When I first began running large-scale programs for a global organization, I quickly found out that multiple time zones created an enormous strain on the team.
If you are in the central US, here’s what your day might look like: a 4 A.M. wake-up call to check in with your Asian team at the end of their day, a 6 A.M. call with Europe to catch them midday, a full day in your office, and probably an 8 P.M. conference call with Asia to make sure their kickoff goes well.
When project staff span multiple time zones, communication takes on entirely different dimensions and requires dedicated and committed personal leadership by the project executive team to keep things synchronized. To assure you have continuity, you need periodic in-depth sessions. At least quarterly, you need to get on a jet to spend a minimum of one week with each group.
Communication becomes the invisible force that feeds the team’s efforts. Without it, schedules slip and visions diverge.
Contrast this with the words written by the authors of the Agile Manifesto who recognized the incredible power of face-to-face communication — so much so that they included it as one of the pillars of agile methodology:
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
What is Lost when Teams are Scattered
There are two main aspects of face-to-face communication that suffer when a team is spread across the world: awareness and informal communication.
Awareness: Much of our awareness comes from visual inputs like body language and the physical interaction of the team. Little pieces of information – how co-workers interact and what their patterns and moods are – doesn’t transmit over phone or video calls. These are things that help us navigate group dynamics and facilitate the results we want to see. When things aren’t working as planned, can you know and use this sort of information to work out a solution? Who goes to lunch together? Who is under stress from outside work events? What is going on outside of the specific work I need to complete – are there other things I might help with? How does the other team interact to solve their problems? Who is sought out from other groups for ideas?
Informal communication: So much is communicated in and around the official topics of the project. Informal communication is the “filler” conversation among team members who are in the same physical space. Who shares my interest in wind surfing or has a big family? How are things progressing in the moment, and do we need to make a small shift today in how we are doing things to prevent a large miss down the road? Does anyone want to go down to the pizza place for lunch today?
This informal communication is very important to the progress of a fast-moving work effort. Experience has shown again and again that serendipitous crossing of knowledge is key in breaking through tough problems. The chances of this happening in teams that don’t interact in the details of life with one another is greatly reduced.
It turns out that guys in garages had the right idea: if you are trying to create growth with minimal resources on tight timelines, getting people in the same physical space – at least the same time zone – is key.
So what if you can’t have all your resources in the same “garage?” Then you’re going to have to put some work and thought into trying to recreate what’s been lost.
Replacing subtle, contextual communication with virtual tools is very hard, and is the subject of lots of discussion among the program management community.
Here are my top three strategies for creating some proximity with a distributed team:
- Invest in a well facilitated face-to-face project kick-off workshop with a good part of the agenda dedicated to socially developing the team.
- Insist that the team is staffed with as many full-time subject matter experts as possible. If an individual is multi-tasking at a remote site, progress will be spotty.
- Rotate major reviews among all the sites, and avoid having all the reviews at headquarters.
The last deserves a sentence or two of explanation. Good reviews are bi-directional learning experiences, and a good deal of the bi-directional learning is seeing the facility of the team, how they interact, and their specific surroundings and relationship to the site as a whole. The second reason this is a good practice is it avoids the “summoned to headquarters” feel, instead of the valued contributor feeling you are trying to create. Lastly, it balances the down time of travel among the team, making sure that the “local” team does not have an unfair advantage.
Having a small number of far-flung “garages” that are connected through these three methods is the next best thing to getting everyone in the same place. If you need a breakthrough, it’s worth a considerable investment to get them together. For the rest of the time, be prepared to make the commitment to the large amounts of travel and phone (or video) calls required – not to mention loss of sleep!
I’d be interested in your advice for dealing with teams spread across multiple sites and geographies. Please drop me a note or Tweet me your thoughts.
Related posts you can benefit from…
