A presentation which explores the issues and joys of working with a remote team and outlines what the approach one particular team has taken.

2. Synchronous communication is
overrated
How to thrive in a remote team

3. A video conference call

4. Who am I?
Name: Kelsey van
Haaster
From: ThoughtWorks
Role: Not a consultant!
kelseyvh@thoughtworks.com
@kelseyvh

5. Overview
◻What is a remote team?
◻Why do I care about remote teams?
◻Step 1 - do some research
◻Step 2 - make some changes

6. What is a remote team?
◻ A Remote Team is one where the team members work from locations
other than a corporate office
◻ Team members are rarely (if ever) co-located
◻ A group of people working on an Open Source project is an example
of a remote team
◻ A Distributed Team is made up of groups of co-located people in more
than one location
◻ A team where groups of co-located people work with other groups of
co-located people is an example of a distributed team
◻ Both kinds of team, can be Globally Distributed

7. In the US alone, the number of
remote workers has grown more
than 103% in the last decade.
Further, more than 50% of people
will work remotely by 2020
Forbes Magazine
March 31st 2016

8. Why do I care about
Remote Teams?

9. Why do I care about remote teams?
NORTH AMERICA
Atlanta
Chicago
Dallas
Denver
New York
San Francisco
LATIN AMERICA
Belo Horizonte
Porto Alegre
Quito
Recife
São Paulo
Santiago
EUROPE
Barcelona
Berlin
Bologna
Cologne
Hamburg
Istanbul
London
Manchester
Munich
AUSTRALIA
Brisbane
Melbourne
Perth
SydneyAFRICA
Johannesburg
SINGAPORE
SingaporeINDIA
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Gurgaon
Hyderabad
Mumbai
Noida
Pune
CHINA
Beijing
Chengdu
Shanghai
Shenzhen
Wuhan
Xi’an
Our customers are
ThoughtWorkers

10. Why do I care about remote teams?
NORTH AMERICA
Workspaces NA
Identity
SLAM
Infosec
Finance
InfraDel
LATIN AMERICA
Workspaces
People Data
Labs
InfraDel
Staffing Systems
EUROPE
Workspaces
SLAM
(+CIO)
Our People Lead
AUSTRALIA
Workspaces
Identity
AFRICA
Workspaces
INDIA
Workspaces
Digital
Operational Insights
Finance
Finance Lead
Connect
InfoSec
People Champion
Identity
CHINA
Workspaces
Finance Systems
Recruiting Systes
Sales Systems
Connect
M&A
InfoSec
We are part of
TechOps

11. Why do I care about remote teams?
NORTH AMERICA
Identity
Support
Sys Admin
Engineering
Tech Lead
AUSTRALIA
Identity
Support
PO/BA
Engineering
INDIA
Identity
Support
Sys Admin
DevOps
We are Identity

12. My team is both remote and
globally distributed.
We can’t even be together on the
same day of the week!

13. We’re pretty good! But we
wanted to make it even
better!

14. The really great stuff
◻We have taken the time to get to know one another
socially
◻We are all experienced and can work independently
◻We are all multi-skilled and competent
◻We have a strong feedback culture
◻We trust each other and our colleagues
◻We all love what we do

15. The challenge
◻ Working too many hours
◻Too much (unsuccessful) video conferencing
◻Very, very long complicated email threads
◻Lots of effort expended trying to keep people on the same
page
◻Struggles staying in sync with other remote teams
◻Some frustration with the time decisions/discussions
could take

16. We realised we were trying to work
like a co-located team.

17. Step 1 - do some research

18. What do the experts say

19. 125 companies with entirely remote workforces
10up Citrix Help Scout Origin Eight TELUS
Acceleration Partners Clevertech Hippo Education peopleG2 Tessitura Network
AgileBits CloudPeeps Hubstaff Percona Cheat Sheet
Aha! Codebusters ICUC Social Plex The Geller Law Group
AIDS-Free World Collage.com iDoneThis ProofHQ The Wirecutter
appendTo DataStax Incsub Receiptful ThirdPath Institute
Art & Logic Devrix Inspired HR Remote Year Time Doctor
Articulate Doist InVision RevolutionEHR TNTP – The New Teacher Project
Attentiv DuckDuckGo Jackson River Scrapinghub Toptal
Authentic Form & Function DVMelite Kin HR Seeq Tropical Travelers
Automattic Edgar LoveToKnow Severalnines Universal Mind
Axelerant ElevenYellow Lullabot Simple [A] Upworthy
Balsamiq Evolving Wisdom MariaDB SitePen Ushahidi
Baremetrics Fire Engine RED MCFTech Skillcrush Varsity Tutors
Basecamp Five Q Melewi Sococo Virtual Law Partners (VLP Law Group)
Beutler Ink FlexJobs Mobomo SoftwareMill WAKA Kickball & Social Sports
Big Universe FlexProfessionals Modern Tribe SpiderOak WooThemes
Blossom Four Kitchens Mokriya Sticker Mule Wordfence
Bluespark Genuitec MomsRising StudySoup Workfrom
Buffer GitHub MoveOn.Org Summit CPA Group Working Solutions
Canonical GitLab Mozilla Sutherland Global Services World Wide Web Hosting
Catalyze Go Fish Digital MySQL Taksa X-Team
Chargify Greenback Expat Tax Services NodeSource TeamGantt YNAB
Chef Groove Olark TeamSnap Zapier
Ciao Bambino! Haynes and Company OnTheGoSystems Teleport

20. These folks must know something!

21. Also some user research - What does the community say?
◻Short anonymous survey, distributed via social media
◻32 responses in total
◻47% of respondents currently working remotely
◻53% have worked remotely in the past

22. The respondents

23. The Balancing Act

24. What do the experts say
◻Autonomy is a big benefit
◻Remote working results in better work life balance for
employees

25. What did the community say?
I love the autonomy and flexibility I get
from remote work
My work life balance is better with remote
work

26. What did the community say?
Having odd working
hours (very early or
very late) is an issue
for me.

27. “Working from home allows me to create an
environment that is geared toward my
optimal working environment, which may or
may not conflict with other people's
necessary environments”

28. “Having gained an extra 2 - 3 hours a day (from not
commuting) I am much more content. Although it's not
expected by my company, I often use those extra hours to
work on things for the company that I find interesting, but
aren't necessarily a core part of my normal 8 hours!”

29. What did we say?
◻We agree in general
◻We all love the flexibility and autonomy we have
◻But: early morning and late evening calls can make
balancing things hard

30. Rethink
communication

31. What do the experts say?
◻ Synchronous communication is overrated
◻ Network and bandwidth issues make it minimally productive
◻ Time zones can make it impossible
◻ It’s actually easier/better if everyone is remote
◻ It doesn’t actually matter if you can never be all online at once
◻ Use other ways to communicate
◻ Rotate meeting times and attendees
◻ Record meetings for later consumption

32. What did the community say?
Having an always on video link is
essential
Having some time when the team
is all online is essential

33. “For any remote team to work, there should be an anchor
person who is able to reach out to all members of the team.
If possible they should meet so that they can have more
informal talks and hence understand each other.”

34. Even if good comms tools are in place, there is still a
challenge in keeping everyone connected and on the same
page.
With poor comms tools & strategies, making the whole
team feel like a team is difficult.

35. communication is critical - all forms of it, being flexible and adaptable
and always growing / learning are really important to keep
communication effective. It takes more effort to build a remote /
distributed team that works as well as once where everyone is in the
same office, however the benefits are great. ...Of course, when it's bad
on a remote team it can be much much worse than when everyone is
together...

36. What did we say?
◻At the start - we could be online together
◻And we wasted a lot of time (VC technology still sucks)
◻Later - A new team member and another timezone
◻Double the trouble for not much benefit
◻Working collaboratively with other (also remote) teams
was really hard

37. Culture eats
methodology for
breakfast

38. What do the experts say?
◻Hire the right people
◻Spend time and effort on cultivating your culture
◻You can’t over communicate

39. What did the community say?
I miss the social (water cooler chats) by
working remotely
I don’t feel like I am plugged into my
organisations culture

40. “Not being involved in the social activities and sometimes
that time lag waiting for decisions or input from co-located
team members.” [is hard]

41. Getting to know each other and establishing trust - once
that's done everything runs better!

42. What did we say?
◻As a global organisation, we work hard to achieve a
homogeneous culture.
◻As a remote team, we accept that we need to work harder
at it than a co-located team might.

43. A tool is just a tool

44. What did the experts say?
◻Picking the right tools is essential
◻It’s good to experiment
◻Automate everything (see Github)

45. What did the community say?
It’s important to pick a consistent set
of tools and stick to them
How many different tools does your
team use?

46. Tools is an important factor for remote teams. Tools for
quick screen share, remote pairing, chat, document sharing
and collaborating, task management, etc play a big role in
ensuring remote teams work well together.

47. ◻We tried hard to make sure we only used internally
provided tools at first (dogfooding).
◻But we realised that finding something that worked
mattered more.
◻Email is an awful choice
What did we say?

48. Step 2: Make some
changes

49. Finding balance must be deliberate
◻ What we do now
◻ Call it out when someone is working at silly o’clock
◻ Be personally accountable for not burning out
◻ Put sleep time and weekends in your calendar

50. You need to rethink what collaboration looks like!
◻ What we do now:
◻ An asynchronous standup
◻ Ad Hoc video chats for specific topics
◻ Swarming on Google docs
◻ Always make sure you can hand off to the next person
◻ Don’t get territorial about the work

51. You need to make more effort to get to know one another!
◻What we do now:
◻Recognise that not being co-located requires tradeoffs
◻Recognise that social connections need to be
deliberately and differently made
◻We take the time to chat and share socially
(sometimes out of work hours)
◻We don’t restrict our work chatter to just work

52. There is no perfect tool
◻What we do now:
◻If something doesn’t work, we change it - as many
times as we need to
◻Recognise that often tools can be overloaded (Google
docs)
(If you only have a hammer - everything looks like a nail)
◻Recognise that effort spent on automating is like
earning compounding interest

53. General Principles
◻ Don't fight remoteness - embrace it
◻ Level the playing field, if anyone is remote, everyone is
remote
◻ Find the right cadence
◻ There are always things you can do to make it better

54. Message
There are many benefits from being able to work
remotely for both individuals, teams and organisations.
But you have to embrace remoteness, trying to ignore it
or counter it doesn't work.

55. Questions!