It’s a common situation for a growing startup — your company can’t afford an office, or it opens a second office, perhaps recruits a sales presence in a new market, or relocates its tech development, and suddenly you have a team spread across cities, or even countries.
Research by AON, the global risk management and human resources consulting firm, found that virtual teams can be significantly more productive than traditional teams; productivity can increase by as much as 40 percent, depending on the industry. Employee retention can also be much higher, sometimes reaching 50 percent. But there can be challenges too — how do you manage a team separated by geography?
Working virtually
“Remote teams can be hard, but it bubbles down to communications,” says Matt Allen, the Bowral-based Director and CTO at DevLogic. “Some people do not like to tell you what’s going on. You have to enforce that or you’ll get nasty surprises.”
One way to manage remote teams, is to clearly distinguish the responsibilities of the team. Some companies have one office dedicated to development, with another office to sales. Australian crowd-funding platform Pozible has offices in Sydney and Melbourne. Alan Crabbe is based in Sydney, while co-founder Rick Chen is based in Melbourne.
“Rick and I have split the roles and responsibilities within the the business — and similarly the teams in Melb have different responsibilities compared to Sydney,” says Crabbe. “There is overlap when it comes to marketing tasks, meetings and workshops but each office is responsible for their own measures.”
For Allen the choice to work virtually is a lifestyle one. He doesn’t have any local customers, and travels for client or team meetings. He’ll usually spend a day or two in Sydney each week.
“We like being regional. We used to be rural, on 75 acres with 8km of dirt road between us and bitumen. That was hard.”
“I have gathered up all the geeks I could find and we share an office in Moss Vale. It’s an a great old building from 1891 and it’s recently been renovated. Rent is super cheap, so that’s nice.”
U.K. company BT was one of the first major corporations to establish a work-from-home program. While attempting to cut costs in the late 1990s, the company established an initiative to encourage more than 20,000 of its workers to work from home. This move had significant productivity benefits; BT has saved more than £135 million ($AUD207 million) in travel expenses and £103 million ($AUD158 million) in productivity gains since making the change. The company also found staff working virtually took 63% less sick leave.
Tools and techniques
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) argues that virtual teams can outperform traditional co-located teams, but only if they are well-managed. It referenced research by the MITSloan Business Review which looked at 80 different software teams from 28 locations globally. The benefits of a virtual team are clear: expertise can be sourced from anywhere, work can happen around the clock, and you’ll likely have a more diverse team. But there are also some challenges. HBR argues that in order to be productive, a virtual team requires strong processes, efficient communication channels, and a conscious effort to limit conflict to tasks.
Both Allen and Crabbe say working remotely can have productivity benefits, as long as you’re well organised.
“We call it ‘going dark’,” says Allen. “Switch everything off and get work done. I do it regularly when I’m really busy.” Allen is a fan of the Pomodoro technique (pdf e-book here), where you use a timer to break work into 25-minute increments. It’s aimed at removing distractions and improving your focus, and is popular among some software developers.
The Pozible team uses the free task-management tool Asana to assign tasks. Other than that, the team uses Skype for conference calls. There are some things that need be done face-to-face — Crabbe says the team try to meet bi-monthly for company strategy workshops.
“The biggest challenge is team discussion around strategy and company-wide objectives. We find that company strategy discussion or even brainstorming is not easy facilitated remotely so we try to bring the team together for these purposes.”
Allen uses Atlassian’s HipChat group chat and IM tool for daily communications. He finds a daily text ‘standup’ works well, with every team member posting; what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today, and any blockers they’re facing. He’s a fan of Sprint.ly for project management.
But it can still be difficult: “Being present is hard,” he says. “If you’re waiting on feedback on an issue that’s holding you up, not knowing if someone is at their laptop can be annoying.”
The FLT team work remotely too — Zach and Phil in Surry Hills, Alan in Newport, Sue and Kirsty in Wamberal. Sometimes, it’s the best of times, sometimes… not so much. How do you and your team manage working remotely? What are the biggest challenges you face, and what are the rewards you gain for not being in the same office? Let us know…