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Co-located teams versus Remote teams, Key Considerations by Giff Constable Content as Culture, by Jotto

Hong Lam February 11,2022

Most open-source projects are remote-first, and this experience has encouraged many startups to use it. Agile teams typically rely on intensive person-to-person communication, both within the team and with the customer. Remote team members miss out on these face-time encounters, and their understanding consequently suffers. Each of these models has pros and cons, and your choice will depend on context.

Of all the ways remote work can be detrimental to a company, culture is most at risk when distributed work isn’t done well. Co-located teams tend to establish and maintain a culture naturally, with a little help from leadership. Finally, you should remember that communication dynamics are very different than when everyone was in the office. People simply don’t listen and learn online the way they do in person. This makes the practice of over-communicating and repeating critical. It may seem overbearing and unnecessary, but it’s the only way to make sure there are fewer misunderstandings.

How to Have More Effective Meetings

If it is not immediately possible I encourage you to work towards it. A key recommendation arising from the findings is that managers should not only consider co-locating team members with each other. They should also investigate the possibility of colocation with other wider teams in an open-plan environment. Thus contributing to the feeling of connectivity and involvement that is shared within the environment. For the first couple of sprints, we did our demos the regular way. Usually there were another 4 or 5 folks attending the demo and a couple that couldn’t make it.

Once the pandemic hit, many of those companies quickly pivoted to using the tools as their go-to work-from-home enablers. Weekly video updates that keep the team informed about new feature releases, birthdays, and other company-wide news. Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love Teams using Help Scout are set up in minutes, twice as productive, and save up to 80% in annual support costs. Most industries no longer accept working under one roof as a given, so if you’re ready to consider a distributed team, our staff augmentation guide is a great crash course in this brave new world. Most of your team is together, but a handful of outliers work remotely, possibly on specialized projects.

For teams to learn to be effective, there typically needs to be a degree of vulnerability and learning trust; a safe place is needed for that. Private groups allowed the team a place to put anything they wanted apart from the rest of the site. While physical conversations were still the way the team solved problems, they also started using G+ posts as a way to gather questions and answers together, like a FAQ.

Be open and transparent about your “why” and involve the employees in the decision-making process, motivating and strengthening the engagement. However, a good team space doesn’t automatically mean you have a high-performing team. It only provides opportunities for open communication, trust, and knowledge sharing. The downside of simple face-to-face communication and a team space is that working with deep concentration can sometimes be challenging due to interruptions and distractions. To avoid this negative outcome of a team space, you should, on the one hand, offer explicit spaces for concentrated work and, on the other hand, commit within the team to use these explicit spaces for deep work.

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Working remotely, if I’m using Facetime and you’re using Google Meet, we have a problem. In March of 2020 they gave each employee a $500 allowance to purchase office equipment and then repeated this in August of 2020. The Release Train Engineer I was coaching went https://globalcloudteam.com/ from sitting on a bar stool at the kitchen counter to a sit /stand desk with an external monitor and audio. The difference in how they felt at the end of the day was palpable. Thus, the individual team member needs a specific home space where they can work.

By 2015, job-posting platforms reported an increase of 36% from companies looking for distributed agile teams to fulfill their positions. This number is predicted to grow by up to 50% in the nearest future. InVision, GitLab, HippoEducation – are examples of organizations that considered remote teams as an excellent decision for performing their remote software development in Agile. These companies claim that being fully-virtual brings them the same level of success and productivity as if they had fully-collocated teams. With the vibrant approaches to managing remote teams, they discovered that distributed teams aligned with Agile principles bring the best results.

How Citizen Developers Can Transform Your Company

When we go into the office, we have ergonomic chairs, sit/stand workstations, and broadband internet access. At home we have a sagging couch, our lap, and bad DSL internet. So we asked you this week, is co-location actually better for product development? When we asked this we were worried that this would be a landslide, and in our poll 82% did think that co-location is better.

In this article I shared a small selection of the overwhelming evidence that shows how much more effective the colocation of a team is. It is my recommendation to seek collocation of a team wherever possible. Having the team together also helps a lot with the team’s growth in mastery.

• Therefore, it’s essential to consider up-to-date agile team models which are devised specifically for product companies.
• All of these models have specific requirements that you need to consider.
• Your ability to make an informed decision between co-located, fully remote, or a hybrid workforce model depends on reliable data.
• If you are working in any kind of larger release Cadence, like SAFe Product Increments, it is absolutely critical to bring all the teams together for these events.
• Fostering a sustainable work pace needs to be weighed as your organization settles on whether to go fully remote, colocated, or hybrid.
• Effective remote communication when the parties aren’t visible to each other is difficult, requiring soft skills as well as technical acumen.
• The software development process can be handled by collocated (in-house) or distributed .

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. With organizations going global, distributed teams are becoming the norm.

Misunderstandings can happen with more frequency in workplace setups where face-to-face communication isn’t the norm. And at least at first, it’s tricky to identify the moment where it’d really be best to call time out; the instinct is to react and reply, only that makes the problem worse. Problems get blown out of proportion because build team culture we think so much faster than we type. It also can provide an enhanced quality of life for your workers. The ability to attend a child’s afternoon music recital or soccer playoff is invaluable and will likely only increase team loyalty. Benefits like this cut across all genders and cultures and can help diversify your staff.

How to achieve better team performance through data-driven standups

Tonic Health is a product tech company from the US that ventured to enter the Ukrainian labor market to build a team of developers. Having no recruitment providers, the company faced the challenge of hiring senior engineers… People.ai develops the AI platform for sales teams, which requires rare engineering skills. The startup decided to hire IT talents with a special technology stack in Eastern Europe and started to work with several providers at once that resulted in…

He cites the ability to interact with another to co-create, particularly at whiteboards, that sounded very much like what we expect from agile teams. You select team leaders/managers for their ability to trust, respect and empower others. Thus, ‘good’ management is more important in dispersed teams than co-located ones. One company that I visited in Uruguay allowed their employees to work remotely whenever they wanted.

Communication

Occasionally, people new to remote working find out that it doesn’t suit them. They feel alone; they get cabin fever (especially when they’re in a different time zone than their team), and they realize it’s just not for them and that they prefer going into a traditional office. The general debate on co-location reminds me of past debates about delivery process, programming language selection, stack benefits, and so on. Scrum, extreme programming , dual-track, kanban—they’re all frameworks that help teams get work done. Processes and working models don’t dictate success or effectiveness. This paper presents quantitative research based on computer logged data sets tracking the behaviour of individuals in multiple virtual, semi-virtual and co-located teams.

Quick wins to create an inclusive remote organization

If the number of people is higher than ten, the team’s time to invest in communication is much more than the outcome of adding more people to the team. Since the physical distances between team members are very short, communication can flow easily. Share the ideas you learn with your peers and the larger organization. If companies struggle to make this new flexibility in work successful, they will quickly move back to their old ways of doing things. As an engineering leader, there is a massive opportunity to find new ways for your team to be effective in this new world of work.

But note they likely don’t affect all functions of an organization at all times. Once you have this feedback you can begin to make data-driven decisions on the workplace model and norms for your organization. Perhaps more importantly, you will also have an established baseline and mechanism to inspect and adapt that model and those norms going forward. We’ve created this guide so that you can effectively inspect and adapt your organizational concept of a workplace. To better align your rules and norms with your vision and purpose.

It is easier to keep everyone pointed in the same direction (i.e. understanding the why, not just the what, behind your business). This model requires less duplication of management, is more resilient to leadership change. Strong visions and clear goals are essential to succeed as a team, regardless of whether the team works remotely, at one location, or somewhere in between.

This means that each participant controls whatever video they want to send to the rest of the group. They can show a running app, a video they recorded, or step the audience through a regular demo from their browser. Second, the hangout creator acts as Master-­‐of-­‐Ceremonies, switching from participant to participant to control what is being shown. They are able to mute mics, cut in for some live commentary while something is getting set up, or moderate online chat.

Ultimately, we all want to do business with people we know and trust. 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.

This is also common in my experience and pushes everyone to improve, especially with maintaining a well-organized backlog of tasks for these teams. The information in the rest of this article will explain how to do that. The task board is a widely used tool which helps to organize workflow and boost the performance of co-located teams. With the help of a task board, it’s possible to identify the objectives, goals, accountabilities, timelines, and materials of the software development project. Moreover, it’s easier to implement progress tracking and address emerging issues. The tech industry has consistently demonstrated creativity and innovation in how work is structured.

During the lifecycle of a large, distributed project, team members are exposed to many different situations. Being aware of cultural differences can help them understand the deeper meanings in some of their communications. Maintaining relatively even workloads across the team is also an important part of keeping the team rolling. If someone is burning out because of an unrealistically high workload, move some tasks to another developer if possible.

The leader also must understand that co-location alone is not the key to success. It is more about taking advantage of the physical proximity! But that means the team needs to have time to benefit from it, for example, time for creative and thinking together meetings, team building, and chats at the coffee machine. Alcor’s recruitment solution allows western IT companies to expand their business capabilities by choosing either the distributed or co-located team model. Thanks to our fast and effective recruitment, our clients get a dedicated team of developers from Eastern Europe and retain full control over their expenses and team management.