Distributed ≠ Disconnected

It's hard to tell what came first, the egg or the chicken. In the modern business world, did technology create distributed teams, or did distributed teams create the need for technology?

I recently had the pleasure of being part of a debate team at the PMI Conference on teams, and the argument that they had to be collocated to be effective. My position was that in many organisations and teams, you're better off accepting that you have distributed teams and finding ways to evolve your practices to that fact. Part of this requires accepting that your old way of working, not not scale.

I work in a highly distributed and diverse team, so I've been practicing this first hand. Here's some things I've learnt.

1: Psychological safety beats physical proximity everyday.

The specific team I'm working with right now, is a fascinating one. Of the 8 team members, we report to 7 different bosses. And our 'normal' place of work has us spread across 5 locations. Recipe for disaster right? Actually no. We invested early on in being in the same place or same timezone, and spent that time building a lasting relationship. Wherever possible, we broke bread together. I know Sarah has kids, Kellie loves interior decoration, Bernie and his Dad connect over sports, and Emily has a passion for Physical Therapy. Taking a genuine interest in each other, has brought us closer together, despite us being really far apart. It's a foundational element of our team dynamic.

QUESTION: What are your rituals for building trust early on in a team?

2: Seek first to understand. Empathy is hard.

We were planning an offsite recently, which was gong to be a great chance for us to reflect on the year gone, and plan for the year ahead. We booked a week together in Sydney to spike our activity, and it was going to be our first time all together for over a year. Then I opened my ears and listened. The compromises that various people we're going to have to make to get to Sydney, just wasn't going to work. The potential negative impact on family or personal life, couldn't be netted off against an increase in velocity for our work. So we went with Plan B. The need for meeting didn't go away, so we'd have to change how we did it. I could have insisted. People could have kept quiet and gone along with it. Speaking up was brave. Listening was hard. Planning around the constraint was a nightmare!

QUESTION: How do you listen out for signals from your team?

3: Practices first. Make it work.

We set ourselves a very clear target of "we WILL make this work". We knew we'd have little failures along the way, but we had a clear objective.

The very first challenge that we took on, was our practices. Between us, we'd run or been part of hundreds of offsites or spikes, so it would have been easy to go to the treasure chest of "this worked last time" and copy, cut and paste. But the environment was different, so we had to adopt our practices.

Some things that we tried that worked well:

• We all connected live in the Aussie morning and US afternoon. We had 2 solid hours together, and that was our sparring time. High intensity and vocal discussion.
• The rest of our days (while half the team was asleep) was deep work, where we completed our tasks, research, actions etc.
• We used Confluence to share documents in advance. The principle we worked off, was that everyone consumed information in their own time, and commented/edited where applicable, and we used our time together for valuable debate and discussion. There was no room for updates or status. That could be read before.
• Everyone dialled in. If one person is remote, you're all remote. The early Australia start and keepings things equitable, meant we all dialled in. It meant no one party dominated the conversation, and we didn't have 80% of the chat happening live in a room whilst everyone on the video played Candy Crush.

QUESTION: What practices are default to your style, that might be optimised for co-located teams, and not distributed teams?

4: Tools are an enabler, not the solution.

A fool with a tool, is still a fool. So once you've got your people and practices right, that is the time to look at tooling to compliment the environment you're in. Obviously in Atlassian, we use Atlassian tools, but you can use whatever works for you.

We used Trello for a great live discussion on Roles and Responsibilities, where we could all contribute at once. And our equivalent of a whiteboard for the week, was Confluence Collaborative Editing.

It was great to have a "3, 2, 1...go" and see everyone live in the same document, adding content and evolving a product in synchrony.

No emailing version 14.4_Final_Dom_DRAFT word documents, and no multiple versions of the truth. Just all team members seeing the same information at the same time, and mixing rich conversation with rich content.

QUESTION: What is your "go to" tool for connecting with your distributed team mates?

NB: We ran several plays from the Atlassian Team Playbook as part of our offsite, and a Health Monitor on the team. Both provided great context and focus for us to invest in the most impactful areas.

https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook