenges by applying these and other practices to help your distributed team
gel.
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