This May 2004 article from Harvard Business Review argues that teams that are geographically distributed can be more productive than traditional teams:
Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn’t necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually. The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn’t have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members felt freer to contribute–especially outside their established areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues.
The researchers found three practices that can boost virtual productivity above that of geographically colocated teams:
They exploit diversity
The team can’t just be diverse; it has to make the most of it. Our teams credit their creative breakthroughs to challenging people from different disciplines, cultures, and the like to come up with something better together. They did.
They use pretty simple technology to simulate reality
By today’s standards, what they use is not very complicated. More than 80% of the teams use teleconference calls and shared websites. More than half used IM even when their companies prohibited it. Only a third used video conferencing. Some banned email.
They hold the team together
It takes a lot of communication. Some leaders spent as much as a third of their time just on the phone with team members.
There’s another way of talking about the value of diversity; it’s called the wisdom of crowds, and according to author James Surowiecki, is not about getting everyone together and trying to reach consensus. It’s that one of us, alone, working independently, is smarter than a bunch of us together. One of us is smarter than all of us:
The wisdom of crowds comes not from the consensus decision of the group, but from the aggregation of the ideas/thoughts/decisions of each individual in the group.
At its simplest form, it means that if you take a bunch of people and ask them (as individuals) to answer a question, the average of each of those individual answers will likely be better than if the group works together to come up with a single answer.
Two weeks ago, I joined a virtual team working on a big, hairy, uber-enterprisey system development project. In these two weeks, I’ve seen the wisdom of crowds and the power of virtual teams in action. I know the team members only as voices on a telecon, emails in my inbox, and comments on my Word document, but I’m already feeling hooked in and jazzed by the quality of ideas we come up with. The key is that we don’t develop the ideas in collaboration. We develop them apart and then fire them in the kiln of our conference calls.
You know what it reminds me of? Blogging. The difference between blogging and participating in, say, a discussion forum or other group-centric activity is that the group matters more the individual. The activities revolve around the group rather than orbiting the individual. This follows the ideas Stowe Boyd put forth in his seminal blog post The Individual is the New Group. That, along with Kathy Sierra’s coverage of the wisdom of crowds, should be required reading for anyone pondering starting a blog. But really, you can’t understand it until you do it. I have worked remotely before, but I was the only one remote while the main development group worked together in a typical office environment. I had no idea what it might be like to work in an environment where we were all remote, where we all retained our individuality.
Now I know. I’ll never go back.
6 Comments
This is a subject that’s been on my mind for the last several weeks. Partly because I’m looking for a new contract, partly because I may leave Seattle. In spite of everything you cited above (all of which makes sense to me and I fully believe), I see very few technology companies who actually are implementing virtual teams. Tech companies should be among the most accepting of this way of working, yet from startups to large companies, jobs are almost always listed as “in “. Now, sure, opening it up makes hiring harder and managing more challenging - and if I was a finalist and pushed the issue, some might allow this - but if the tech sector by and large doesn’t do this, why do we expect other sectors will? And if they don’t or won’t, what’s the purpose of all of this collaboration and social technology? If I were a startup, I’d LOVE to work this way - reduced overhead and the ability to recruit anyone, from anywhere? With no relocation expenses? Are you kidding?
I’d like to think we’re merely in a transition and a decade from now this will look different. But that feels like whistling in the dark to me right now.
Rick, I have also seen that most tech companies are resistant to the idea of virtual teams–witness HP’s recent move to cut back on telecommuting for IT staff. Some will agree to it for valued workers who want to move and continue to work for the company. Oracle routinely supported that; I had my first experience of working remotely when I worked for them and moved from California to Virginia. But there wasn’t a thoroughgoing commitment to virtual teams, which seems like part of the key to making it work. Doing one-offs with individual contributors doesn’t achieve the same effect as having everyone work relatively autonomously and independently.
The corporate world is so stuck in old ways of doing things. It’s next to impossible to find part-time work, too, because everything’s oriented around the full-time-with-benefits model. Will it change in the next ten years? I don’t feel all that optimistic either.
I hope you find something like it… of course I’m only two weeks into it, kind of still the honeymoon period, but it’s exhilarating.
The odd thing about the fulltime with benefits model is that I can earn a very nice living if I can bill about 75% of my hours… Nice enough that I can easily cover the $300/month health coverage, and I’m likely less expensive than a fulltime employee. Yet finding that type of gig is not straightforward. More than anything it’s this discontinuity between what people talk about and how they act that makes me doubt Stowe Boyd and others who trumpet the individual as the new group and social technologies as our near-term future. For an edge few, perhaps. But not for most people, not in the next decade. I guess I just need to jump into multi-project consulting with both feet.
Of course, I’d LOVE to be wrong about all of this…
The fulltime with benefits model is screwy. It’s not necessarily best for employees or employers, but we’re largely stuck with it for now. The only reason I can work as a consultant (i.e., independent contractor without benefits) is because my husband has a regular job with health care coverage for our family of five.
I am reading Free Agent Nation right now by Daniel Pink. It was written in 2001. I have to wonder–how much is it just a minority alternative, how feasible is it really that a majority of the workforce could work that way? And how many people would want to? Not everyone wants to work so independently.
I’m glad to hear that Anne likes the virtual team work mode. I’ve had several years of working from home, part of a distributed team. It’s the best. It’s not perfect, but it sure beats the heck out of a daily commute. The things I find that make distributed teams work best are:
1. Strong process and regular schedule. Commitment to doing the small things right (status reports, project plans, regular meetings), all the time.
2. An excellent, friendly, *human* leader. Someone who can project humanity across the wire.
3. Great meeting etiquette. Showing up *on time* to the calls, for one.
4. Clarity on scope and assignments. Tell people they’re really empowered within their scope of work, and the good ones will get it done (the bad ones will bring their issues to the meeting and hope that others decide for them).
Anyway, good luck with the distributed team. It can be great.
In America, the screwed up health care system is one of the key elements that prevents a more diverse pool of people in the hi-tech innovation pools. Once you get a family or you start thinking of having one, you have to nuzzle up to BigCo to get that sweet, sweet insurance. Getting insurance on your own that’s equivilent to “normal” insurance is crazy difficult.
The end result is that only people in their 20’s or that have no care about families are better positioned to take the risks needed to innovate in hi-tech: the primary risk being stepping out of the “what works” world of BigCo into the “what might work” world of small companies.
Yeah, health insurance in the US: frustrates me to no end.