All of a sudden, distributed teams (remote workers) are more than just an oddity. They’re a workplace force to be reckoned with.
According to a study by IWG, 53% of all global workers do so remotely at least half the week. That’s a big deal and set to get bigger. If you’ve never worked remotely on a distributed team before, or managed one, expect that to change in the near future. And thanks to the internet, former geographic restrictions in hiring are out the window.
But this new paradigm of a global work environment doesn’t come without challenges. As distributed teams become the rule rather than the exception, especially in technology-related industries, managers and workers find themselves playing a game for which they weren’t told all the rules.
If you're new to managing or working on a distributed team, you'll likely encounter these five unexpected challenges.
Translating Direct Manager Skills into Indirect Supervision
In a traditional “co-located” office environment, a manager can assess the status of the team by simply walking around, observing, and talking to employees. This allows him or her to stay on top of developing problems by direct observation and intervening before it spirals out of control.
But these direct management skills can be unsuited for trying to tame the wild beast known as a distributed team. Here’s the problem: a manager can only indirectly infer what’s actually going on with a team based on results and, for a direct manager unaccustomed to relying on inference, relying on direct management instincts can lead one horribly astray.
For example, in a co-located situation, say an employee is mad at the manager for a perceived slight. It soon becomes obvious through body language like glares, mumbling, and slammed doors. A good direct manager will bring the employee in for a chat and try to fix the problem.
With a distributed team that communicates mainly by instant chat, email, and — maybe less frequently — video chat, it is hard to pick up on the same kind of disgruntled cues until it’s too late and the “I’m quitting this job forever!” email arrives, seemingly out of left field.
What can you do?
A distributed team manager should make it a goal to create work conditions that approximate the greater intimacy of a traditional workplace. Do this by practicing a remote version of direct management. Touch base with each team member individually and collectively, as if you were walking around the office daily.
The nature of remote work is isolating. Bonding does not come easily to virtual teams. A manager needs to recognize that and work at creating a virtual camaraderie. The aim is to encourage the same kind of interpersonal relationship-building between employees that goes on in a traditional break room. The trick is to achieve this without being an overbearing micromanager.
Hiring "Junior" Workers Can Lead to Project Chaos
Early in my career I worked for a web development company that seemed to be obsessed with junior developers. No complaints from me, because I was one — and understood the appeal of catching a new coder on the way up (at a smaller salary), but who already had a pretty good skill set. The problem with this way of thinking didn’t materialize until deep into a project, when it became apparent that the whole thing went off the rails a while back but critical questions went unasked.
No, it wasn’t my fault. It was my friend — umm — Bob.
In a traditional work environment, junior developers sit side-by-side with senior developers and can ask questions during down time without being seen as a pest. Remote work is not so conducive to this give and take.
In this case, junior developers on the distributed team felt like there was no down time and hesitated to ask questions, preferring to muddle along until a senior someone noticed the project had taken a wrong turn in the recent past. Asking a simple question earlier would have kept everything going in the right direction.
Since remote companies aren’t likely to stop hiring junior developers, the duty falls to the manager to create a virtual environment where new employees are unafraid to ask questions. Otherwise, you have inexperienced workers pretending like they know more than they do and making poor decisions. The result? Costing the company money and eventually get themselves fired.
How can this cycle be interrupted?
Simple. A manager needs to be proactively available to new workers, even more so than if it were a co-located team where juniors could ask questions of seniors. With a distributed team, the manager takes the place of senior employees in fielding questions, and even more importantly, ensuring that less experienced employees feel like they can ask questions without getting fired.
Company higher-ups should also think long and hard about establishing a mentorship program that matches up new employees with either an older employee or manager in an organized way that replicates the co-located environment as much as possible. Part of this mentoring could include an incentivized method of encouraging employees to improve their skill set. Everyone benefits from this. Employers get more highly skilled workers and workers have a way to show they deserve to move up the pay scale and responsibility ladder.
The Reality of Communication Friction
Communication friction is when message meanings become garbled as a result of shortcomings in the medium rather than any fault of the participants. Communication on a distributed team faces challenges far beyond that of a co-located office where an employee can simply turn to the person next to him or her and say, “Hey, I have an idea.”
Remote teams have a universe of choices for how to talk to one another: instant chat, email, telephone, text, video calls. This last one should be the same as being there, right? Not exactly.
While video call technology is an amazing tool, it’s no substitute for sitting in a room with co-workers for face-to-face conversation. For one, the state of the technology is such that only one microphone works at a time so you end up with a series of mini-lectures rather than an actual conversation. Then there’s the problem of latency, which leaves people talking over one another.
What suffers in such cases is creativity and productivity. If your distributed team suffers even a 20% decline in the latter, as compared to a traditional team, you end up having to hire more people just to stay even. You need to find a way to increase productivity by that amount.
Your mileage may vary, but here are a few ideas:
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Declare daily quiet hours for your team’s communication tools where nobody messages but just works.
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Incentives! It’s amazing what a little bribery can accomplish — gift cards and immediate PayPal-delivered rewards are a good start.
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Avoid loading up employees with small, time-consuming tasks that take away from their availability for more important stuff.
Put enough of these kinds of things into motion and you may be able to overcome the problems of communication friction.
Placing Trust in Someone You’ve Never Met
There is an inherent difficulty in reaching the same level of trust with a person when you’ve never stood in the same room. This is not to say that a distributed team can’t achieve an impressive production level — but there are barriers to achieving similar levels of synergy to those found in a traditional workplace.
Whenever there is communication, conflicts and disagreements are going to happen (and sometimes can even be a good way to clear the air and start afresh). But there is something disconcerting about an online disagreement with the ever-present spectre that the aggrieved party will simply disappear, never to be heard from again.
It’s harder for an employee to pull this kind of vanishing act in the traditional workplace. The chances are better the manager will talk to the offended parties, together and separately, and figure out a way for everyone to live happily ever after.
So, what do you do about the trust issue when the team is dispersed geographically? There are no easy answers, but a good start is to create a culture of trust from the beginning and lead by example:
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Set clear goals with intermediate steps and talk up every member’s strength and what they’ll contribute along the way.
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It should go without saying that team trust doesn’t have a chance if the manager is a flake. Put on your grown-up pants and make sure you are reliable and responsive. Do it long enough and dividends will flow.
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Don’t be afraid to get a little personal. All business and no pleasure leaves little time for trust building.
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Consider something as simple as creating a “fun” channel on your team message app and spend a bit of time each day talking about whatever interests people — video games, movies, and music are all a good bet.
The bottom line is that teams that trust one another work better together.
Importance of Processes
The structure of defined processes is especially important in a distributed tech environment due the precise and sometimes time-sensitive nature of the work. Because teams are scattered across different time zones and locations, processes lend an air of cohesion when collaborating in near-isolation.
When process mapping is clearly developed and communicated, each team member has a specific role to play in the ultimate success of the enterprise, and knows exactly what's expected of them within the context of that defined role.
In order for processes to be actionable and productive, they should:
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Describe how the work is to be performed
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Set performance benchmarks
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Support a successful outcome
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Include a metric for measuring success
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Provide focus for improvement
Process mapping is essential for clarifying steps, practices, and policies that will affect the outcome, making sure all parties are on the same page. It can be formalized through the creation of a workflow diagram that lays out every step.
An example of process mapping might go like this:
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Set boundaries for where the processes begin and end, and determine which other processes feed into the primary process.
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Lay out the steps of the process using action words at the beginning of each step in order to illustrate each point.
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Refine the sequence of each step once it has been documented, using language, characters, and direction to demonstrate the relationship between steps.
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Base the final process map on a system model that clearly illustrates timelines, procedures, sequencing, and other control factors necessary for efficiency and a successful outcome.
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Evaluate the final process map for completeness, accuracy, and clarity.
For most employees (and employers), this sense of structure is a good thing.
The Bottom Line
Though challenging at times, the idea of distributed teams ushers in an exciting and still relatively new world of work. Employers like it because it saves money and offers access to geographically dispersed talent that would have been unavailable before.
Employees like it for the schedule flexibility and — oh, by the way, you can work from home in your pajamas. What’s not to like about that? Technology has brought us to the cusp of a new work world, one never before possible.
The bottom line is that distributed teams are where the global workforce is headed, and it’s time to grapple with implementation best practices to set yourself up for success.
About the Author
Will Ellis develops the guts beneath beautiful websites and can't wait to see what the blockchain world will look like once the technology fully emerges. He invests in cryptocurrencies and studies history.
