Another fresh serving of articles and presentations about remote work and distributed teams, from all around the web. In this edition: building trust, collaborating on visual design while distributed, keeping a team together during dry spells, and much more!
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Creative Remote Collaboration » IQ Blog – Annotated
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Remote collaboration is important for any line of work where people are divided by time and space, but the need is expanded in a creative industry where there is an increased requirement of collaboration, communication, and execution of ideas. When you work for a creative agency with colleagues and clients around the country (and developers around the world), how can you improve and streamline the creative collaboration process?
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Building Trust Within Virtual Teams – Small Steps Add Up – Annotated
One of the ideas in in this article is to have the team members shoot video of themselves. One team I participate in sent an HD camera to each of the remote workers in turn and then created a team video. It was a lot of fun, I definitely recommend it.
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It’s easy for practically anyone to make and share videos. Ask team members to make videos of themselves in their own work environment (or in their favorite setting) to share with others — maybe during a call, by posting online, attaching in an email, or embedding into a blog. This way, people can get a better feel for each other’s environment without having to travel. Consider staging a “best picture” contest for the funniest clip, best acting, most beautiful scenery, cleanest offices, etc.
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Communication – Reliance on one person – Annotated
More distributed agile insights from Mark Needham.
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another thing that I’ve noticed is that it’s useful to try and ensure that there is communication between as many people as possible in the two cities.
This means that we want to ensure that we don’t have an over reliance on one person to handle any communication.
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Building a Remote Team at The Shane & Peter Inc. Blog – Annotated
When a dispersed team is made up of independent contractors, a dry spell in work can cause the team to drift apart. This article discusses strategies for keeping the team together during droughts.
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great teams are great friends.
There are many ingredients required for a friendship: shared sense of humor, complimentary personalities, shared values. But one thing is required above all: regular communication. You can’t be my friend unless you share my joys and my miseries. You don’t have to share them all, but there is definitely a direct correlation between the closeness of your friends and the percentage of life events that you share.
We make a point of checking in with everyone on the team regularly. We’ve also recently set up a team blog.
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Building and managing virtual teams | Think Vitamin – Annotated
An experience report from a dispersed team. Chris Nagele gives a lot of great advice in this article.
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It’s not always about business. Nothing helps a team gel more than learning about each others personal lives. It’s easier when you work in the same office, but in a virtual team you need to make time for it. We’ve celebrate with shots of vodka in Campfire. We send each other pictures of our home offices. We remember birthdays or occasions and announce them to the team. The personal discussions are always overlooked, so be sure to make the time.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Being part of the original team that built vBulletin, I’ve lived though years of working like this and being vastly more productive that an office environment will allow.
It’s just frustrating now waiting for companies who are after seriously skilled technical people, to look beyond their expensive office space in SF !
Indeed. But I think more and more companies ARE looking outside of SF. Knowledge workers in Silicon Valley aren’t getting any cheaper, and as awareness of the possibility of telework spreads, it’s becoming a more viable option.
About time is all I can say 🙂
Hard to find such orgs though as they typically try to connect via traditional hiring channels and get flooded by India/etc out source sweat shop companies.
Not commuting and working in my own environment is worth a lot more to me than money, and whomever I work for actually gets more for less …….. no brainer to me.