On 7 May 2011 10:22, Rafael Bugajewski <rafael@juicycocktail.com> wrote:
>
> Also keep in mind that communication is better if you talk face-to-face instead via such fancy tools like Skype, Basecamp, …. I don't say that it isn't possible to do great work and have a good communication if you work remotely, but it requires more effort on both sides. Usually the freelancer is used to it, but the company has to adjust.
>
Although I'm a remote worker, I'm going stick my neck out here and say
that it's foolish IMHO to assume Skype, Basecamp, etc make up for the
lack of basic communication you get by standing in front of someone.
If anyone goes to clients and makes that claim, I'd be surprised if
many of them would take you seriously; you're fighting against day to
day experience, and plenty of modern research on communication. Don't
worry about the 20+ years ago history - this is up-to-date experience
within the past couple of years.
I work in a remote team right now, but we've had to go a long way to
make that work - you have to do a lot of "extra" stuff to make up for
the loss, and/or to prove that you've made up for it. In my own
experience of remote teams (both inside and outside them, both as a
team member and as a manager), many individual remote workers focus on
their own work, and assume everything is good just because they're
fulfilling their personal task lists. Great. Except ... they're
usually part of a team, and just having "their" work OK isn't enough -
you need the rest of the team to be having their work come out good
too.
The "extra stuff" you can do includes things like:
- scheduling week-long on-site sessions for the whole team (spending
a week together at a time really helps with the remote-communication
for the rest of the month)
- working with people who know each other well already and have
worked on projects together before (communication is easier with
people you know, and whose emotional communicaiton you can better
infer than with strangers)
...we've also done a lot of work in process changes and company org
changes (we're a very small company, so that's not too hard) to make
remote-working more effective. Right now, I'd say it's almost as good
as side-by-side working for most of us - although some individuals are
still noticeably less effective than they were working in large
offices together.
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