Communication First and Foremost

We are reaching a new era! Remote work is coming strong and as the commodities increase also problems communicating between distributed teams.

Companies are not grounded to a certain location

Companies are not grounded to their office's location as they now play between the whole world's rules, so we need to change the mindset to understand this new paradigm. A great example is giving a job offer to a candidate, if we consider a salary limited to the candidate's location we run the risk of it being declined as he may have received offers from all over the globe, more tempting and better paid.

This concept may induce problems at any organizational level, people will compare themselves and what they do to professionals from all over the world and may think that they are not being offered the same level of benefits or that they just are not being paid enough. So how do you deal with this problem? making them feel part of something awesome, helping them overcome blockers to personal growth and most important of them all, keeping them learning new stuff.

Not everything that shines is gold goes the phrase, and we can apply the same concept between a company and its employees. People do not always search for money! knowledge is one of the greatest values one can provide as I always preach the following: “Knowledge first, money second; The more you know, the more someone is willing to pay you for it“

Coordinating across time zones

Being a distributed first company is not an easy task, managing work synergy across individuals that are not even in the same time zone can result in a bigger challenge than anticipated.

I recommend learning how to work asynchronously, it is just putting the puzzle pieces together, but the challenge is to find which are those pieces. Along with my professional experience, I detected that the most important and also difficult piece is generating a balanced amount of context among the team.

The way I have been doing it over the years is by understanding that communication is key and secondary to none, your team needs to be in the same boat or it will not work.

Second, you need to know your sources of truth, a place where you can check to clear doubts and search for context because it's always up to date. From my experience I found that there are two different kinds:

One represents the reality of each business logic, a great example is the usage of Notion or Confluence as sources of truth, where we detail what we expect, why we are doing what we are doing, requirements, corner cases, etc.
There's also the need for a second type related to workloads and what the team has agreed to do, and is one you already know, the created tickets that the team will complete over the passage of time.

We need two different types because while the first one gives us all the context we may need, we also have the necessity to put a stop at some point and decide when to start the implementation process. This last one details what the team has agreed on doing with the correct amount of context so they can provide enough value and don't be blocked in the process, and we need it so we can continue working on improving and evolving.

Let's think about what happens when having doubts about a certain task, a lot of people would create a comment inside the ticket, leave a message inviting communication over a chat channel, etc. This usually ends in a lot of meaningful chatter, confusion and more doubts, as we can't fully understand the intention of the text. How to fix it? Just sort the order of the elements in a different way:

Ask for a call, talk with each other and adapt in a way that needs are fulfilled on both sides.
Document the results over the related ticket and leave a history that can be tracked for future similar situations.
It's ok to use chat channels for simple subjects but move into a meeting as soon as you see that the conversation is going nowhere.
Meetings are not meant to add context or new information, please update the source of truth and share it as a first choice.
Meetings are not meant to add context or new information, please update the source of truth and share it as a first choice.
Include the related source of truth link inside the tickets, but also try to add all the needed information from it directly into the ticket to leave a definition of what has been agreed at the moment of creation.

There are some other easy ways we improve this mindset

We can start by over-communicating decisions across all geographies, this will result in people understanding what's going on and the whys.

Minimizing the friction in setting up a work environment, having documentation and some sort of guidelines will improve new additions to the team processes of getting to know the way they are expected to work and getting up to the required level to start working.

Clearly define the definition of done, this one relates to the need of having a workload source of truth, what are the acceptance criteria we need to complete to move a task as "done". Also, remember what I said before, a feature needs to have a start and an end of its own in a way that can provide value while being independent.

Using some of the concepts already provided in the previous chapters, for example doing pair programming or code reviews helps distribute knowledge between offices, helps generate a structure between global teams and minimizes the amount of collaboration required.

Creating Rapport

Reaching an accepted level of affinity between distributed teams can prove to be challenging but there are some things we can do to increase our possibilities:

Communicate even minute details until both offices find a healthy groove.
Communicate decisions.
Everyone needs to understand the decision and why it was made.
Don't use emails as they are an easy way of losing information.
Use a content management system, for example, a wiki.
Create channels for individuals and teams to communicate and see updates, another great idea would be to create channels for a certain future and the involved people.
Spend time creating a simple but effective "Getting Started" guide.