Wide Teams

The Narrating Your Work Experiment

Hans de Zwart recently finished an experiment in which he encouraged his distributed team to “narrate their work”—to issue frequent updates to the team about what they were doing. In this article, he discusses the results of the experiment. This article was originally posted on Hans’ blog, and he has kindly granted permission to reprint it here. A few months back I posted a design for an experiment on my blog. The goal of the experiment was to find out whether it would be possible to use a microblogging tool to narrate our work with the intention of making better performing virtual teams. Over the last two months, the direct team that I work in (consisting of 18 people) basically participated in the experiment in the way that it was designed: They posted constant, daily or weekly updates

8 Moments of Remote Work Zen

Mar 29, 11 • In Discussion, Experiences, Featured

For some remote workers, leaving the office behind is a choice to spend more time with family. For others, it’s a move to an environment more conducive to focus, or a way to travel the world while still making a living. Whatever your reason for working remotely, it’s good sometimes to reflect on the joys of living and working untethered to a desk. I asked eight remote workers to tell me about their moments of remote work zen—those perfect moments that make it all worthwhile. Here are their answers. —David Browning, co-founder of Two Guys —Sahil Parikh, Founder of DeskAway –Marieke Guy, blogger at Ramblings of a Remote Worker —Ligaya Turmelle —Jessica Dally, Project Manager at TechSoup –D. Keith Casey, Jr., Chief Stuff Breaker at Blue Parabola —Shane Pearlman, CEO of Shane & Peter, Inc. –John McCaffrey,

The Rambling Remote Worker: Marieke Guy on virtual teams, event amplification, and the future of remote work

Nov 22, 10 • In Basics, Experiences

Today we are lucky to have a guest post from remote worker and blogger Marieke Guy. In this article she recounts her own transition to remote remote work and then to becoming a champion for remote workers; discusses the concept of “event amplification”; and talks a little about the future of distributed teams. Hello, I’m Marieke Guy and I work for UKOLN, a centre of excellence in digital information management. I’ve been there for 10 years now and have worked on a variety of different ‘information management’ projects. The majority of my work today centres around the Web (especially Web 2.0 and beyond), digital preservation and innovation. There’s more on my staff page. Why be a Remote Worker? UKOLN is based at the University of Bath. For those of you who haven’t heard of Bath

Meetings and Distributed Introverts

Nov 5, 10 • In Experiences, Practices

For an introvert, any meeting can be trying. In this guest article, contributor Chris Strom talks about how distributed meetings are especially taxing for those of an introverted bent, and some of his strategies for coping. I am a strong introvert. As with most introverts, I lose energy when I interact with people. Meetings, in particular, drain me. Since they are a staple of a professional career, I have built up something of a tolerance for meetings. Remote meetings, however, continue to confound me. Everything about remote meetings saps more energy than the in-person equivalent. By itself, any one thing does not amount to much. But, by the end of a meeting, I am completely drained. I have no fight left. I care more about reaching the end than reaching consensus. In my experience, eye

Wide Teams are Stagnant Teams

Jul 8, 10 • In Experiences, Opinion

Distributed sucks. Human interaction is far better than virtual, all the more so for teams of any significant size. I have worked with successful distributed and local teams. The local teams were far superior in their ability to improve. I much prefer the lifestyle afforded by distributed teams. But that lifestyle comes at a significant cost that today’s tools cannot even begin to mitigate. Editors note: Wide Teams is about more than just advocacy for dispersed teams. One of the reasons this site exists is to foster a robust conversation about all aspects of remote work – including the very real challenges involved. In order to get a critical perspective on distributed work, I asked my friend, former coworker, and fellow blogger Chris Strom to write this guest article. As someone who has managed