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What is the hardest thing about working remotely within a distributed team?

Hey fellow IH nomads,
We're looking for some help in understanding challenges around remote teamwork. Here's a few we've heard:

A. Not having a full picture of what my teammates or I should be working on

B. Maintaining personal rapport and trust between teammates

C. Managing my motivation and accountability

D. Balancing solo focus time vs. real-time/ad-hoc collaboration

Anything else ?

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    For me, it's managing clients and team members in multiple time zones and trying to find meeting times that work for everyone. For instance, one of my clients in the Middle east, our dev team in India, and I'm in the US. There's really only a 1-2 hour window each day when everyone can meet (though it's early for one of us and really late for others).

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    -You need to be a 10x better manager to manage an online distributed team than an in person team for many of the efficiencies outlined.

    -You need to figure out an effective way to qualify the people that you are paying, and their efficiency. (Example: you think someone doing something at $20/hr is cheaper than someone @ $50/hr? or you think someone at $500 fixed price can finish a project faster and better than someone at $50/hr can? - these amateur assumptions that you make before you figure out a way to properly assess the capabilities and performance of your team can really hurt you and costs thousands.)

    The point above cannot be understated, especially if you have no money and not technical experience to Vet code - you essentially have to hire a manager to be your CTO and review your code, otherwise your developer could be building unmanageable, unscalable, garbage code, hard-coding credentials, making all sorts of mistakes you have no idea about that will put you in serious liability. You could think everything is fine, and not even be aware of your exposure.

    -Getting everyone to work effectively in teams - after identifying good people, these guys are a treasure - you literally dig through every crevice in the world to try and get good people at a good price, and then managing the relationships and getting everyone coordinated and working together as an efficient and mean machine is an art form. Its incredibly difficult, and you will be appalled at how frequently you run into like "ego-problems" and "personality issues" and "work ethic problem", time delays, people will lie to you about what they can and can't do, they say one thing and do another, and all these other problems that seem downright insane. Honestly you learn so much that if you become a successful manager of a bootstrapped startup, I would consider that more valuable than an MBA.

    -language and time zone barriers

    -If you get cheap people, you have to put in the work to develop them - this is always the case, you have to identify high potential people that have to be developed, if they were already developed they wouldn't be cheap. It should go without saying that developing people is really really hard (I don't think they even want to be "developed" - its more of a "look dog, if I am going to pay you, we are going to do things like this" and they reluctantly agree - and in the end they end up seeing the logic of it and it becomes second nature to them (example - having a uniform UI))

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      People have said that you need to hire for a 'manager of one.' When you mention some of the difficulties with certain teammembers working together effectively, do you wish they had more of the 'manager of one' trait? Could better structures and modes of communication have helped? (ie more structured/frequent video calls/chatter to share personal things unrelated to work..)

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        No that's not really the problem, the reality is that everyone is different and has different ideas and expectations about what is "acceptable" what is "quality" about what is "right", and then you have primal instincts of wanting something for nothing, and taking the path of least resistance, personality disagreements. These forces need to be balanced and managed by the prime mover (you).

        So really you need to become a better leader. Your constrained by time and resources and your success depends on the ability of your team to function and coordinate with one another to finish the project and make a profit before your resources run out. To that end you need effective incentive structures which reward the things that lead to success and punish the things that lead to failure. You need to be discerning enough to understand what will lead to success and what will lead to failure, then you need to find the most efficient pathway for decision making, problem solving, and conflict resolution that leads to victory. Your judgement and ability to do these things effectively and consistently will define success.

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          Yea, the same people management and teamwork issues are there in remote vs. physical office regardless :)

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    What I find the hardest is to actually have to work with folks who don't understand the fundamentals of working with distributed teams and individuals.

    Lack of different timezone awareness, constantly scheduling meeting at random times because they don't know how to use a tz supported calendar accordingly

    Poor understanding of efficient and respectful remote collaborations, taking too much time from others, some people feel that harassing colleagues online with questions on IM is ok, because it's virtual, the time syphoning is real and rarely acknowledged.

    Poor communication skills in particular in the use of emails, what could be condensed and leading to action items in one email exhange becomes long threads of dozen of verbose emails getting nowhere.

    Team members acting like above is very detrimental to the entire distributed network of contributors. Those issues are less of a problem in the office environment.

    Workong remote is just far less forgiving in so many ways. It's been demonstrated that working away from the office gets most people much more productive (autonomy, yadi yada). It can work great, if communication flows smoothly. Easier said than done :)

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      Yea, we've heard that having experience as a remote worker is increasingly an important criteria in itself when hiring remote workers. Regarding 'efficient and respectful remote collaboration/communication,' what things do you think are best to try that will help with this?

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        I think written set of general guidelines for everyone is a good start.

        And folks to keep an eye on patterns.

        An example is the following: An individual more often than not write overly verbose emails, hardly crafted to help the reader. A quick chat with the individual about getting better a this, explaining how to improve, show examples. And touch base in a couple of weeks.

        I say folks, because I don't think it is only the 'managers' job to do this. Although a manager in the end has the authority to take disciplinary actions (maybe a bit too late by then)

        Another good tool is sending out quarterly performance review requests that ask very precise questions. Ideally with multiple choice answers or a rating scale. With the right set of comprehensive questions, and making sure these get sent to a broad audience for feedback, and covering every single contributor, the trends will appear in the results.
        It has the benefit of showing other kinds of trends as well. Could be technical skills gaps or anything that matters to the organisation.

        Everyone can learn, some need to be given the opportunity and some support. Some will never do the necessary to learn, no matter how much you help them to.

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          This is great. Thanks for the great tips. The need to learn via feedback and support sounds also very important. It's needed in offline office settings and perhaps even more frequent in remote where there's more possibility for gaps in communication/connection between teammates/teams

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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      Jed. What skills are slonch after? I'd jump to get involved in that project as one Bristol expat in Prague.

    2. 1

      Thanks for sharing this. Yea I totally can relate on time spent documenting vs. quickly getting alignment. How often do you get on video calls to help mitigate this?

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