No your not. We’re building products with remote teams and I’ve to tell you compared to co-located teams it’s just pure hell. My conclusion is: either everybody is remote or the team needs to be co-located entirely. The middle ground results in entrenched warfare between the 2+ parts of the team.
> either everybody is remote or the team needs to be co-located entirely. The middle ground results in entrenched warfare between the 2+ parts of the team.
Are you sure? I’ve worked remote and worked not remote, and trench warfare between team factions can happen in both situations. It’s leadership and culture issues that leads to that kind of collaboration breakdown, and can happen even with locally collocated teams. In a large company many of your collaborators are going to be in other cities anyway.
I agree it can happen in both cases. I think the likelihood is just way greater and efforts to build a strong team thus way higher in the remote situation.
Having been remote to a much larger team (at Google) in the past, I know where you're coming from, but I'd also like to point out that this is a question of balance and communication structure. In my case the team was about 20 people, and myself and another guy were remote, but in the same time zone. The co-located team made no effort whatsoever to disseminate information or seek my input. As a result, I sometimes had to undo or re-work other people's changes because they _thought_ they understood the gnarlier bits of the system, but they really didn't. As you can imagine, sometimes this led to confrontation. I lasted about a year and a half, but I was extremely productive during that time, communication notwithstanding, mostly thanks to the constant communication with my TL.
The point I would like to make is, in that team of 20 not sharing information and not seeking input was a problem, even though people sat right next to each other. And that problem could have been solved very easily by putting most of the decision making into one pagers, Google Docs and bug tracker, as well well as by defining the goals more clearly.
That is a cultural problem which remote team members did not create, but merely magnified. It existed before we joined and after we left. It resulted in a project which you need to have a PhD in computer science to figure out how to use, and as a result few teams inside Google use it.
Which is a long-winded way of suggesting, that if introducing remote workers shows some cracks in your team structure, perhaps there's a deeper reason why, and things aren't 100% ideal to begin with.
I've had that experience when there are two teams each colocated but remote from each other. They tended to build their own culture and that quickly becomes us and them. I've had great results when there was one hub and a lot of individuals working from home. We shared a culture. My guess is that an entirely remote team would work well too.
Good question. My feeling is that distance creates emotional separation and vice versa. Maybe because remote communication is abstract and misunderstood quickly.
BTW: The best I’ve read about this so far is: “The Culture Code”
