Show Notes:

ZyncroBlog
Twitter: @zyncro
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00:40 – Introduction

02:22 - Louis’ background

04:20 – Distributed team structure and background

09:08 – Challenges working distributed

10:30 – Cultural differences between team members

12:00 – Zyncro as a company

16:22 – Advice for distributed teams

17:20 – Future of distributed teams

 Show Notes:

00:55 - Introduce Joe

01:41 – Interview begins

 01:58 – Joe’s background

04:50 – Pair Programming

06:55 – Pair Programming 100% of the time while remote

09:10 – Patience and Social Skills while Pairing

13:55 – Keyboard back & forth sharing

23:08 – Daily Pair Swapping

25:09 – Going from co located to remote (Joe’s experience)

27:18 – Daily Standups

32:01 – Daily check-ins with clients

33:56 - Social impact of going from co located to remote

36:40 - Advice for remote workers

38:17 – Type of person who can be successful at remote work

39:40 – How much of a “normal” work environment can be replicated with distributed teams?

40:35 – Aspects that are superior to remote versus co located work

42:00 – Remote pair programming and coworking

43:38 – Wrap Up

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 on our Yammer network. Each update would describe things like what they had done, who they had spoken to or what issues they had encountered. Occasionally the updates were peppered with personal notes about things had happened or were going to happen after work.

Methodology of the experiment

There was no formal (or academic) research methodology for this working experiment. I decided to use a well-considered survey to get people’s thoughts at the end of it. Out of the 18 team members 17 decided to fill it in (in the rest of the post you can assume that n=17). The one person that didn’t, has taken up another role. This means there is zero bias in who answered and didn’t answer the survey.

I find it more interesting to zoom out and look at the methodology of this experiment as a whole. To me doing things like this is a very good approach to change in the workplace: a grassroots shared experiment with commitment from everybody working towards solutions for complex situations. This is something that I will definitely replicate in the future.

Didn’t this take a lot of time?

One concern that people had about the experiment was whether it would take a lot of time to write these updates and read what others have written. I’ve asked everybody how much time on average they spent writing status updates and reading the updates of others. This turned out to be a little bit less than 5 minutes a day for writing the posts and slightly over 5 minutes a day for reading them. The standard deviations where around 4.5 for both of these things, so there was quite a big spread. All in all it seems that narrating their work is something that most people can comfortably do in the margins of their day.

Barriers to narrating your work

Designing the experiment I imagined three barriers to narrating your work that people might stumble over and I tried to mitigate these barriers:

• Lack of time and/or priority. I made sure people could choose their own frequency of updates. Even though it didn’t take people long to write the updates, just over 50% of the participants said that lack of time/priority was a limiting factor for how often they posted.
• Not feeling comfortable about sharing in a (semi-)public space. I made sure that people could either post to the whole company, or just to a private group which only included the 18 participants. Out of the 18, there were two people who said that this was a limiting factor in narrating your work (and three people were neutral). This is less than I had expected, but it is still something to take into account going forward as 12 of the participants decided to mostly post in the private group.
• Lack of understanding of the tool (in this case Yammer). I made sure to have an open session with the team in which they could ask any question they had about how to use the tool. In the end only three people said that this was a limiting factor for how often they posted.

The qualitative answers did not identify any other limiting factors.

Connectedness and ambient team awareness as the key values

Looking at all the answers in the questionnaire you can clearly see that the experiment has helped in giving people an understanding of what other people in their team are doing and has widened people’s perspectives:

A quote:

I enjoyed it! I learned so much more about what my colleagues are doing than I would have during a webcast or team meeting. It helped me understand the day-to-day challenges and accomplishments within our team.

and:

The experiment was very valuable as it has proven that [narrating your work] contributes to a better understanding of how we work and what we are doing as a team.

People definitely feel more connected to the rest of their team:

There was practical and social value in the posts:

A lot of people would recommend “Narrating your work” as a methodology to other virtual teams:

What kind of status updates work best?

I asked what “Narrating your work” type of update was their favourite to read (thinking about content, length and timeliness). There was a clear preference for short messages (i.e. one paragraph). People also prefered messages to be as close as possible to when it happened (i.e. no message on Friday afternoon about what you did on the Monday). One final thing that was much appreciated was wittiness and a bit fun. We shouldn’t be afraid to put things in our messages that reveal a bit of our personality. Sharing excitement or disappointment humanizes us and that can be important in virtual teams (especially in large corporations).

Personally I liked this well-thought out response to the question:

The best posts were more than simply summing up what one did or accomplished; good narrations also showed some of the lines of thinking of the narrator, or issues that he/she encountered. This often drew helpful responses from others on Yammer, and this is where some some additional value (besides connectedness) lies.

It made me realize that another value of the narrations is that they can lead to good discussions or to unexpected connections to other people in the company. This brings us to the next question:

Public or private posts?

The posts in the private group were only visible to the 18 participants in the experiment. Sometimes these posts could be very valuable to people outside of the team. One of the key things that makes microblogging interesting is the asymmetry (I can follow you, but you don’t have to follow me). This means that posts can be read by people you don’t know, who get value out of it beyond what you could have imagined when posting. What to you might sound like a boring depiction of your morning, might give some stakeholders good insight in what you are doing.

So on the one hand it would be very beneficial to widen the audience of the posts, however it might inhibit people from writing slightly more sociable posts. We need to find a way to resolve this seeming paradox.

A way forward

Based on the experiments results I would like to recommend the following way forward (for my team, but likely for any team):

• Don’t formalize narrating your work and don’t make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn’t like about the experiment.
• Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don’t share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture.
• We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about “Learning Innovation”. If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the “Learning Application Portfolio” and so on.

I liked what one of the participants wrote:

I would like our team to continue as we have, but the important steps to take now are 1) ensuring that we stay in the habit of narrating regularly, 2) showing the value of what we achieved to other teams and team leads, and 3) ensure that there is enough support (best practises etc) for teams that decide to implement [narrating your work].

I have now taken this as far as I have the energy and the interest to take it to. I would really love for somebody to come along and make this into a replicable method for improving virtual teams. Any interns or students interested?

(This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands License. It originally appeared here: http://blog.hansdezwart.info/2011/07/19/reflecting-on-the-narrating-your-work-experiment/)

Announcements:

Show notes:

03:15 – Dan’s background

04:02 – History with oversea startup

06:00 – Schedule Flexibility

07:28 – Importance of relationships

09:50 – Advantages of working with teams across time zones

12:00 – Tools

14:40 – Smartboard

17:06 – Code Review

19:00 – Adjustment to working with distributed teams

20:52 – Future of working with distributed teams

21:24 – Advice to distributed groups

Show notes:

• John Hawkins is @vegasgeek on Twitter
• 9Seeds LLC
• The Event Ticketing and Affiliate Manager WordPress plugins
• 9Seeds sponsors WordCamp conferences

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.

What about you? What’s your moment of remote work zen?

Show notes:

• Shane Pearlman is @justlikeair on Twitter
• Shane & Peter
• Check out the Shane & Peter Lifeblog
• Redmine
• Adium
• Coworking
• Freelance Camp

There are ways remote workers can overcome these challenges with different communication techniques.  Knowing when to use e-mail, the phone, and instant messaging can also help everyone communicate more effectively.

1. Use the phone for urgent matters. If you have a question or a matter to discuss of urgent nature, you want to reach your team member over the phone so that you may receive an immediate response.  The telephone also allows you to obtain clarity on a response immediately if you have further questions.  Of course, there are times when you reach voicemail instead.  In that case, you want to leave a message that clearly indicates you have an urgent matter that needs to be discussed (if you have a specific deadline, indicate what it is), when you called, and request an immediate call back.
2. Gather your thoughts before communicating. Compile your thoughts, points and questions in one e-mail or on a piece of paper before going on a call.  If you are using e-mail and have two or more points or questions, use bullet points.  This makes it easier for you to receive responses to all items and for the team member to review and respond to you.
3. Respond promptly. It is important to respond promptly to all communications.  It’s already a challenge for team members to not be able to walk over to you with a quick question.  You want to make communication easy for everyone.  Your team members will appreciate your prompt responses and will catch on to this protocol.  In return, you should also receive prompt responses for any questions you have from team members.
4. Get to know your team members and let them get to know you. Face time helps a great deal when getting to know one another.  For remote workers, utilizing video conferencing such as Skype when appropriate helps with interpersonal communications.  Also in any day-to-day communication, whether via the phone or e-mail, make a point to be more personable by asking how your team member’s day is going, how their weekend was spent, and share with them what’s going on at your end.
5. Use “please” and “thank you.” E-mail and texting can leave a cold message.  There are times when the tone of a message can be misinterpreted.  By utilizing words such as “please” and “thank you,” it ensures your message’s tone remains positive and it also doesn’t sound demanding.
6. Provide and/or ask for confirmation. Before ending calls where direction is provided, always summarize what you understand to be the next steps and include deadlines.  This ensures both of you are on the same page.  A brief e-mail summary on to-dos is also helpful in keeping everyone on the same page.

Title photo “Hotline” by Grant Hutchinson

• Set Up Remote Colleagues With the Apps They Need Using Ninite: Online Collaboration «

  • Ninite has a selection of many of the most commonly used apps, including browsers, IM clients, media players, office apps, Flash, PDF readers, security tools, utilities and even some of WWD’s favorite tools, like Dropbox, Evernote and KeePass. The installer installs the most up-to-date version of the apps; running the installer again will update the apps to the latest version.

     

• iPad 2: The Best Tablet for Distributed Teams Just Got Better: Online Collaboration «

  I’ve talked about the importance of  a “comms appliance” for remote workers; the iPad 2may just be the best device yet for that role.

  tags: communication videoconferencing ipad

  • People who think that adding a camera to the iPad 2 is just a minor improvement aren’t people who work with remote team members and clients. Videoconferencing is increasingly popular; you need only look as far as the success of Skype and the rise of competitors to that service to find proof of that. The value of face-to-face communication actually increases as in-person dealings become more of a rarity, and it won’t be long before third parties join Apple’s FaceTime in the video chat game, and multi-person group video chat is right around the corner

     

• Teleworkers on the rise

  Great article about some of the advantages of working remotely.

  tags: telework

  • Carr said the benefits of teleworking greatly outweigh the stress of sitting in traffic and being distracted by the office atmosphere.”It becomes clear that the best employees are the ones not stuck in traffic,” he said.

     

• How to Work with Someone 12 Hours Away | Macadamian Blog

  Terrific article about one team’s experience with a very widely dispersed organization.

  tags: wideteams telework

  • It’s awesome when the critical path moves seamlessly from North America to Western Europe/Asia. For example, say you have 80 hours of tasks that can’t be done in parallel. A local team will need two weeks to do these tasks. A global team, on the other hand, can work separate 8-hour shifts and get them done in one week. That’s twice as fast!

    It’s awesome when my code is tested while I sleep. A small team of local developers can be extremely efficient when paired with a remote QA. I spend my day fixing bugs and adding features, and by the time I come in the next morning, these issues have been tested and either re-opened or closed. Prioritizing tasks is a breeze, and we don’t lose as much time on code freezes leading up to a release.

     

     

• Google Docs Turns Its Comments System Into a Conversation System – ReadWriteCloud

  tags: collaboration wideteams documents office remote communication

  • The new comments system works like a conversation thread on a Facebook, complete with @replies. When someone is tagged in a conversation, they will receive an e-mail notification. The user can then either click-through to the document, or simply respond to the e-mail. All the conversation is captured and stored in Google Docs with the document. If the notifications become too much, users can mute notifications.

     

• Implicit Communication and Virtual Teams | Leading Virtually

  Really insightful article about high-context and low-context cultures, and the different ways they can react to the challenges of remote work.

  tags: communication

  • Indicate to your team that research for virtual teams shows that, because of the challenges inherent in virtual work, being a little more explicit in communication is probably necessary. This may mean more of a challenge to high-context team members who are used to implicit communication. To help them feel more comfortable with being explicit, frame virtual work as a totally new way of doing things with a lot of learning to be done along the way.

     

  • team members will create rules of engagement which make explicit the what, when, who, and how of decision-making and communication within the team. Among the things covered by the rules of engagement are the nature and frequency of communication, communication media to be used, the values that the team will live by, the response times for messages, how conflict will be resolved, and how the decisions will be made, including who makes what decisions.

     

I talked to Susan and Jessica about why TechSoup is a distributed organization, and why organizations are using Second Life to meet, network, and do their work. For someone who spends a lot of time doing remote collaboration, it was eye-opening for me to discover this whole new frontier of online interaction. After listening to this interview you may just be inspired to add a virtual world meeting space to your own remote collaboration tool box.

Show Notes:

• Susan Tenby is @suzboop on Twitter
• Jessica Dally is @jessicadally
• TechSoup is @techsoup on Twitter
• Nonprofit Commons is @npsl on Twitter.
• A video about NPSL’s work in Second Life
• Second Life
• Hypergrid Business, a blog devoted to “enterprise users of virtual worlds”
• Community Voice Mail
• 5PM project management tool
• Evernote
• HootSuite
• BaseCamp