remotely effectively definitely depends on the people you are working
with.
For example, the group that I am working with part time for the last 6
months or so work very well together, remotely. We have a guys in
Canada, Colorado Springs, Texas, Syracuse, NY, Reading, England and me
in San Diego, CA. We work on Campfire (Propane) all day long. I
personally, haven't even met any of the guys yet and only talked to
the owner of the business once on the phone and that was to get an
assignment that needed immediate attention. They've all been working
well together, best I can see, for the past couple of years without
any issue of communication, even across time zones. Campfire/Propane
has made that possible, in my opinion. Since it saves all
interactions you can be in a completely different time zone, ask a
question on there and expect to get an answer when the person is who
knows the answer is online.
So to say generally it doesn't work isn't true. "It depends" is
really the right answer. And it's certainly not for everyone. But it
works for me and it works for the team that I am currently working
with.
And I would love to do it full time, but I am working on that angle.
Cheers,
Mark
On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Adam Martin <adam.m.s.martin@gmail.com> wrote:
> Good points, but IME 90% of the client concern is this one:
>
> 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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