In a modern world businesses are getting more and more global. So are teams. In order to succeed, both enterprises and small companies must operate globally. Not only it is beneficial for acquiring new markets, but also to get an access to the new talent pool.
In this post we will try to do an analysis to understand pros and cons of a distributed organizational structure. I've been working in a global distributed environment for almost 5 years as of now and gained some insights on it, so let's start.
What's good about distributed teams?
- The first one that comes into my mind is coverage. When working globally you kind of getting things like 24H operation hours "for free". Which is good as it enables you with various perks, such as handling maintenance tasks gracefully or an ability to provide a timely support for your customers.
- Another thing is an access to the global workforce. If you are able to operate efficiently in a distributed environment, finding a new talent gets much easier as pool to select from is getting larger. Look at major technology companies... They do not even bother to stop hiring and never close their positions as finding talent is hard even at their scale.
- Also, diversity plays a huge role here. Having global team will inevitably broad company perspectives and help with building a more global vision. Might also help in understanding local markets in some situations.
- Surprisingly, distributed teams and remote office culture are working better in a fast changing global world too. Take the 2020 COVID-19(Coronavirus) outbreak for instance. Large office spaces are hugely affected worldwide as they have to impose travel policies, as well as take care of an office environment(keep it clean and healthy). Conferences getting cancelled, internal events are cancelled or indefinitely postponed. Such situations are much easier to manage when your team is distributed as risks are much lower.
So, where is a grain of salt?
On practice, though, running a distributed team/company comes with a price. This is a huge topic, but let's try to get the gist of it and I will likely to talk about it in my further posts.
- When working in a distributed environment, company culture should get the topmost priority. And I think a lot of companies get it wrong. There should be clear guidelines on communication principles, engineering principles, and most importantly, the way information gets stored should be designed properly. Let's take an example. In a real life, it is unrealistic to expect that all related people will be able to attend a particular meeting, if your team is distributed. And if you truly want to be distributed, you have to acknowledge that. So, instead of blaming people for missing meetings you better should focus on making sure that the person, who was not in a meeting is able to retrieve all the important bits, that we discussed. I can even put it that way: if you want to work in a distributed environment, you will likely have to become a little bit more formal in some processes and log information as much as possible, even when it is redundant
- Managing organizational dependencies will be more painful - try to keep your distributed work units(people/teams) as independent as possible. In general, this is also true for regular offices, but in single office building you always have other ways to bring people in sync than online meetings, wiki pages and chats - you can simply standup and talk to people. And you simply do not have this luxury in a distributed environment. Check out the last section of this one, where I am talking about cross team dependencies and how it might affect your business
- Another serious aspect is a remote communication culture and it is a massive issue. I will likely cover it in a separate post, but just think about it... For thousands of years people were developing communication skills (verbal and non-verbal) and finally became pretty good at it. And yet, the modern distributed work environment makes lots of these skills literally useless as you often only have text(or just voice) to express your ideas. I strongly believe that a writing ability is extremely crucial in a modern work environment(remember the point about logging everything)
- Last but not least are feelings of inclusion and engagement. And this is really hard thing to do. For instance I have some peers, who I have successfully completed some projects with, but never saw in person! Its neither good nor bad, just keep in mind that it is very different from the conventional work culture and you will have to adapt. The positive side of such a situation that I eventually became more pragmatic when shaping up my mind about people at work. It's just like you do not have enough data to make decisions based on the human personalities, so the only source at your disposal is a quality of work, produced by the individual. Again, not like it is good or bad, but it is very different from classic approach.
Conclusion
In my opinion, the key to the success of the distributed organizations is an efficient information exchange as well as its availability to your employees. I think it is a true foundation for rest of the building blocks. Not like I consider rest of bullet points to be less crucial, but if you do not have a solid, available and up to date data lake, it will be very hard to bring people together. Yet harder would be to let them working efficiently as people will have to rediscover same things again and again.
As usual, if you want to discuss these ideas, tag me and this post on social media and let's chat!