 I think we're going to go ahead and get rolling here. I'm sure people are still coming in from lunch, but we'll go ahead and get started. So the session is remotely virtual, which is about remote teams or virtual teams. So if that's not what you thought you were coming to, you can leave if you want to. I'm Karen Stevenson, and let's go ahead and talk about this. I have been involved with Drupal for about seven years. I am the co-maintainer of CCK and maintainer of date and calendar, and a bunch of other things like that. So that's how I got connected to Drupal. I work for Lullabot Consulting. We're a big Drupal shop. We do a lot of training. We do a lot of consulting, and we do a lot of web development work, friend-in-the-back-end design and everything else, and lots of big sites that we've worked on, Martha Stewart and Grammys.com and WWE and lots of others as well. This man right here is my great-grandfather. He's the first cat herder in our family. Hurting cats. Don't let anybody tell you it's easy. Anybody can hurt cattle holding together 10,000 half-wild short hairs, but that's another thing altogether. Being a cat herder is probably about the toughest thing I think I've ever done. I got this one this morning right here, and if you look at his face, it's just ripped to shreds, you know? You see the movies yet, you hear the stories. It's, I'm living a dream. Not everyone can do what we do. I wouldn't do nothing else. It ain't an easy job, but when you bring a herd into town and you ain't lost to one of them, I ain't a feeling like it in the world. I love that commercial. Hurting cats. So does managing a remote team feel a little bit like hurting cats? Yes, it does. So let's start. People throw around the terms virtual and remote kind of interchangeably, but they're really not the same thing. So let's talk about terminology for just a second. So virtual means something that doesn't really exist, right? Something that's sort of simulating or pretending to be something else. And remote means things that are far away. Something that's not close. So for instance, Drupal is, the Drupal community is a virtual team. Drupal is not a company that you can join. You can't, you can't get hired at Drupal. You can't get fired by Drupal. You decide to be a part of it. And Drupal can't do anything about it more or less. So that's a virtual team. And we obviously have remote members on this team. They're international. It's all over the world. I used to, when people asked what I did, I used to say I am a remote employee on a virtual company. But that's not actually true, because Little Bud is not really a virtual company. It's a real company. But we do have remote employees. In fact, that's all we have is remote employees. So it's kind of unusual in the sense that we don't really have anybody who's not remote. Unlike a lot of teams where remote is kind of the exception, at Little Bud, remote is what everybody is. And then Little Bud in turn participates in virtual project teams with lots of other people. So we work with a client and we end up with a project team that is partly comprised of our Lullabot people and partly comprised of people from the client that we're working with. And in some cases, another vendor is involved. In some cases, there are multiple departments from the client or whatever. So we end up on a lot of these virtual teams. So again, that's a team of people that's come together for a purpose. But that's where the virtual comes in. And it has remote members. So we've got a lot of kind of variations of all of this. So who exactly is remote? Well, the obvious answer is you've got an in-house team and you've got remote contractors. So a company might have remote contractors that they bring in to do certain things like work on a website. You can have a company that has remote employees. There are individual employees in the company that work from home or work from someplace that's not the same place that everybody else works with. You can have remote offices. And remote offices are interesting because people a lot of times don't think about remote offices when they talk about remote employees. But a remote office is sort of in the same boat as a remote employee. A lot of times, they're kind of the forgotten stepchild that kind of is out of the loop and doesn't know what's going on at the mothership. And I would say that it even goes a little farther than that because if you've got people who are working while they're traveling, you've got people who are temporarily remote and they need to be able to function and do their job, but they're not connected. They don't have the connection. You can have people that are working from home during emergencies and that could be either the emergency of the employee. You know, my kid is sick and I don't have a babysitter. I'm going to have to work from home today. We've had a blizzard and I can't get to work, or it could be something's happened at work and work isn't there. And I've got to work from home. And you can have open source and joint venture projects which is kind of where Drupal falls in, right, that you've got this virtual community of people that's working together on a mutual project. And I would actually say that you can even take it a step further there's research now that says that even, you've got companies where people are working in different buildings and those people may be somewhat remote from each other. There's actually research that says teams that have members in the same building but just on different floors actually have some of the same kinds of problems that distributed teams across the country have because if you're not there, if you're not right in front of everybody, that's a little different. So many teams have remote elements, probably more teams than anybody really realizes because if somebody says, you know, we don't have remote in our company, most likely you have one of these things. The only people that really, only companies that really don't have any remote employees at all would be a very small company where everybody is physically in the same location and you never work with anybody else. And that's probably not that many. So if you go back to kind of the traditional idea of, you know, remote means people are working from home they can work from wherever they are, the benefits are obvious, right? You've got access to the best talent wherever that talent may be. It gives you a wider pool of employees. Your employees have more of a global perspective. It's not just this narrow little group of people that work right where you do. They may be more productive and more available because they're not commuting, they're not wasting their time doing that kind of thing. And they may be less expensive because you don't have to pay for a desk in an office building. They're working from home. So there's a lot of benefits. What's coming into play more and more is employers are beginning to realize that having the ability for people to work remotely is actually kind of business interruption insurance. A client that I work with, you know, the Hurricane Sandy. How many businesses were unable to work in New York City after Hurricane Sandy? And those that were already set up with the capability of allowing people to work remotely were able to continue to do business as normal even though their offices were actually shut down. So it turned out to be kind of business interruption insurance. So there's some employers that don't embrace this idea of remote employees. There's been a lot of discussion about what does this mean that Yahoo said we don't want people working from home. And I don't think personally, I don't see that as any kind of like a smear on the idea of working remotely. I think Yahoo is just a special case. They've got their own reasons for doing what they do and wanting to do what they want to do. I don't think in any way, shape, or form, it means that remote work is going away or it's not important or there's a new trend coming or anything like that. It's just their particular situation. There's a lot of things that employees love about it. You've got a flexible schedule. You've got the ability to do some work-life balance. You don't have commuting. You've got fewer interruptions. Those things are great. But it comes with responsibility. So you can't just be a remote employee and just say, you know, I'm going to do whatever I want to do. You have some responsibilities that come with it. So I've come up with like my five commandments for team members. There's probably more than five, but five seems like a nice number. So you will spend much time on the phone. One of the things we tell people when they come to work for Lullabot for the first time, if they haven't been, especially if they haven't worked remotely before, is be sure you get yourself a new phone plan because you are going to be on the phone a lot. And I think almost everybody doesn't believe that enough and ends up with like a $500 or $1,000 phone bill the first month that they're working and then they're going, oh my God, you really meant it. Yeah, yeah, we really mean it. You're going to be on the phone a lot. You have to be visible and accessible. You cannot just drop into a black hole and disappear. That won't work. And in fact, when we have people like that, and sometimes this happens, you get somebody on a remote team who just doesn't get. How do you work remotely? And they do just sort of disappear during the day and maybe throw some code over the wall every once in a while. It doesn't work. You can't function that way. Part of the agreement for somebody to be in a remote employee is they have to understand that you have responsibilities. And you can't disappear without explanation. You can disappear. Everybody can't always be visible everywhere, but you've got to let people know what's going on. You must over-communicate. And that is everybody. That is management has to over-communicate and employees have to over-communicate. And you can't do too much of that. You have to excessively communicate. And there is no way to do this successfully without understanding how to use the virtual tools. So if you don't know or you don't want to learn how to use virtual tools, people in this room probably don't have any problem with that at all, but you do have teams where there are people who are not comfortable with virtual tools and that can be a real problem. I want to reiterate commandment number one. You will spend a lot of time on the phone. Now there are some potential problems that come with remote workers. Isolation. People are not in a group of people. They may not feel like they belong. They may feel like they're kind of cut off from everyone else. It may be hard for people who are working remotely to feel a sense of rapport with the rest of the team. It's nice to work remotely to have that work-family balance, but the work-family balance can kind of go the other way, because you can have them colliding into each other and you can't separate them enough. That can turn into a problem. Remote employees can have trouble seeing the big picture. You know, I'm just me sitting here at home doing my little piece of the work and I don't understand all the other work that's going on and I don't know where my little piece fits into the big picture and that can be a problem. And I lose that casual contact that you get when you're all physically in the same building. So we just don't have it. But we can work around all these things. So one of the things that we have to do is we have to have the right infrastructure in place. So these are just some quotes from, I've got some quotes scattered through here from people that are working on virtual teams that kind of said, you know, what works and what doesn't work on our virtual team, what makes it successful or not. And one of them is virtual teams are forced to be better and follow clear procedures. And that is really true. You cannot assume anything. What we find is you need to have a team identity and a lot of times you need to have some sort of an intranet or, you know, a point of central contact for the remote team or for the whole team. Right, both the remote and the local ones. You want to have an online team directory with photos of each person and contact information. If you are not in the same room with these people, you want to see their faces. You want to know what they look like. When you do have a chance to meet them in real life, you don't want them to be strangers. You want to feel like you know who these people are. You should treat adding a person to a virtual team in the same way that you treat adding a new employee to a company. They need that same kind of orientation and attention. I would say that one of the things that Drupal has been accused of having problems with is new people approaching the Drupal community and feeling like they don't belong and nobody wants them and nobody wants to hear what I have to say, that kind of thing. It's that same kind of, you know, that's that sense that this new person who's trying to join this virtual team doesn't feel welcome. It doesn't feel like they're a part of something and that's important. Each team members have an understanding of what the others are doing and how each person fits in with the rest of the group. And again, it's easy to miss this. It's easy for this not to happen, but it's really important. Documentation and data sharing is vital. You know, this is all kind of a lot of the same thing. We need to know what's going on. We have to have ways of communicating with each other. And so we kind of have, like at Lullabot, we have, I'd say, like five kind of big buckets of things that build the infrastructure that I think are important to a lot of teams. So first of all, you need some sort of a team internet. You need a central point of contact and that should have a directory on it so you know who all the team members are. You need a way to share files. You're going to have to have a way to get files back and forth. You need some way of calendaring and keeping track of events and that kind of thing. You probably need a time tracking. Not every team needs time tracking, but I would say that maybe more of them need it than realize it. And then you need lots of communication channels. You don't need just one communication channel. You need multiple communication channels. So for instance, our Lullabot Internet is super simple Drupal site, right? Nothing really fancy. We've got a place where we've got client information and documentation. We've got a place where we've got our team directory. We can bookmark. We've got an ability to bookmark. That's just flags. This is just a super, super easy Drupal site. And then blogging about things like birthdays and benefits and company news and all that kind of thing. We've used OpenATrium in the past. It wasn't a particularly good match for exactly what we were trying to do. So we aren't using it right now, but that's another alternative. There's a lot of companies that use things like Basecamp for this purpose. There's a lot of tools out there. It doesn't really matter what you use. The point is that you need something. And then how are you going to manage files? We're using Dropbox. And I think Dropbox is mostly pretty good. It's not a perfect solution either. I don't know if there is a perfect solution for sharing files, but Dropbox is working pretty well for us. I think what you need for file sharing that's important is you need a way to say we've got some files that need to be kept private and we've got other files that we need to share with people. So we need a way that that can happen. If a client needs a file, how can you get that file to them? And at the same time, you've got private files and you want your private files to stay private. You probably want to have some way of doing some sort of hierarchical organization of your files. Dropbox gives you that. Some people just put files into something like Basecamp. And I don't know if you can do a hierarchical organization. The ones I've seen didn't, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a way to do it. Cross-platform accessibility is really important. Like Dropbox, I can get to from any machine that I'm on. It's got an iPhone app. It's got an Android app. It's got lots of different ways that I can get to my files. And I've got some revision history. So all those things are really important. And then you could say like GitHub would be, you know, or another way is GitHub for your code repository. You need a calendaring system. Now, we use Google Calendar. And Google Calendar is pretty powerful. And one of the things that's nice about Google Calendar is you can combine multiple calendars into the same one. So when you see the two different colors here, this is an example of somebody that's got a couple of different calendars. And so what we do, for instance, at Lullabot, is we've got a calendar that is our regular, you know, everybody's got their regular calendar. And then we've got a calendar that keeps track of who's out of the office. So we've got an OOO calendar. And I can bring the OOO calendar into my thing. And I can see that, oh, yeah, so-and-so is out today. I'm not going to find him. He's out today. We've got a conference call calendar. So we've got another calendar where we keep track of all the conference calls. Who's using what conference call lines? You could do a calendar for meeting rooms, which doesn't apply in our situation, but somebody might find something like that useful. So you can have lots of different calendars that are used for different purposes. And then everybody can bring them into their own calendars and see that information. Very handy. Time tracking. I told-I said-I mentioned the idea that not everybody thinks that they need to track time or wants to track time. We're currently using something called Let's Freckle, which is an online tracking system. I like it really well. Periodically we have debates about whether it's the right answer or whether there's a better way to track time and then we go look at other ways to track time and then a lot of times we end up back here again. But we do-we do from time to time kind of revisit this question of what's the best way to track time. But you can put projects in here. When I started at Lullabot a long time ago, way back when it was, we didn't track time. We actually-the only time we tracked time is if we were billing time. So if you were working on a project where you weren't billing time and materials, nobody tracked time. And we found out over time, we found out that it's actually useful to track time for everything, even if it's not a billing situation, even if there's not a billing question. So what we've got is we've got buckets for things like internal time, and therefore working on the company website. And you can keep track of how much time are people spending on these kinds of things. The tough part about that is getting people to actually do it, right? So you really have to keep up with those kinds of things. You have to get into the habit of tracking time and it's really useful when you're at home to know what it is you are spending your time on. So there's basically two ways to do it. You can use some sort of a timer where you're just constantly keeping track of what you're doing and then you click, you know, done and you post it. Or you do something where you kind of catch up at the end of the day. I tend to do the second because I do so much switching back and forth between things that I don't find that the timer works. You can wait to the end of the week or the month, but you will odds have forgotten what you actually did do. And like I said, the important thing is that we're finding that this is kind of transcends billing. It's really just time management. This is keeping track of how you're spending your time and not just for management but for the employee as well. So everybody knows, you know, where's my time going? But again, trying to get people to actually do it sometimes requires some gentle reminders. So we've come up with a freckle fairy and if you don't post your time, you get an email from the freckle fairy. And if she has to, she might post it in a public place where you're going to be shamed. So people are getting pretty good about now posting their arms, their hours now. So we've got, I'm quoting various people because we've had conversations about what are suggestions about working at home and one of them that Seth came up with is track your time. You want to know that you're spending enough time, but you also want to know that you're not spending too much time. Maybe if you're spending too much time on something, maybe you're spending your wheels, maybe you should be asking for help. Maybe there's a problem. But the only way to know how you're spending your time is to track it. Another thing that we use is called Yammer. And Yammer, if you're not familiar with it, is basically Twitter, but it's kind of a private Twitter. So it's not open to the public. Everybody can't see it. It's something that's constrained so that we can feel free to put names of clients into our Yammer's and that kind of thing. We're using Yammer as sort of an announcement, right? I just got done working on such and such a project or I'm getting ready to work on something else. We do lots of things with Yammer. We keep finding more and more ways to use Yammer. We do something called the Hive Mind. So you're stuck on a problem and you say, you know, I feel like this is a problem somebody else has solved and I'll post something and I'll put hashtag Hive Mind. And that means, hey, anybody know the answer to this question? Anybody got any good solutions? And, you know, a lot of times somebody else does. So we do the Hive Mind things. And we say, you know, like this is an example of, I found this really great resource that we could use as a resource. So there's a lot of different ways that we use Yammer. But what it all comes down to is you absolutely have to find good ways to communicate. And one of the things that's important if you're going to be a manager on a remote team is you have to have good communication skills. It's the manager's job to stay on top of everybody. There's a whole bunch of things that we'd use for communication channels. So email, obvious email. We use email lists all over the place. So for instance, we have an email list to team and that is all the people on the team. So if you want to make sure that everybody on the team knows something, you just have to copy the team email list. And then every project that we set up gets an email list. And so if you want to send an email out to everybody that's involved on a certain project, you don't have to go look up all their names or worry about whether you've left somebody out or anything like that. You copy that email list. It's really great for making sure that people aren't left out of the loop. And I think that's one of the really valuable things about it. Obviously you want a mobile phone. You need a way to do conference calls. We use something called TurboBridge. There's a bunch of different services that you can use for conference calls. But you have to think through how are we going to do conference calls. And if you're the remote employee and you've got the company set up, they're going to have to figure out how are they going to conference call you in, right? So one way or the other, there has to be a conference call solution. IRC is like the mainstay. Everybody sits in IRC all the time and you're expected to. And the idea is, first of all, you're easy to ping. And second, it also lets everybody know that you're there. I'm here, I'm available, I'm working. You can reach me if you need to. So that's the idea with IRC. We use Yammer for all kinds of things. For personal things as well as business things. And then Skype and Google Hangouts. Google Hangouts are great. So the bottom line is all teams need good communication. But co-located teams, so co-located would be the opposite of remote. We're all in the same place. Have more chances to stumble across information. I started a bunch of conversations with people about what's good about working remotely, what's wrong with it, what works, what doesn't work. And one of the responses I was getting was they're harder to manage. And I think it's interesting because there's nothing about managing a remote team that isn't a good idea for any team. It's just that you have to do it. And with a co-located team, you can get away with not doing it. And actually I was thinking about the grapevine, right? So some people say, well, you know, the remote people, they don't hear the grapevine. Well, you know, the grapevine is really sort of a failure of communication. It's sort of a response to a failure in communication. Somebody didn't tell somebody everything they needed to know and the grapevine tries to pick up the pieces. So the fact that you don't have the grapevine is really just a signal or the grapevine is just a signal that communication is not going on. So then we'll get to talk about phone calls because there's going to be lots of them. So here are my five commandments for phone calls. Thou shalt use a headset. We have to kind of teach people this because if they're not used to being on a remote team or in a phone call that includes a lot of people, they don't always realize this. There's a lot of people on a call and they don't have headsets on. You start picking up background noise. You start hearing somebody clicking on the keyboard, all kinds of things. It gets really confusing and noisy and it's just, you just have to say people on a call with more than two people have to use a headset. And the corollary to that is when you're not talking you should be muted. Thou shalt ta-da. So what happens when you've got a conference call or a call with a lot of people involved is sometimes you can have what some people like to call the Thunderdome thing. Everybody's talking over everybody and you can't tell who's talking and when they're done and all that kind of thing. So a couple of things that are really helpful. First of all there should be somebody leading the call and we try to do that. A lot of times it's the person saying, okay Jim what do you think? Okay, wait a minute that's enough Karen. Let's hear what Sue has to say. That kind of thing, sort of doing that. You also need a way to communicate that you're done talking so somebody knows okay now I can move in. What we started doing at Lullabot and I don't even know who started this thing is when you get all done talking you say ta-da. Ta-da. And that means I'm finished and somebody else can talk and it's hilarious because we bring other people in on our calls clients and things and they're all picking it up and so pretty soon you hear the clients are starting to do ta-da on their calls I think it's a lot of fun but it works. It's very effective. Again you have to have a conference call system and you have to think about international calls as well. We're in a global community. Some people maybe will never ever ever have any reason to either need to have somebody international dial in or out and keeping in mind that even Canada is international you have to think through how are we going to do this? If somebody from outside the U.S. needs to dial in how are they going to do it? Do we have a number they can use? Is it going to cost them a million dollars? How's this going to work? And vice versa. If we need to call them how are we going to call them? Skype is sometimes an answer but it can use Skype and so you can't rely on that. Sometimes it works. So now we're really really good. We are commuting communicating the hack out of everything. We are copying everybody on every email we are pulling people into a million phone calls we need to do that but the corollary to that is now we've got information overload so what do we do about that? We have to balance the availability with a way to get away from it a little bit and so one way we can do that is there's a couple of ways. This is an interesting suggestion that I just ran across when I was researching this topic. We actually haven't been doing this but it might be a good idea when you're sending an email blast to everybody on the list to say the CC means I'm just letting you know that you don't have to do anything but the two means I expect you to respond. I think that might be an interesting idea to try. You want to schedule time to speak with each other so the idea is you don't want to just constantly interrupt each other nobody's going to get anything done if they're being constantly pinged and interrupted and stopping what they're doing to answer questions and that kind of thing so ideally you want to say Jared I need to talk to you what's a good time I'd be available after 2pm today and we set up a time and we figure out when we're going to talk and we can both fit it into our schedule and similarly you can schedule time to go dark so you can say okay I've got this project going on I really need to focus on this thing I mean I cannot have all this other stuff going on heads down in this project and so what we've started doing a lot of us are doing is Will Yammer something like I've got this big project I am going to go offline for 2 hours you know if it's an emergency try and contact me otherwise you know I'll be back in a couple hours something like that so you're kind of announcing to people you're letting people know what you're doing and what to expect but you're giving yourself a chance to kind of step back and actually get something accomplished so then we have body language so one of the things that happens when you're dealing with a remote team especially when everybody is not in front of you is if I'm hearing silence on the other end of the line am I seeing is that somebody smiling and nodding their head or is that somebody looks like this and you don't know right you don't know which one silence is so this is an issue you're missing body language that's one of the things that happens when you're remote is you don't get the body language clues and you have to be very conscious of the fact that you're not getting those clues and silence does not mean necessarily mean agreement it does not necessarily mean I understand it may be total confusion who knows so what we have to do is we have to find out how can we kind of solve for this problem that we don't have body language when we're dealing with remote teams so first there's basically two solutions so one solution is you've got to explicitly ask questions okay you get done explaining something you hear dead silence people are saying yes yes yes I agree you know you've got agreement but if you're not hearing anything you don't know what that silence means you've got to ask you've got to say does that sound right do you agree do you disagree did you understand what I was saying you have to do that and then the second one is you can use something where there is a visual element so you could do something like Skype or Google Hangout or something where you actually can see the person that you're talking to and get some of those body language clues and again another quote from some of the research I had to totally change my work process and be much more direct when asking people how they're feeling or acting I have to translate what I and I think what this was supposed to say is I have to translate what I would have picked up from body language in other words there is no body language so I've got to figure out a solution for that so we do things we do Google Hangouts and we have a lot of fun and sometimes when we have this really tough problem that we're dealing with the best part is and it's like they're all just going ah you know they're just going to have a little fun and break the ice a little bit and then they're going to get back and solve the problem another problem that you have with remote is isolation so you've got people that are kind of out away from everybody else and again keep in mind that all of these things could be like a remote office just as well as an individual remote employee working from home so you've got isolation you've got a sense that you are separated or left out or missing out on things you're not a part of the mothership you're missing something you don't know what's going on so this came up over and over again as a potential problem you know people feeling like they were left out so how do you get around this so this is an area where a manager can really make a difference so a manager who's really kind of conscious of the fact that this can happen and this does happen one of the things that some of the comments talked about was the idea that an employee or a team member might not be comfortable saying I feel left out you know they might not ever verbalize that and so that you need to the managers need to kind of check in are you doing okay haven't heard from me lately things going alright kind of keep that thing going and the other thing that the managers can do that really helps is keep communicating the big picture how do you fit into the big picture the reason why you got to do this crazy project is because of this you know here's the big thing that's going on here's your piece of it this is why this little thing that looks so screwy is really important and it needs to happen and then confirming understanding again silence may or may not mean anything you've got to do that check to see then we'd have the things like the work family balance working from home means it's nice you've got the ability to be involved in more things in the family but you also have the opposite you have the family everywhere right and sometimes it's hard to get separated from them so what a lot of people are saying is things like the way that I do this is when my office is closed it means leave me alone I need some quiet time I need you to pretend I'm not here basically it's a real risk everybody that works from home I think would agree that there is a tendency for everybody to sort of assume you're here that means you're available and just ping you all the time and you have to avoid to communicate when you're not so I just pulled out some pictures these are things that have been posted our team sort of balancing their work and family stuff and we all figure it out right eventually we all figure it out I love that picture so another issue is time zones if you're dealing with more than one time zone and if you're in a remote team you are dealing with more than one time zone there's two ways to deal with multiple time zones a team that has multiple time zones you can say we're going to pick out a block of time when everybody is going to be available we're all going to be working simultaneously we're going to have some overlap period and it's early for some people and it's late for other people but this is the period when we expect people to be around and we're all going to work together or you can say we're not all going to be working simultaneously and what we're going to do is we're going to do these handoffs so team A is working we're going to pick up and work from 5 to 11 etc etc so basically you got one of those one of those two things going on it's really hard to figure out how to schedule meetings across time zones I found the neatest this is a really useful thing if you have to do this kind of thing thisworldtimebuddy.com basically what you can do is you can pull up a list of time zones that your team members are in and then you can pull your calendar up to the top and then you can look down the list and say okay here's an opening on my calendar and here's what time it would be in everybody's time zone on the team and I could I can send an email and try to you know I could put it on my calendar and send an invitation out or whatever but I can see what this means you know and I could tell that oh that's three in the morning for somebody that's not going to work right another way to do it where the time zones are less obvious people like to use doodle.com so this would be something where basically you don't ever see what everybody else's time zones are but you figure out some times that are good for you and then everybody else sees those times in their own time zone and they can respond yes or no to them the downside of this is you can't tell you know the thing that you know that you've just sent something that was two o'clock in the morning for somebody but this can be useful too if you're going to do a 24-7 hand-off one of the things you've got to keep in mind is that if you don't if you don't answer all the questions that need to be answered when you do that hand-off you are basically going to lose a day of work because now that you know you hand it off and you went away and you're not there anymore and now you your 24-7 team may be sitting there with twiddling their thumbs because they needed a piece of information they didn't get it so you have to be really focused on those issues there's all kinds of things that you don't even think about because everybody is so sure that everybody else thinks the way that they do I mean it just doesn't even occur to us to think about this but there are cultures where working through lunch nobody works through lunch and there are cultures where of course you work through lunch when does the day start and end do you work on weekends do you not work on weekends what are the holidays who has holidays when they explicitly call all these things out there are actually and there are also cultural differences on communication style so here's a couple of examples and so this was one team that had Dutch members and US members and the US team said okay we'll meet next Thursday and the Dutch members said sure however it turned out that the US team thought that next Thursday met the upcoming Thursday and the Dutch team thought that it meant Thursday of the following week so again you can't make assumptions and then another example American faculty members said we'll tell the students to adopt a chosen procedure and then the Dutch faculty supervisor said we'll discuss the procedure with the students you know just that different cultural response to how you communicate and on top of culture we have language so we can have multiple languages and one of the things that we have to be aware of is for those people who don't have English as their primary language you need to be careful because if you start moving too fast they may be thinking about how to respond and you've moved on to the next subject and you completely left them in the dust and so you have to be conscious of the fact that they may need a little extra time to stay caught up with you all kinds of interesting things can happen holiday schedules you want to let everybody know what the holiday schedules are one of the things that came up was the idea that the people who are proficient in speaking English are not necessarily the experts on the team so this was an example where there was a team of people that spoke different languages and the experts on the team were not proficient in English so they sort of sat in the background and the people that were communicating were actually the junior members of the team that spoke different languages and the American team treated them as though they were the experts and they treated the experts as though they were the juniors so these funny things happen the other thing that's interesting about this is one of the solutions for language problems is that a lot of people are going to find it easier to write or read a foreign language than to speak it and so using text confirming things and writing writing things as opposed to trying to read and speak everything can be a way to help get across that yeah this was that example the junior members and then this was an example of somebody who didn't speak English well who thought that they had somebody who made the team really successful and they said when I asked a question they didn't just say yes but they said yes you mean this and this they told me what I thought I meant then I could say yes you're right and then they would send a little story about the meeting and what the outcome was so I could read this and look if it was right so the idea again of saying okay this is somebody who doesn't have English as their primary language we want to make sure that they understood what we thought they understood and confirmed that we want to develop rapport we've got a bunch of people that aren't in the same room but we want them to feel like they belong together and I think that's one of the things that Lullaby has done really well at and so I'm trying to figure out like how do you make that magic happen because it's important one of the suggestions I came up and we actually don't do this but this was a suggestion that came up was doing a virtual lunch once a month trying to build rapport we use Yammer a lot I see Yammer as one of our things that kind of build rapport I love this one my mom has a mom and she's my grandma mom has a dad and he's my grandpa dad has a mom, dad has a dad there are many many people who love me and then Andrew says this is a great excuse to start teaching recursion all these things and all kinds of things like somebody will start a thread and they'll say a picture of what it looks like out your window or somebody else will send in a radar map and a big X and say this is my house, I'm going for cover you know a bunch of us have Fitbits and we've got like a contest going to say who's going to do the most steps and Fitbit keeps track of that and then every time somebody comes up to the top of the list they post it and say I'm the winner and then somebody else beats them later but all of these are really great rapport or building things and we go around sometimes because there's a lot of quote noise on Yammer because of all this stuff but I also think this is really valuable because if we didn't have that we wouldn't have that sense of rapport and then the baby pictures I mean we've got all these like Lullacids now so we got all the baby pictures posted all the time and they're all sweeties the other thing that you can do is you need to make opportunities to see people in real life so if you are literally remote you still have to create those opportunities they have to be days when you could do co-working you can have retreats you can have on-site meetings but you need to have those periodically I'm not sure how possible it is to really have rapport with a group of people that you never ever ever see it is possible to have a good relationship with them but I think it's important to have those in real life things or real life opportunities and then we've got hybrid teams and these are really challenging so the team where most of the people are local but there's a few remote people we had asked a question I guess it was Matt asked the question at one point about how do you feel about working at a remote at a company where you're remote and I think almost everybody that responded said it's so much better if everybody's remote than if there's this one lonely person who's remote and you're it because you tend to get forgotten that's not an impossible thing to fix but management has to be really conscious in that kind of situation to not let that remote person get lost so I think that's an especially challenging management issue you need to have a feeling of trust you need to feel like you can trust the other people on the team and a lot of that comes back to if the other people on the team are doing all this communication if they're talking about what they're doing you know what's going on you'll have that sense of whether or not they're doing what you expect and you know is so and so getting behind and all that if they've gone dark if they've gone into a hole and disappeared you have no idea and that's a real problem for trust on the management side the idea is managers need to be really proactive right they can't just wait until a problem devolves into chaos they have to be like probing all the time if things okay do you want to write do you need anything lots of praise, public praise let people know what's going on let people know that they're doing the right thing this was an example of a horrible manager the silent approach included screening phone calls from remote colleagues not returning calls and emails leaving them out of the loop and avoiding working with them all together so this is the guy you don't want to work with so my management commandments initiate communication the management has got to take the responsibility I think for creating a sense of identity for the team and making sure that everything is documented and documented in a place that everybody can get a hold of it and showing everyone the big picture I think that's really important so then the last thing I want to talk about is meetings so we have meetings so we have a remote meeting in particular online meetings are easier than they ever used to be we have Skype, Google Hangouts used to be expensive complicated and hard crazy equipment it's so easy now to do meetings online meetings you can do mixed media we do this all the time maybe we've got the same Skype number but we're using something else for the video and we're using something really important to make sure ahead of time that everything works there is nothing worse than a meeting where you've got a dozen people in the line and the person that's running the meeting is trying to figure out how to get the thing to show to work I can't figure out how to get WebEx to work so you want to get that all figured out ahead of time practice makes perfect so I feel like it's crazy to keep jumping around and using different kinds of... find a system that works for you and get really good at using it and know how to use it and keep using it I really think I've seen a failure on this one a lot when you're on a remote meeting a lot of times it's very easy not to know who else is in the meeting I think it's really important for whoever is leading the meeting to make sure that everybody knows not just who's there, who are they right? I don't know how many... well it hasn't happened a whole lot of times but it's happened a few times where I thought somebody was a junior person and it turns out like they were a really important person and I probably would have answered a question a little differently if I'd known that it's really important I think to make sure that that gets communicated who are these people and then sending documents there's nothing worse I don't think than getting into a meeting where you're just sort of ambushed we're going to talk about we're going to talk about what I had no idea we're going to talk about that I'm not prepared for that at all ahead of time ideally means more than five minutes before the call and those of you on my team know who I'm talking about meetings again, a meeting needs a leader in particular a meeting that involves remote people needs a leader and that leader needs to be constantly paraphrasing making sure that everybody understands trying to keep one person from dominating the conversation, drawing other people in and in particular don't forget not forgetting the people that are on the phone okay the people in the room a lot of times will dominate the conversation and the people on the phone will sort of get lost and you need a leader okay let's hear from the people on the phone you know what do you think encourage personal conversation before and after I think that's wonderful but the meeting needs to stay focused I think one of the most difficult things is the hybrid meetings you've got you've got a bunch of local people and then a couple of remote people if you've ever been the one on the phone in these things how awful is it when you can hear people like talking quietly in the corners but you have no idea what they're saying it's just again you need the meeting leader that sort of keeps this stuff from happening make sure the people on the phone can hear everything make sure they understand what's going on don't use visuals that not everyone can see this happens a lot we just decided we're going to pull something up on the screen or we're going to put it up on the wall and then the people on the phone are just out of luck you have no idea what you're looking at the other thing that I've seen is sometimes you send out materials ahead of time we're all looking at the same material like we're paging through a PDF or something you have to keep saying okay now I'm on page 10 now I'm on page 11 because the people on the phone are not going to be able to know that so we say it's hard to get your point across if you don't have a virtual whiteboard but there's again there's lots of good solutions for this now we've got Skype Google Hangouts, go to meeting, join me you can share your screens there's so many ways to do this Hackpad, I don't know if you're familiar with Hackpad but it's a document it's a document that you can get several people in and you can all be writing simultaneously and like keep notes about what's going on in the meeting Google Docs which is the same kind of idea you can share a Google Doc and everybody can see the same thing at the same time you can have an audio call with a Google Doc so you're all looking at a Google Doc and you're listening on the call but because it's real time you can all see what's going on with the document so there's a lot of ways to fix that clarify the purpose of every discussion and summarize decisions that were made okay so this is it so what are the takeaways that I wanted to get first of all the things that make remote teams work make all teams work better this is it's not that these things aren't needed for teams that are not remote it's just they're critical for remote teams and they're also important for teams that are not remote you can't over communicate there's no way to do it however much you communicate is probably not enough both members and managers have to be available and visible and the infrastructure has to be right so remote can work and I don't I guess we don't really have time for questions although I suppose I could take one if anybody's got a real quick question there's a mic back there you probably need to jump back there you showed that slide on whiteboards which of those are competent in like collaborative market so you can actually truly collaborate virtually and another question is how do you what are the special needs you need for presenting to clients in this situation okay I'm not sure I understood the question just a second so the first question was whether the tools were collaborative so the collaborative tools would be like hackpad or google docs those are ones that you can be working in simultaneously was that the first question different different people right different people can can all be working in at the same time both of those will will do that I didn't understand the second question those okay so I'm gonna take a stab at trying to rephrase that so you're saying when you're dealing with a client language are you talking about language body language oh right right yes so body you're missing the body language when you're dealing with a client we really do try to have an onsite pretty early on in most engagement so that we're not like this is nobody we've ever seen before that you'll you'll still have meetings where you know where you can't talk about language but they're the best you can do is is just keep asking right did that make sense did you understand that does that look right to you you know and that's that's probably the best solution I can think of yeah so this one is potentially I suppose kind of a negative question I definitely don't mean it that way but probably one of the hard parts is for management with a fully remote team if you have examples from how have you identified under performance and have you dealt with it okay dealing with performance on a man on a remote team is probably really no different than dealing with performance on on any other team the difference is that managers have to manage a little differently so to know what people are doing they have to be in communication with them and the employee has to be in communication with the manager so a lot of it is about everybody staying communicating with each other enough that the employee knows what's going on and the manager knows what's going on you know beyond that it's probably the same as it would be anywhere else you have a review you know you you talk through things in a review but the evaluation is the work that you've done and and you're you know the the visible things that you have communicated I think I'll take that one question then I need to I know I need to end go ahead do you have ideas for virtual parties or virtual celebrations with remote teams virtual celebrations yeah the a small group could do a google hangout I guess but I that wouldn't work for a big group I don't know what you would do for a big group there's a blog post about that so there's he said there's a blog post about everybody takes a picture of themselves with a beer or something like that yeah I don't know I don't have any good ideas about that alright I think I need to end because the next session needs to get in here but thank you very much