I’m happy to see that more people are uncompromising and are speaking out against doing the silly things that people justify with “that’s reality”. We create reality and we can therefore change it. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
Tobias Mayer says:
“Distributed teams are not teams; they are at best a collection of people who communicate regularly. But communication is not collaboration. A distributed team cannot create the kind of energy that comes from human eye contact, from shared spontaneous laughter, from physical touch. True collaboration requires all five senses. Distributed teams require managers, and thus can never be truly self-organizing. Time differences and delayed response times inevitably slow down conversation, hold up decisions and ultimately cripple agility.”
Distributed teams can never be that agile so stop pretending they can. Find ways to colocate. It’s not impossible.
1 Comment
I agree with you about 90% here, but I think that other 10% is important to acknowledge.
Yes, most distributed "teams" really aren't. And especially in large companies, I've seen people put together idiotic working arrangements and then justify it as "reality", without ever considering the costs or making an effort to change. However, that's not always the case.
One of the teams I've coached is distributed and, for a distributed team, doing very well. They are pros who have worked together (physically together) for years before, and have strong relationships. To work together in a physical office would require them each burning 1-3 hours per day on commuting, with all the stress that implies. So they work as a virtual team, meeting physically when needed.
They know that if they magically lived next door to one another, getting together physically would improve their productivity. But they don't, and they would quit rather than move, and that is truly the reality. So they work as a virtual team, with long VOIP discussions and large blocks of virtual pairing. They agree it's not optimum, but believe it's still much more efficient than commuting, and worlds better than not working together.
We can, to some extent, change reality. But we don't create it. Showing proper respect to the people whose best option really is to be distributed will help persuade the people who really could make things go differently if they tried.