Several years ago, when Brian Curin and his business partners were busy building up the Cold Stone Creamery franchise, “We built a big office, the Taj Mahal of offices,” he explains. But this group of surfers and outdoor enthusiasts wasn’t particularly taken with the suit and tie lifestyle, so when they moved on to their next venture, they let their lifestyle considerations guide them.

The result is Flip Flop Shops, a quick-growing franchise of more than 45 stores selling beach-ready footwear, that Curin, who serves as president, and four partners run out of home offices spread from Atlanta to Vancouver, British Columbia. “It’s a true lifestyle brand,” says Curin. “Jeans, T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops: that’s what we wear everywhere and what’s nice is it’s sort of expected. So where most people couldn’t get away with dressing like bums, when we go to places everyone goes: ‘Oh, it’s the Flip Flop guys. It’s OK. Let them in.’”

Talent

Curin has a simple mantra when it comes to hiring: Attitude first. When adding to their team of support staff (currently five people) or deciding who gets a franchise, experience and qualifications come behind passion. “It’s so critical for us to get the absolute right fit, and that may not be the most qualified all the time. It may just be the person who goes, ‘I used to work in the corporate world and I’d cut off my left arm if I didn’t have to deal with that,’” he says, adding “when you find those people, you just have to set the expectations.”

And a particular location isn’t among his. “Go to Mexico!” he tells his staff. “You’d probably do better if you were just living the life and doing what we need you to do.” Nor are set hours important. “If the waves are good, they’re probably going to be out of their office,” Curin concedes. What is important is that people get work done on time and forge a personal relationship with the team.

To find the right talent for this type of team, Curin is a firm believer in interviewing face to face. “People can sound one way on the phone and interview great and look good on paper, but nothing compares to face to face,” he says, but he’s also a huge fan of a healthy degree of social media snooping to screen candidates before that stage.

“People aren’t smart on Facebook. Most people put everything out there, and so in a matter of a few minutes you get a really good flavor for their vibe. You either like it or you don’t, but it makes you way more prepared when you go meet with them,” he explains. Referrals also help ensure cultural fit: “It’s rare that we get somebody that’s just cold, never met them, out of the blue.”

Tools

In collaboration tools, as in footwear, Curin doesn’t get too fancy. “Part of the whole ‘free your toes’ mentality, this lifestyle we lead, is simplicity, so Apple,” he says, giving a one word answer to the tools his team uses to keep in touch. “Apple gives us all the gadgety things we need — iPhone, iPad, iEverything — to make this whole virtual office thing work for us,” he continues, sounding like a contented fanboy. Anything else? Just FaceTime (Apple again) and “no less than 20″ calls a day to CEO Darin Kraetsch.

The company is also a fan of social media, as we’ve heard for recruiting, but also for keeping up to date with franchisees. “We set up a closed loop Facebook page for shop owners only. We’re the admins on it so we can accept or deny people. The public can’t view it, and it’s set up as a platform for all of our shop owners to talk and share best practices, complain, share inventory, whatever it is,” he says.

Tips

“We respect the fact that we’ve got a really good thing here. We don’t suit-and-tie it. We don’t report to anybody,” says Curin, but he does see one downside to his current setup, and it’s a common one for virtual workers. “The one downfall is you truly never get that total shut off downtime except maybe once, twice a year where we tell each other, ‘hey, I’m going to Hawaii,’ my phone’s done,’” he says.

And while Curin admits that shutting out work stuff at home is a challenge, he’s firmer about shutting out home stuff when he’s working. “Make sure your space is set up the right way, so basically, when you go in there, it’s: ‘I am at work.’ You’ve got to make sure those ground rules are set with your significant other or your roommate, whoever it is.” And this space shouldn’t just be any old desk, chair, computer setup but a place that truly reflects your lifestyle. “To do it successfully, you can still be in your pajamas, but make sure your space fits the vibe of whatever business that you’re in.” Need an example? Check out Curin’s home office to the left.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be.

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I’ve been having conference calls that end up resulting in additional conference calls to discuss the findings of the previous conference call, and then having more conference calls that are required with another group of people because some folks got left out of the loop either purposely or accidentally and then we have to entirely or partially re-cap them… with another conference call.

It doesn’t matter if 20 email chains go back and forth that summarize the calls, the conferences never seem to end. Effectively, each successive conference call turns into a partial repeat of the one before it, resulting in a vicious cycle of “Groundhog Day” all week long.

Do you know how I realize that conference calls are becoming a serious problem? I have three VOIP handsets that I have dedicated to my business line. It’s not unusual for me to completely chain-smoke the charging on all three handsets for a 10 or 12 hour workday, of which 70 to 80 percent of that day is dedicated to conference calls.

And it’s not just Perlow who is experiencing conference call issues. As director of business development at the Acumen Fund, Sacha Dichter is pretty far removed from the world of IT, but he has a similar complaint to Perlow — conference calls can really suck. Dichter diagnosis many of his calls as suffering from “telephonitis,” which he described as “the process whereby otherwise conversant, engaged, active people become silent in the face of a group conference call.” To fight the dread condition, Dichter offers a number of tips including:

When silence starts to set in, start cold calling people. This has two effects: making sure you’re hearing from people, and creating an incentive (for those who don’t like being called on) for people to speak up when they have something to say.

Never equate silence with agreement. It’s bad enough to do this in person. Worse still on the phone.

Marketing guru and author Seth Godin has experienced the telephonitis phenomenon as well, but he offers a different solution –- using chat in parallel with voice calls (he recommends Campfire), which he says offers three advantages:

When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen. The first is that everyone participates. If you don’t, it’s noticeable and you won’t be invited back.

Second, the voice part of the call acts as a narrative for the chat part, allowing people to highlight or respond to what’s being said.

Most of all, it creates organized, trackable chaos, which was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

In a previous WebWorkerDaily Tales from the Trenches posts, Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick said his team had great success with Godin’s parallel chat technique. Keeping a chat log of calls and reactions to what’s been said is also one possible solution to Perlow’s complaint about time-wasting “catch-up” conference calls, allowing those that missed earlier information to read up on what they missed rather than being told over yet another call.

How does your team battle telephonitis and conference call overload?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Editor B, CC 2.0.

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In a recent article, Rothbard frets that because of specialized neurons, called mirror neurons, your team may suffer from their lack of physical proximity. She discusses some famous Italian neuroscience research on these neurons, saying of the researchers:

They found that what we do when we are watching [others] is that our neurons start mimicking, firing in the same way other people’s [neurons] are firing. They think this is the basis for social learning. We learn how to do things by watching other people…. It creates a pathway neurologically for us to follow.

Remote working, the article suggests, “could mean that skills don’t get transferred as quickly or completely from one employee to another because colleagues are unable to watch each other work.” So should you start fretting immediately about your team’s mirror neurons and whether they’re firing away in your Friday catch-up?

For those fascinated by the human brain (and who isn’t?), mirror neurons are an extremely hot topic. Here’s a 7-minute TED talk from neuroscientist VS Rachmachandran, which explains why some experts believe they’re at the very core of human civilization.

But perhaps it’s too early to be adding to your stress levels over the frontiers of brain science. First off, research mentioned in the New York Times suggests that children’s mirror neurons fire when watching violent TV shows and other studies have even shown that mirror neurons fire when we’re read descriptions of physical actions. So there’s no reason to despair yet that your training video conference is a failure at some fundamental biological level just because it’s not face-to-face (though if you’re using avatars in a virtual world, the jury is out).

Conclusion: keep an eye on mirror neuron research out of curiosity, sure, but it’s a little early to add it to the list of practical problems for web workers.

Do you find it harder to empathize with colleagues or learn new skills if you’re not face-to-face?

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Despite the proliferation of options for communication, the way workflow, responsibilities, and collaboration are managed in this scenario can be quite different from on-site or partially dispersed teams.

To get it right, team leaders need to consider the interplay of three crucial factors: frequency, transparency, and variability.

Frequency

In an office, communications are incidental, and frequency is high. With dispersed teams, communicating is an effort, and frequency is often much lower.

The concept of frequency affects communication like status updates and meetings, as well as casual team interactions. But it also affects momentum: the timeframes in which outputs are created, and how swiftly they’re taken into the next stage of the project.

Different projects and timeframes require different communications frequencies. You’ll want all the members of your dispersed team to be able to work comfortably to a given level of frequency, or intensity.

So as you’re planning workflow, milestones, and deliverables, consider whether your dispersed team will be working exclusively on this project, or on others at the same time. What does team members’ degree of focus mean for the potential frequency of communications and deliverables? How can you support those needs in order to get the job done?

Transparency

The best dispersed teamwork is supported by strong transparency. Your team members may never meet in person, but they need to get enough of a feel for one another to collaborate closely, and get the work done.

Transparency is important in a number of areas, including availability, progress and outputs, as well as personalities. Setting explicit baseline expectations of transparency — outlining up-front what kinds of project information should be shared, and how, for example — is a good start, but more work may be needed to keep things transparent on a day-to-day basis.

Should all project-related discussions be shared, and is IM therefore a less-than-deal communication tool? Are there times when team members will all be online — and does everyone know what those times are? Are there certain outputs that should not be available to all team members? Will your Yammer steam be strictly business, or will you encourage team members to share more broadly, to make it more fun?

These are the kinds of questions that are easily overlooked, but which can greatly influence the sense of openness and participation of distributed team members.

Variability

It can be easy to see remote team members as resources, or sets of capabilities, rather than real people with real lives. A truly productive, smooth-working dispersed team will flexibly cater to individuals’ needs and differences.

This might mean that you create a rotating schedule for team meetings, so that everyone shares the burden of time zone differences, and the same team member isn’t staying up until midnight every Tuesday to meet with you.

You may encourage team members to share things like personal websites or work histories, so each team member has an idea of others’ experience, capabilities, and areas of interest. You might ask the team to choose the tools you use to share information and communicate about the project.

Promoting the open communication of unexpected hurdles — illnesses and other events that take team members out of the work for a period — may be another way to ensure the smooth running of a team whose members may come online at different times, and at different intervals from the team leader.

Frequency, transparency and variability are critical factors in the smooth running of dispersed teams. Being conscious of them as you establish and support remote team members can have a significant impact on project success.

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It makes sense to focus on project briefs and core competencies — after all, these are what gets the job done. But what gets the job done well? Often, it’s team members’ non-core skills and experience — and their freedom to apply those capabilities to the project — that make the collaboration a real success.

This is especially the case in experimental work, where the path to the desired outcome may be unclear, and work in distributed or completely new teams. If it’s not clear how your team members should make contributions to others’ domains, or whether they’ll be valued, you’ll never get the most out of the project.

What can go wrong

Recently, I worked with a new, distributed team on a fairly experimental project. Team roles, relationships and work patterns hadn’t been clearly defined. While I knew some team members, others were new to me, and I’d never worked closely with any of them before.

As the work began, team members struggled to identify where their contributions should begin and end. We all knew what each others’ core competencies were — it was the extra stuff that got confusing.

There was overlap between team members’ areas of expertise, but the team structure and approach to collaboration — which, while supported by the appropriate tools, was loose and fairly unpredictable — caused blockages. Some team members didn’t want to step on any toes; others wondered why no one was taking responsibility for certain contributions. Few of the team knew what they could expect from their colleagues.

This project didn’t fail, but it took longer than expected, and project overhead expanded, since communication wasn’t smooth-flowing. The usual pitch-in mentality became mired in a subtle kind of confusion. Assumption took the place of inquiry and clarification, so opportunities to capitalize on each team members’ capabilities slipped past.

Welcome more than core skills

Leaders organize people into teams on the basis of their core skills, which is fine. But to really make the most of everything each team member has to offer, you’ll need to go further than simply providing a project brief and setting up a file repository.

• Evidence of a collaborative culture. Culture is particularly important for new teams, or teams that comprise people from several departments, offices or organizations. Give some thought to how you’ll evince that culture — from the way meetings are run, to the way ideas are presented, captured, discussed and actioned. What evidence says to team members that all contributions — not just core-skill offerings — will be welcomed and valued? Does your evidence translate for team members operating from other locations? Keeping that evidence consistent is also critical. It’s all very well to be open, welcoming and responsive in a meeting, but if you neglect to respond to team members’ post-meeting emails or messages for days, you’ll likely erase any goodwill you generated, and engender a culture of flakiness and irresponsibility instead.
• A clear collaboration model. Does all team work involve all team members, or are some working in smaller groups, without the leader’s input? Flat structures and easygoing reporting requirements may seem to encourage the free flow of ideas, but the reality is that groups comprised of team members who haven’t worked together before may need more guidance, encouragement and transparency, especially at first, or if the team is distributed. Leave them to their own devices and silence may well ensue. Discuss up-front the basic expectations you and your team members have for the collaboration, and how extra ideas will be treated and addressed. As you adjust the model to fit the needs and suggestions of your team, make sure everyone’s aware of the model’s evolution. Over time, the team will likely develop its own culture, and you may well be able to take more of a backseat, but be wary of doing this in the initial stages.
• Meet expectations. Once you’ve all agreed on how things will happen, fulfill those expectations for your team, and ensure that your team members do the same. If your team management, or team members, are unpredictable in the way they respond to each other and events, the result is uncertainty. That may translate to team members feeling that the project isn’t important to their colleagues, and deciding to do only what’s required — not to bother making value-add suggestions beyond their core competency. It may reduce team members’ confidence to put themselves — and their “crazy” ideas — out there. Or it may just mean that team members spend more time trying to work out what’s going on than focusing on collaboratively creating the best possible solutions. In any case, unpredictability reduces team members’ ability to focus on the work itself.

A really successful team project is, of course, fulfilling and rewarding for team members. The evolving nature of the digital space may have reduced the likelihood that individuals will be typecast into narrow roles, yet leaders may still struggle to elicit the full breadth and benefits of colleagues’ past experiences if they don’t consciously work at it.

Have you worked with teams that really valued and benefited from the contribution of non-core skills? What aspects of the team management made the project work well?

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What exactly is curation?

In a nutshell, curation is selecting content from the web, based on specific criteria and presenting it to an internal or external audience, or both. With aggregation, the precursor to curation, we generally selected content for our personal consumption and had little filtering control. We usually had to be satisfied with receiving all content from a given source (the entire RSS feed of a site, for instance) without being able to filter out content we didn’t want. With curation, you choose specific items to share from a source and have the option to add your own editorial comments. If you’ve ever tweeted a link or retweeted someone else’s tweet, you’ve curated content.

Did you see that thing I tweeted?

It can be frustrating to try to get information you want to share to everybody on your team who could benefit from it. You all need to be up to speed on your market, competition, technology, trends, etc. If you’re sharing this info in a haphazard way (using multiple communication channels, crossing your fingers that team members will see and act on the info, mixing items of personal and professional interest), then having a system for content curation might be for you.

Where to start?

Curation platforms are still in their infancy; no single tool is likely to be the perfect solution for your needs. You’ll have to explore the various platforms and keep an eye on the evolution of the trend if it interests you. Be on the lookout for curation features to start being integrated into collaborative project management platforms. In fact, Producteev, a task management app that we’ve covered before, will soon allow team members to curate content and attach it to specific projects and tasks.

Fortunately for you, Pierre Tran, a French tech journalist, recently carried out an extensive comparison of a number of curation platforms, and prepared a very useful table in English and French that you can use to start exploring.

The platforms in Tran’s table offer a range of output options (the format in which people will be able to consume your curated content) from RSS feeds to embeddable widgets to stand-alone web pages. Their intended use ranges from collection of business intelligence (BI) for a company’s or team’s internal use (Eqentia, Knowledge Plaza, Factiva) to collecting and sharing interesting images or multimedia (Fancy, Pinterest, Magnify). Depending on what it is you do, the BI platforms might meet the needs of your team but, then again, if your team is composed of graphic artists, the “pretty picture” type of platform might come in handy as a group inspiration board.

You also need to decide if you want to curate exclusively for your team, or if you also want clients or the public to have access to the results of your curation efforts. Most curation platforms are designed for sharing the content with a public audience (Pearltrees, PublishThis), which your team could also access, of course.

Scoop.it

The only curation platform I’ve spent any time with is Scoop.it. It allows you to create a standalone page that resembles a blog and features content you have selected from the sources Scoop.it has helped you gather. There’s also a bookmarklet you can use to scoop up content you see when you’re out and about on the web.

Your team (and your clients, and the public) can subscribe to the RSS feed of your Scoop.it page. In the near future, you’ll have the option to keep your Scoop.it page private if you prefer to use it for your team only. Here’s an example of a Scoop.it page.

You start by entering keywords for your topic, and Scoop.it automatically pulls content from a number of major web and social media sources (you can delete those you don’t want). You can then add your own sources, like specialized blogs, individual Twitter accounts, and more.

For each piece of content, you can add your own comments, which is very useful if you want to point out to your team why you selected an item and what you want them to get out of it. You can also create posts from scratch.

Scoop.it’s still in beta, and has some shortcomings in terms of user experience and functionality, plus it needs to give users more control over the appearance of their pages, but it is still quite usable.

You don’t need a curation platform to curate

The sites that have been curating since before everybody was calling it that use tools that were already out there to get the job done. If none of the ready-made platforms work for you, don’t forget that you can, for example, create RSS feeds based on keywords in Google Blog and News search, and from there curate and furnish your selected content manually in a number of ways.

Copyright

The idea of curation isn’t to steal other people’s content in its entirety and use their work to draw traffic to your site. That would be unethical and illegal, even if you credited them. If you’re sharing your curated content with the public, you need to be sure that what you share with the public falls within the bounds of fair use and link to the complete, original content at its source.

If you read French, I highly recommend Pierre Tran’s companion article to the table he created on curation platforms (Le Guide de la curation (3) – les outils), and another table he created on automated publishing platforms (those with no manual filtering) in English and French.

If you’re already curating for your team, please let us know about your tools and workflow in the comments.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Minke Wagenaar

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Don’t you generally like to know what’s going on in your work collaborations? I know my students do. In experiential exercises we do as part of class, term after term, my working professional MBA students (they come to class straight from their real-world jobs) demonstrate that they want transparency from their collaborators. Students who are initially left out of planning sessions can become disengaged, and even confrontative. And they are less interested in participating even if eventually invited in. These experienced professionals report that they would prefer to have the news on the table, even when it’s bad, where they can better manage it and prepare for the ramifications.

On the other hand, those students playing roles in experiential exercises where they can withhold information, often do so. When asked why they weren’t transparent with their collaborators, they generally offer one of these reasons:

• It would take too much time to involve the others
• They plan to involve the worker team … once they (in the role of the management team) have planned what work needs to be done
• It would be uncomfortable to share, so tacitly acting on the information is better than being explicit

This kind of thinking is usually counter-productive. Strategist Nilofer Merchant writes in her book, The New How:

Everyone is better off when they know why decisions are made with as much accuracy as possible. It gives them an understanding of what matters and provides information on which to base the trade-offs constantly being made at every level. It also boosts buy-in and energy from the organization. When reasons behind decisions are not shared, the decisions can seem arbitrary and possibly self-serving. That is, they may seem like they are made for the good of the decision makers, rather than the good of the organization.

Warren Bennis, business professor and co-author of Transparency: Creating a Culture of Candor, offers evidence that transparency supports financial success: “Again and again, studies show that companies that rate high in transparency tend to outperform more opaque ones.” He cites a 2005 study finding that a group of 27 U.S. companies noted as “most transparent” beat the S&P 500 by 11.3 percent.

Like the effective companies in the study, teams in my class that share inevitably outperform those that do not. In one of the exercises, transparency is the difference between a creative outcome due to the unique information held by the “worker” team and a drawn-out, brute-force solution that’s worse for everyone. The faster the management team shares the task requirements, the quicker the worker team is to trigger the creative solution to this intricate puzzle building task. Performance goes from complete failure, or a 10-minute build, to as fast as 11 seconds.

So if transparency is nearly always the best approach, should you always immediately share everything with your collaborators? No. My advice is to stop and look first. Then if you can reasonably do so, share at least the main features of the situation. You’ll find that it is easier to explain the details once you understand the background and perspective of your collaborators and they understand yours. You may also be surprised that your collaborators have wonderful advice even if they are not hierarchically in a position where you would expect the insight. Finally, listen. Learn from this experience and setting in order to improve on the next collaboration.

Are you seeing a change in management practice?  Do you feel that the last few years have provided more or less transparency in your collaborations? For better or for worse?

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While there is no single accepted way to kick off a group in a collaborative process, my experience and the available research says you should start small with a specific, achievable goal, rather than trying to implement a full technology platform at the same time as you’re organizing the project.  Stewart Mader, author of the book Wikipatterns, says that you should focus on the work; help people see the value from the work and the rest will follow.

Organizational scholar Karl Weick wrote in 1984:

A small win is a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance. By itself, one small win may seem unimportant. A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals. Small wins are controllable opportunities that produce visible results.

This still holds true today. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer followed 238 professionals in 26 creative teams across seven companies and three industries, gathering over 12,000 person/days of data. They report their results in the forthcoming book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. In a recent talk I attended, Prof. Amabile described how progress in meaningful work is the most important factor in people’s engagement. This progress doesn’t have to include a breakthrough — just maintain forward momentum.

Keep these ideas in mind when you start your next collaboration project. Go for the small wins, rather than the stretch goal, and focus on the work rather than the tools. Follow Georgina‘s advice and take a “tools last” approach to collaboration. She says, “tools are not the process, nor are they the work. Tools are there to make complex tasks easier or more efficient for your team.” Get the team’s work started, then see what tools will be most helpful.

What is your experience?  Do you agree that small wins beat out stretch goals for kicking off a new collaborative project?

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Here are sensitive areas to watch with your own remote staff, or to guard against and prepare for if you’re a new remote worker yourself.

1. Training is tricky. Orientation for new remote workers, especially if they’re new to the job or company and not just making the shift from being an in-office employee, can be very difficult. We tend to forget how much training, even when it takes the shape of self-directed study, is helped by the presence of experienced staff to clear up misunderstandings and provide guidance. It’s much more difficult to quickly check if you understand something correctly when you’re working remotely and don’t have a mentor nearby.

To assist with training, make sure support staff with the knowledge new remote employees will need are on-hand via IM for quick contact during business hours. Also be aware that training may be slower with remote employees than with on-site ones.

2. Compatibility issues. It can be very frustrating to run into hardware and software compatibility issues early on in a remote work setup, especially without having easy access to in-house IT support staff to clear up any issues.

Luckily, the fix is easy. Check all essential software and prepare and publish hardware and software guidelines prior to hiring remote staff, or moving people to remote work positions. Make sure that not only do staff know what they need to work remotely, but also how to use those tools.

3. One is the loneliest number. Offices are nothing if not social spaces; one of the biggest shock to a new remote worker’s system can be having to deal with the loss of the social aspects of office work. It’s something that might not get noticed right away, but after the honeymoon period is over, loneliness can set in.

Coworking is one way to fight off the lack of social interaction for remote staff. Working together in a shared office space has a number of other benefits, too. Other good tactics to stave off loneliness include getting staff out to events and trade shows on a regular basis.

4. Rewards are less real. It can be hard for remote workers to feel like their work is valued. Positive feedback and informal praise are things that can easily get lost when you’re working with a distributed workforce, and the resulting impact on long-term morale can be quite considerable.

To combat this issue, make rewards for good performance a priority, and don’t forget to drop a note even for small achievements. Also, if you’re a remote worker, try to re-frame your sense of a job well done, by considering that a verbal “good job” just isn’t something you’ll likely receive as often as a remote worker, since an email actually to that effect requires more effort than an offhand comment.

5. Feeling forgotten. Remote workers can have a tendency to feel forgotten, especially when working together in a company which also employs on-site staff. The perception, whether real or imagined, is that they’re lower down the pecking order than people who work in the office. Even workers in entirely distributed teams can feel at least a little out-of-site, out-of-mind.

Employers have to make it very clear that all considerations for advancement is based purely on performance. Having remote staff in trusted positions higher up the totem pole can reinforce the idea that remote staff are just as visible and valuable as other members of the team.

Remote working has a lot of benefits, but it also poses many challenges. Being aware of and addressing those challenges, however, can help make a distributed workforce happier, more productive and more sustainable.

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1. Coworking is like a non-stop trade show. Conventions and trade shows are the perfect place to get your company’s name out there and make connections that could possibly form the backbone of your future business. Because of the revolving-door nature many coworking spaces, coworking can be like a lite version of padding the trade show floor. Connections made at coworking locations can lead to partnerships, lucrative sales contracts, or high-caliber talent acquisition.
2. Coworking provides office structure without office stricture. With coworking, employees get an office environment that encourage structures, such as offering regular office hours and a sense of responsibility and professionalism, while also not conveying the often-constraining feeling of being babysat that too many traditional offices provide. It’s a best-of-both-worlds type environment that works especially well with remote teams who happen to be co-located, since they can much more easily work together while still feeling like a fully autonomous cell of the larger company.
3. Coworking encourages work-life balance. Remote employees can actually suffer from a tendency not to put their work down at the end of the day, which, though it may provide benefits in the short term, will eventually have a negative effect on productivity and product quality. Encouraging workers to seek out a coworking space will help to divide work from home life, which will enable them to better leave work “at the office,” so to speak, and should encourage healthier work/life habits in the long term.
4. Coworking is creative. Even if coworking remote workers don’t encounter anyone who travels in the same sphere, they can still be influenced by others around them. Being in close contact with other professionals in different fields is bound to result in some creative experiences, and even generate solutions that otherwise would never have been considered. Coworking space users interact and talk, and the flow of ideas is one of the better reasons remote teams should seek out and take advantage of these opportunities.
5. Coworking is human. If you want your remote workers to be even better than those located at your physical office, the human factor is definitely something you can’t overlook. Regular, face-to-face human interaction regarding business-related matters is something that will never become unimportant for companies or individual employees; in fact, it may become what separates companies that just do well from those that truly excel as we move into a time when workforces see less and less of each other and the people they serve, sell to and buy from. Coworking ensures that remote teams remember the value of, and remain well-practiced at, human interaction, even if that just means knowing how to negotiate a shared work environment. It may seem like a small thing, but disconnection from even that most basic human experience is a very real possibility in our remote working future.

Any other benefits you can suggest, maybe from your own experience coworking as a remote employee? Please share in the comments.

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The problem with this purely quantitative approach is that it misses the great potential of collaboration: innovation.

Using a team, rather than an individual, isn’t just a way to get things done faster, it’s also a way to do things better, and do better things. Gone are the days when innovation was handled by management. Smart businesses know that idea generation, prototyping and testing happens on the ground, on the frontline, at the coalface — whatever cliche you prefer.

When viewed in this context, the shorter timeframes implied by the increased capacity in a team must necessarily expand. Why? Because innovation takes time.

Research

You don’t know what you don’t know. Innovators understand the value of research, through resources, other people, practical experimentation, and so on. And good research — the kind that’s thorough, creative, collaborative, and gives the innovator time to build prototypes and test cases to reduce the risk of innovation to the business — takes time.

An iterative philosophy of innovation might shorten the time it takes to get your innovative idea up and running, but it still takes time, as do subsequent iterations of the idea.

Discussion

We can’t innovate in a vacuum. Team-based innovators need opportunities to speak with other team members, to debate, contribute, conduct more research and report back on their findings.

They need to understand how the innovation they’re proposing will impact others’ work. What parts of their idea can others piggyback onto? What parts present potential risks or dependencies for others’ inputs?

Reflection and Planning

Most team leaders love a good plan, but we can easily underestimate the value of reflection.

Once a team member has conduced research, and discussed it with others, that person will need time to reflect on all that information if they’re to formulate a solid working plan to implement the innovation. Multiply that work by the number of people collaborating within your team, and it’s easy to see that reflection is both important and potentially time-consuming.

It’s true that reflective time isn’t bounded by the restrictions of the working day, but that doesn’t mean we can avoid allocating time for reflection at work.

Through reflection, the team can anticipate problems, mitigate risks, and pull together the strands of teamwork to make the implementation proceed smoothly. Skimp on reflective time — or ignore it altogether — and your increase the risk of having good innovations fail.

Managing Multiple Inputs

Innovating solo avoids many of the hassles of effectively integrating multiple inputs — inputs that may themselves be innovative (and therefore behave unpredictably), or may need to be integrated within an unprecedented system or framework (which in itself is unpredictable).

In the one-man-band, you know what you’ve created, and you know how it all needs to fit together. But innovative teams must manage the unpredictability of their individual innovations (and the processes by which they are developed), the unpredictability of the innovative system into which they fit, and the unpredictability of their colleagues’ innovations.

Communication is never perfect: a team member may believe they understand how something will work, but be surprised when they finally see the finished component. Using a transparent approach to innovation is a common way to lessen the likelihood of this eventuality, but it also takes time.

Making Collaborative Innovation Efficient

Plenty of techniques and tools have been developed to help us innovate more efficiently and more successfully. But it’s important that we understand the nature of team innovation if we’re to get the most out of the models we choose.

People are central to this equation. Smaller, more tightly-knit teams may be less likely to see each other as “human resources”, but it’s still important to understand how team members develop ideas individually and together, and to allow sufficient time for the less-visible aspects of those processes to take place.

How do you manage the time your team takes to innovate? Are you using a specific model for innovative collaboration, or are you winging it?

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Project momentum is what makes it easy for team members to get things done even when they have bigger challenges to tackle; it’s what keeps the project’s wheels oiled and spinning, even when team members take time out.

While team motivation might be highest at the beginning and end of a project, momentum will, ideally, be consistent or growing throughout. This means when motivation levels dip, momentum can carry the team through, keeping individuals productive, and your project on track. Momentum can be especially valuable when your team members are spread across multiple locations.

Once you kick off a project, how can you ensure all the collaborators in your team will maintain the momentum to get the job done easily and well? Can you build the project’s momentum, so progress and productivity actually become easier as time passes?

Action Pathways

Making sure everyone knows where the project is heading, and what they and their colleagues need to do to get there, is a critical first step in maintaining momentum.

Be aware that while shared project management tools are great for keeping everyone informed about project direction and progress, if a team member falls behind schedule, the constant visibility of that lagging performance can reduce the team’s momentum — even for those whose tasks don’t directly depend upon the work of that team member.

Shared task lists, where team members have the ability to add tasks to others’ lists, can also help maintain momentum, as long as the tasks are managed by the team leader, and the lists don’t get too long.

Time Allocation

Time is important in maintaining momentum, and building it. Provide too little time per task, and team members can feel overwhelmed — a huge drain on momentum. Equally, allocate too much time, and the team’s momentum may dissolve as days or weeks pass with little progress.

Ask team members how much time they expect they’ll need to complete a task, then balance that estimate against the business requirements and how you think it’ll impact the team’s momentum. Gut feel; your team’s composition and the organization’s culture will all impact what sorts of timeframes are appropriate.

Don’t miss the opportunity to use the extra momentum generated when a task is completed ahead of time. Consider if other project tasks can be started early or moved forward as a result of this gain — keeping things moving is important if you’re to make the most of the momentum you’ve achieved.

Task Management

The types of tasks a team member has to do can affect momentum just as timeframes can. Too much of one task type, and even star performers can get bogged down, losing momentum as well as motivation. But if they need to switch tasks too often, they may lack the sense of challenge that can help to build momentum.

Even if you can’t control a team member’s whole schedule, do your best to gauge how easy or hard they’re finding the tasks they’ve been allocated, and consider reordering task progression if they seem overwhelmed or mired in a particular task. Making logical, practical revisions on the fly can have a noticeable impact on the overall team’s momentum.

Reporting

Reporting requirements can be good motivators, but they may also provide boundaries for the project, and give it the shape and intensity needed to keep things turning over. Feed the reported information back into shared project blueprints so that everyone on the job can see the progress that’s being made, and share the sense of momentum.

Asking for regular reports from team members — no matter how casual that reporting process might be — can give a valuable sense of flow to the project for each of the individuals involved. Reporting can be one way to help team members get a sense of their own momentum, and use it to work through their own motivational peaks and troughs.

The other benefit of reporting is that it will give you a valuable chance to communicate with the team member, provide feedback, and gauge their motivation and momentum levels, as well as their progress. Ultimately, the interpersonal benefits of reporting can also support and build momentum.

How does momentum play out in your project teams? Let us know in the comments.

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The challenge was tough enough when we had to contend with email and SMS, but add multiple flavors of instant messaging and social networks, and a quick communique can take ages to find.

Did that one-line request from your colleague arrive as an SMS, a Twitter DM, a quickly-jotted IM, or an email “Sent from my iPhone”? Did it relate to the DM you just received, or the all-points email you received an hour ago? How long will it take you to work that out?

That we now have messaging capability at our fingertips 24/7 might make communication easier, but it also means it’s more casual. SMS-style emails are now de rigueur. While shorter notes may seem efficient, in my experience, they’re more likely to be sent hastily and without due consideration about who they’re going to and the tone they take.

Again, this can make following the paper trail of communications for a project a nightmare — moreso if the personal affront of a colleague accidentally left off the CC: list comes into the equation.

How can teams improve communication flow and trackability, and make the most of the tools they have available?

1. Use the Tool for the Job

If you want to be able to keep track of the communications you have about a particular project or aspect of it, use the tool for the job. You could SMS an instruction to your colleague, for example, but since those messages will only be searchable by you, perhaps it might be better to send a quick email or reply directly to the relevant discussion on the team’s Yammer account.

Also, try to think ahead about the practicality of your chosen means of communication over the future of the conversation. If you can’t stick to the originally chosen means of communication over the entire course of the conversation and are forced to switch, you’ll find it difficult to keep track of the conversation over time, or locate certain messages within it if you need to.

2. Speak Only to Those You Need to Speak To

If you need to communicate something that you want to keep private, you won’t use Yammer, for example. If you need those you communicate with to know who else is receiving the message, you’ll avoid the BCC: option.

If you want a certain group of team members to receive all the communications on a certain topic (for example, relating to a certain project) set them up as a separate group in your contacts list for the service you choose. That way, you’ll never risk accidentally leaving someone off the list.

3. Take the Time It Requires

Take care with that reply to a work question you quickly tapped from a taxi, meeting or movie. If the messages you communicate are in any way ambiguous, confusion will most likely result. Your desire for efficiency may actually cause major breakdowns in workflow and time-wasting as your team, once they realize the error, tries to play catch-up to get things back on track.

Think about what you need to say, but also whether you need to include any backstory. If you’re replying to an email thread and expanding it to include more team members, consider whether or not you need to attach all the previous messages. Instead of just referring to a previous email in an IM because it’s quick and easy, spend a moment finding the email so you can attach it, or copy and paste the relevant parts, for your contacts to see.

4. Follow Up

Make a point to speak to your contacts soon after you send the communication, to make sure they understood your message and have all the information they need. Don’t overlook the casual “sure that sounds good” messages, either — often they’re the ones that cause the problems, particularly if the person who sent the message to you wasn’t 100 percent clear about their plans.

Do you find it difficult to keep track of conversations that take place across media? What tips can you share to help us manage the challenge more effectively?

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First, the form of communication that remote teams use most frequently is text-based — whether it’s through email, instant messaging, or discussions within a project management app. Misunderstandings are common; we might think we’re good at interpreting text-based messages, but research shows we get it wrong half the time, so it’s surprising that remote teams don’t experience conflict more often.

Another challenge is time zone differences. Colleagues aren’t always available whenever you need them, and scheduling a phone call, conference or other real-time conversation can require some planning.

Given that conflict is inevitable, especially for remote teams, what can we do to minimize the damage?

#1 Unreliable Technology

One cause of conflict is unreliable technology. Unexpected downtime and equipment problems will always occur, though we can have backup plans that can help us continue working with little interruption. But interruptions do happen and are, at times, expected. Conflict can occur when these technological malfunctions become excuses to not do the work.

In a study about communication and trust in virtual teams, researchers found that in teams with low trust, it was common practice to blame technology for tardiness or inability to accomplish tasks. This fueled an already existing feeling that the technology was unreliable.

On the other hand, teams with high trust levels found workarounds to technological problems. They notified each other when they’d be available for work, even if there were time zone differences.

If the unreliability of technology is an issue, especially if it’s imagined or exaggerated, it helps to implement a group-wide strategy for dealing with it so that tech failure can no longer be uses as an excuse. Does everyone on the team have a backup Internet connection, for example? If not, are there nearby venues with affordable or free Internet access? If they’re without an Internet connection, should the team send SMS updates via Twitter or a similar service? Or should they send a text message to the project coordinator directly? By having an established system in place, team members can have multiple means of contact that aren’t dependent on a single technology or service.

#2 Loafers

We’ve all been part of a group where at least one person did not contribute much, or at all, during a project. These people are often called free riders or loafers, and their lack of participation can have a negative effect on the team’s performance. But these non-contributing members are rarely malicious or lazy; often, there are barriers that are preventing them from making a proper contribution. For example,  in a study of employee participation at Caterpillar Inc. , employees failed to contribute because of fear of criticism, or the feeling that their contributions are irrelevant or insignificant.

If team members are failing to contribute, ask them privately about their barriers and find ways to remove them. If they feel their work is unimportant, highlight the team’s objective and how crucial each individual’s role is. If the barrier is fear of criticism, then the team should learn how to provide constructive feedback (something we’ll also discuss to in the next section).

The worst things you can do about non-participating members are to accept their lack of participation, or to single them out in front of the group. According to the study on communication and trust mentioned earlier, many low trust teams merely accepted or ignored free riders, giving the impression that a lack of participation wasn’t wrong. Pointing out an individual’s lack of participation in front of the group is also a bad idea, since the team will see this as a betrayal and this may lessen overall trust.

#3 Negative Feedback

Harsh criticism can be a source of major conflict within a remote team, especially if carried out in a text-based medium like email or instant messaging. Two characteristics are present in constructive feedback:

• The message should be substantial. Even if you’re conveying something positive about another person’s work, vague responses like “it’s OK” aren’t helpful. Praise must also be specific, so that individuals can identify the improvements they’ve made and also receive recognition for their successes.
• Any disagreement should be indirect. Instead of flat-out disagreeing with a person or a point, high trust teams tend to offer alternatives, together with explanations as to why they may be preferable. This approach may lessen the fear of criticism, since the target of the feedback is distanced from the person receiving it.

What conflicts have you experienced when working with remote teams? How did you prevent or resolve them?

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What remote teams actually experience is known as “swift trust“, which happens when you don’t have the time or means to build trust through multiple interactions. Also, you often don’t have prior experience with your colleagues to determine their trustworthiness. You act as if you trust each other from the beginning. While this type of trust cultivates easily, it’s also very fragile. Since all you have are your communication tools — email, phone, instant messaging, video conferencing, etc. — how can you establish and maintain trust using these channels?

Setting the Tone

Your team’s first few messages are crucial to maintaining and developing this “swift trust” into something more sustainable. In a study published in Organization Science, the researchers noted that “The first messages on the team appeared to set the tone for how the team interrelated.” Just as in face-to-face meetings, first impressions count. As much as possible, remote workers should make the effort to make their initial messages positive. You can do this is through expressing encouragement and motivation.

A study published by the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) demonstrated that high trust teams were expressive about their enthusiasm for the project and gave ample encouragement and compliments to their colleagues. The Organization Science study backs this up. In teams with high initial trust, opening messages saying “I’m excited to work with this team” or “Looking forward to working with you all” were common. Teams with low initial trust lacked this enthusiasm.

High trust teams also gave positive motivation, focusing on what their team could accomplish if they performed well. Low trust teams, on the other hand, focused on what they could lose if they didn’t perform well.

Though first impressions are important, establishing a positive tone mid-project can still improve trust. The study included some teams showing low initial trust, but they moved on to high trust as they expressed more enthusiasm later on.

Task-oriented Communication

Typically, there are three types of communication that take place in virtual teams:

• Social communication. This includes discussions on topics unrelated to the project, such as messages about one’s hobbies, weekend activities and family.
• Procedure-oriented communication. This type of communication is based on setting rules and processes relevant to the task, including discussions on how often to check email, how to monitor work progress, and what the workflow should be like.
• Task-oriented communication. When you share your work with the team, request feedback or directly talk about the task at hand, you are engaging in task-oriented (or task-focused) communication.

In the Organization Science study, social exchanges helped facilitate early trust, but this proved to be insufficient in maintaining trust in the long run. Also, while procedure-oriented communication is important, a team must be able to move beyond it to get things done. Over-discussing work procedures and rules may appear productive, but they can be a way to escape responsibility and waste time while waiting for other people to start the work.

Both studies show that to maintain or create trust, your team must have the ability to move quickly from social and procedural communication to task-oriented communication. Even teams low on initial trust were able to develop more trust this way, and were eventually unaffected by negative feedback and non-contributing members. In high trust teams, communication became exclusively task-oriented and there were rarely any social exchanges. Still, members displayed empathy and support when discussing each other’s work.

Making Communication Predictable

One of the studies also emphasized predictability as an essential aspect of trust-building. Regular, predictable communication was more important than the quantity of communication for maintaining trust. In other words, sending messages often isn’t as important as sending them in a regular schedule or pattern. This means sending daily or weekly reports, acknowledging incoming contributions and informing others of your schedule.

Low trust teams often had unpredictable communication and no forewarning of member absences. High trust teams, on the other hand, informed each other of when they’d be available for work and sent each other prompt messages saying that they received and evaluated a member’s latest contribution. In the JMIS study, high trust teams were also more aware of time zone differences and scheduled their work in such a way that downtime was managed as effectively as possible.

With remote teams, we must know how to communicate effectively if we want to build long-term trust in our working relationships. We can do this by increasing our efforts in expressing our enthusiasm at the start of the project, keeping messages in a positive tone, staying focused on the task, and establishing a regular pattern of communication.

How do you encourage trust in your remote teams? What actions or incidents causes you to trust your colleagues less?

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