When we’re in the office, we share ideas and knowledge with our peers, which doesn’t happen as much in WFH mode. If we do share what we’ve learned with the team, it makes the whole team better. Thus, even if personal productivity drops a little in the office setting, it can actually help the whole team perform stronger. HBR featured Telenor, a Dutch company, reporting that offices are the places where people “collide” and that’s actually really helpful.
This way of working calls for more discipline since it has to be a regular activity, and developers tend to bypass this e-mail communication, assuming people already know what has changed. I have seen many teams, lose days trying to figure out what changes another team has made and jeopardize the delivery timelines. The information in the rest of this article will explain how to do that.
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Once the epics and stories are written and assigned to sprints, most of the activity a team engages in is implementation. An interruption-free environment is vital for maintaining the deep focus required to perform the majority of these tasks. But regardless of where someone physically sits, if someone does not perform, I do not think an office environment will significantly improve their performance.
The locations can easily slip into an us-versus-them attitude, which usually can only be fixed by bringing people together periodically and taking on the expense of letting people travel between the offices. The other downside is you have to double up leadership, and it can be complex and expensive to find leaders who share the right values, strategic alignment, and capabilities. I should add that if you are startup that is still trying to find its way, it is almost impossible to work in any model other than single-site. Things are way too chaotic, and if you can’t sit down with your teammates face to face, you will move way too slowly and with too much confusion. That said, I do talk to a lot of teams, and those conversations
have led me to some tentative opinions that I’ll share here. Building teams that are as geographically co-located as possible is one easy way to address some of this.
Welcome to Product Thinking by me, Kyle Evans. Writer, thinker, podcast host and product leader. Woodworker and…
If there are no network issues, virtual teams communicate with the same immediacy as co-located teams, and often it is easier to Slack someone than get up from your desk and walk across a room. For example, response to specific email subjects or Slack channel messages should have timing based on urgency and priority that teams will respect. The goal here is to engage both in-person and remote teams to build a company culture that complements a hybrid work environment.
Effective communication, like productivity metrics, must be established, agreed upon and documented when beginning any project. Failure in team communication and misalignment can occur when people sit next to each other in a shared space. Like security, working with virtual teams obliges us to add discipline in our projects.
Doing SWAT in a distributed environment is even more challenging because team members are geographically distributed and SWAT requires one-to-one discussions. In one of my previous roles, I worked with distributed development teams in the United States and Australia. I found that most of the developers in Australia were writing readable code, with appropriate comments and unit tests, whereas the developers from the United States were struggling. As described in this HBR article, there are numerous lessons from Automattic, as well as some very compelling reasons why remote work has worked so well for them. Creativity thrives online, and allowing people to find the best way to work allows them to be far more creative than they might be otherwise.
And there’s no “behind-your-back politics” that happens in many co-located offices. Those decisions and values create culture in remote companies more than a ping pong table would because our work is our lifeblood. As technology changes and globalization continues to spread, organizations can find talent across cities, states, regions, and countries.
When speaking about the benefits of project team collocation, it’s worth mentioning the well-balanced corporate culture – a vital aspect of the software engineer working conditions. Nowadays, most developers are eager to work in a company which possesses explicit values and goals. This allows them to get a better understanding of both the product and path that the company pursues. Furthermore, various group projects and team buildings can help programmers feel like an inalienable part of a huge team, making a valuable contribution to mutual success.
Or some teams could actually thrive, finding ways to organise themselves that works for them.
More employees and managers than ever are now considering transitioning from fully in-person or remote work and embracing the flexibility of hybrid workforces.
Its founders have long been proponents of remote work, and they have also literally written the book about working remotely.
Automattic now has hundreds of employees across more than 60 countries.
Product owners and scrum masters who push a practice even when it’s clearly not working are seen as bullish or aggressive.
In larger meetings, being remote still feels a bit too much like watching a meeting on TV. And, we often have to mute mics when we’re not speaking and how to build culture in a remote team have periodics blips in A/V quality. At this point, we have over 570 rooms set up with CfM, and most VC meetings are conducted using Hangouts and CfM.
This way of working calls for more discipline since it has to be a regular activity, and developers tend to bypass this e-mail communication, assuming people already know what has changed. I have seen many teams, lose days trying to figure out what changes another team has made and jeopardize the delivery timelines. The information in the rest of this article will explain how to do that.
have led me to some tentative opinions that I’ll share here. Building teams that are as geographically co-located as possible is one easy way to address some of this.
Effective communication, like productivity metrics, must be established, agreed upon and documented when beginning any project. Failure in team communication and misalignment can occur when people sit next to each other in a shared space. Like security, working with virtual teams obliges us to add discipline in our projects.
Doing SWAT in a distributed environment is even more challenging because team members are geographically distributed and SWAT requires one-to-one discussions. In one of my previous roles, I worked with distributed development teams in the United States and Australia. I found that most of the developers in Australia were writing readable code, with appropriate comments and unit tests, whereas the developers from the United States were struggling. As described in this HBR article, there are numerous lessons from Automattic, as well as some very compelling reasons why remote work has worked so well for them. Creativity thrives online, and allowing people to find the best way to work allows them to be far more creative than they might be otherwise.
And there’s no “behind-your-back politics” that happens in many co-located offices. Those decisions and values create culture in remote companies more than a ping pong table would because our work is our lifeblood. As technology changes and globalization continues to spread, organizations can find talent across cities, states, regions, and countries.
When speaking about the benefits of project team collocation, it’s worth mentioning the well-balanced corporate culture – a vital aspect of the software engineer working conditions. Nowadays, most developers are eager to work in a company which possesses explicit values and goals. This allows them to get a better understanding of both the product and path that the company pursues. Furthermore, various group projects and team buildings can help programmers feel like an inalienable part of a huge team, making a valuable contribution to mutual success.
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