As we have seen throughout this book, when you work as a crew member on a boat, the working conditions must be optimized. Cleanliness and order are vital. Every piece of equipment must be clean, stored, and ready. This is what the term shipshape means, by the way. If you have ever used that term to describe an office or a project that is in good order, you are using a nautical term that has been used for centuries, to describe a vessel that is ready to go to sea.
A vessel that is dirty or that has oil on the deck or whose lines (ropes) are showing signs of wear or whose safety equipment is out of date or improperly stowed is inviting injury or worse. A boat needs the right equipment, set up the right way, in order for crews to move it successfully forward.
The same applies to a well-structured distributed team. During the pandemic lockdowns, many people who were forced to work from home for perhaps the first time found themselves doing their work in less than optimum conditions. Some were working in the living room, struggling to concentrate while the kids played or wrestled with their own schoolwork or watched TV close by. This type of arrangement generates tension and frustration, which is counterproductive to work and bad for family relationships.
Many people currently don’t have the ideal physical space at home, and very few fully understand the security requirements of their home network, computer, and applications, which represents a significant weak link in any organization’s infrastructure.
Distributed teams need legitimate work conditions and training to be able to deliver their work correctly. As I have described, legitimate work conditions include technology, culture, and a renewed approach to time management and leadership. That is what it means to be shipshape.
Distributed teams need legit work conditions and education to be shipshape.
Attaining synergy is not always easy, but nor is it impossible. Leaders who seek to establish a successful distributed teams culture need to think about providing those adequate workspaces, hardware, tools, connectivity, logistics, and ergonomics to their teams, to match the evolution of the culture. This will make all the difference between “being at home trying to work” and “working from home.”
The new normal following the pandemic lockdown period will be an opportunity for companies to use what they have learned about the very real benefits that the distributed teams model offers. As I hope I have shown, it is not just about producing pieces of work from a physically separate location; it speaks to a far more enhanced dynamic, involving hiring and care of individual team members, leveraging their skills and enthusiasm, and crafting a company’s voyage based on the chemistry that great people share and a leadership vision that recognizes it. It’s a new model for some, but it is one that would have happened even if there had been no pandemic. There were already the beginnings of a gradual shift toward a more empowered workforce, through the development of the audience-of-one model that spans the B2C and B2B worlds equally.
Distributed Does Not Mean Disconnected
Just because the model of a distributed team is based on people working from wherever they are does not mean they should never get together. In the companies I have worked with or consulted to, I have made it a point to ensure the team gets together in person at least once per year. This is not only for work but it’s also for fun. It’s for the type of bonding and interaction that can only happen in a casual and playful environment.
Being in distributed teams doesn’t mean there must be no face-to-face in-person interaction. Being distributed is about trust, and an in-person connection plays an important role in developing trust. The same thing applies for on-premises teams as well, of course. Even if they work on the same floor, people seldom get the opportunity to connect, yet it’s vital that they do.
Being distributed is about trust, and an in-person connection plays an important role in developing trust.
There is great joy in connection. Many times in my life I have been fortunate to observe this joy, where two people, who have only known each other from an email address or as a voice on the phone or maybe as an avatar or a face on a video chat, get to hug, get to talk about each other’s families, and just expand their social circle and the depths of their own life experiences.
As a result, this connection helps to build the synergy for creative minds to share ideas, brainstorm, and come up with actions that will solve challenges or end up in new innovation.
Physical Setup
It is often assumed that distributed employees will be able to get more done day to day simply due to the elimination of their commute. But as I just mentioned, there is a big difference between being at home trying to work and working from home. What sort of space should distributed team members have in order to do their work most efficiently? This is something that often goes overlooked by managers who are dealing with people working from different geographic locations for maybe the first time. They suppose that the employee’s own home-based setup will suffice by default. But this is often not the case.
A place of work needs the right setup to do the job, with up-to-date hardware and software and a secure and reliable Internet connection. Team members ideally need a dedicated space, with an ergonomically comfortable chair, desk, and lighting, just as they would have in a traditional office. For many, this means using a dedicated room or corner of a room, rather than working from the kitchen or living room table.
The workspace should be a zone of focus and not distraction. If there are other family members present and there’s no opportunity to close oneself off completely, it can still be done with sound barriers, like sound-suppressing headphones playing music or pink noise as a barrier. There are a great many channels on places like Spotify that provide music for study or music for concentration that make it much easier for people to work, even when the family TV is on in the same room.
For video chats, there will need to be some form of sound insulation. It’s easy enough to mute yourself when you are not talking, but when it comes time to speak up, the microphone will pick up background sound.
In addition, a work schedule itself might need to be built around homelife responsibilities, such as walking the dog or picking the kids up from school. This is a new element in the workday, but it need not be a problem. It is easy to let team members know when you will be available, just through clear time management and communication habits. This is a great opportunity to use the overcommunication techniques mentioned in Chapter 13, by updating status messages and online calendars to show availability and non-availability. It is also a great example of managing expectations, since the other team members will know when to expect a reconnection and can reorganize their day accordingly.
This is exactly what work-life integration is all about, and it is at the heart of the distributed teams concept. The net result is a gain for an organization, since team members can capitalize on a more balanced existence to deliver the required output on time. It’s different than working in the office, but that’s kind of the point. It’s different and I think it’s better.
Security is another key aspect that often doesn’t get the required attention. One of the most vulnerable spaces in a home office is usually the network, which is seldom secured and might still have the Internet router, for instance, operating under its default password. The router should be secured and every device in the household that connects to it, including non-work-related devices like kids’ school computers, and Internet of Things appliances (smart doorbells, Wi-Fi-connected smoke/CO2 alarms) should be secured as well.
In the distributed teams I’ve built, I like to establish guidelines that require team members to encrypt their computer hard disk as well as to enable 2FA (two-factor authentication) on their company IdP (Identity Provider) accounts. Simple security measurements like this can reduce risks to the users, the employees, and to the organization.
At first glance, all of these items appear to be very costly—additional entries on a department’s quarterly operating costs ledger. But in general, the costs of setting up a distributed teams workplace, including the purchase of new gear, are far lower than the costs of hosting these same people on the floor space of a building. In fact, even prior to the pandemic lockdown, companies were already eyeing the significant cost savings they could enjoy by removing floor space—meeting rooms, cubicle areas, dining areas—literally shrinking their footprint as their employees went virtual.
Creating the Connected Culture
The culture of any successful team anywhere starts and ends with people. People need to feel part of something, and they need to feel respected. They need to know they can reach you when they need you, but also that you will leave them to do their work. They need a balance of Focus Time, Collaboration Time, and Catch-up Time. In addition, they also need informal socialization time. They look to leaders to lead by example and to trust them to deliver their work, rather than micromanage them.
Workplace culture starts with vision and thrives on continuous feedback. It requires some central communication points—hangouts, breakout rooms, clear spaces to share information or have conversations. It helps to have a centralized knowledge base filled with definitions, how-to guides, standards, and everything else a team member might want to know about while setting out to complete the work.
Environment influences behavior, collective behavior creates culture, and culture drives results.
—Kristi Woolsey, Designing Culture (2016)
Tribal Togetherness
People are instinctively tribal. For hundreds of thousands of years, we have arranged ourselves into groups or tribes under a leader. We identify ourselves through symbols, colors, and brands. We have the need to connect with others and form groups; it is part of human nature. This is no different for distributed teams. Team members still need to feel connected, with you, their leader, as well as with each other. It’s not just about the work. It can’t just be about the work, and the work itself won’t happen without adequate team building. That’s why I always bring my distributed team members together whenever I can, virtually or in-person.
“TED Talks”-type series department-wide in which guest speakers address and engage with the audience. For instance, I promote to my teams what I call Show & Tell. This typically happens once a month for one hour during lunch where any team member is encouraged to sign up. Each session has three presentations of 15 minutes each.
Open source projects and active blog posts that can help expose great work to the community and increase recognition and the sense of belonging.
Hackathon events where team members have the opportunity to work with other team members from other teams in creative and innovative solutions.
Feedback mechanisms where people, individually or as a group, are encouraged to share thoughts that could lead to improvements, without having to wait for the traditional review cycles.
Unconference-type events where the participants drive the topics and the execution of the events. That creates an outlet for people to connect on the topics they are passionate about.
Self-organized events where teams can create and purchase T-shirts, stickers, winter gloves, or similar types of custom team branding merchandise.
The idea behind these types of events and items is to generate a sense of community outside of the day-to-day activity of work. I have participated in and facilitated a fair amount of corporate meetings, and it is absolutely rewarding when you see team members connecting to each other naturally, in an organic way. The human connection created in these kinds of events goes a long way to maximize everyone’s investment in the team.
Online Work Is Different
During the year 2020, companies were more or less forced to adopt the distributed teams model even if they had not planned to. With employees in mandatory lockdown, there was no other choice. Their employees were at home, connected only by their Internet technologies. Many companies had projects they had to deliver, along with meetings and all the other parts of the workday, which now had to be done through video chats.
When it came to events such as presentations and training sessions, it soon became apparent that a full day spent in front of a screen, watching a presenter present, is more fatiguing than watching that same presenter speak in person. This has to do in part with eye fatigue. In a meeting room or office, people are free to let their eyes move around the room, varying their length of focus, from the presenter to the board, to a colleague, to the clock on the wall, and to everything else.
On a video chat, by contrast, everything happens on a screen, and your key point of contact is the camera lens, which protocol suggests you focus on in order to make it look like you are looking directly at the other people in the meeting. Although you are technically free to look around your own workspace or turn off your camera, that is not seen as ideal since it looks like you are disinterested.
Being forced to stare at a fixed focal length for many hours is tiring for the eyes and brings on fatigue much more quickly. I like to use the 50-minute rule instead of one hour for meetings. Or 25 minutes instead of 30. The rule of thumb is to not fill people’s calendars with nonstop back-to-back meetings during the whole day. People need to have meals, bio breaks, and stretch a little bit in order to be able to provide their best.
Between the fatigue factor and the need for Focus Time, Catch-up Time, and Collaboration Time, a day can quickly fill up for the members of your distributed team. And that is something that distributed teams have in common with on-premises teams. There seems to never be enough hours in the day.
But I would venture to rephrase this last comment. It’s not that there are not enough hours in the day. It’s that there is not enough time management in the day. For decades, companies have been drifting into wasteful habits in the workplace. Meetings that run on too long, unnecessary status checks, detailed estimation conversations about far future projects, uncountable emails—the list goes on. Life in the office has more ways to waste time than to save it, which is why time management courses and leadership books sell so well: everyone is looking for the secret on how to do it better, but the culture is one that has grown passively and has created most of its own faults.
The new generation of professionals seeking a more flexible work-life balance approach and fully aware of the potential of distributed technology offers a new conscious slant toward the high-performance workplace, one that puts management back into time management and performance into a high-performance team.
What is required is a conscious awareness of the potential of every individual person. Some are morning people; some are night owls. Some are Type A; some are Type B. The trick to devising a structure for high-performance distributed teams is to not assume there is just one. There is not a “one-size-fits-all model.” This demands more of a personalized approach that encourages the best from a diverse group of people. It is critical that team members share their preferences and get aligned on what is best for them individually and collectively as a team.
The key goal is to get people to step off their metaphorical hamster wheel and realize that more can be done by proactively planning time than can be achieved by reactively juggling tasks. One of the best methods for this is the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 Rule is also known as the Pareto Principle, and is one of the most important concepts of all of business life because it applies as a useful and relevant model to understand both how things are and how they should be.
In 1906, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that twenty percent of the Italian people owned eighty percent of his country’s accumulated wealth. It was the official start of a famous tool of illustration now known as the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule. It is a versatile principle that helps describe the many areas of human activity in which a small amount of something has significant impact over a larger amount.
The actual proportions, eighty and twenty, are not as important as their symbolism. It does not have to be exactly eighty percent, for example, but it illustrates some very dynamic points such as “eighty percent of the value of a meeting happens during twenty percent of its actual duration.”
There are dozens of these examples in all areas of life, but the one that makes the most sense in terms of time management is the following:
You get more done when you invest 20 percent of your time to manage the other 80 percent.
How can this be? Because planning and doing gets more done than just doing alone. People who simply take on tasks without allowing time to plan them out or delegate or negotiate find themselves on a hamster wheel, perpetually working but never catching up.
One of the greatest techniques of effective time management is to ensure that the right tasks are done the right way, and this requires investing time not only for planning but also for building a kind of credit rating with co-workers through collaborative conversation, intelligent delegation, learning how not to procrastinate, and even allowing time to eat properly, both breakfast and lunch as well as snacks in between. All of this has an impact on them as well as you. At the moment, what is most important to recognize is the concept that more can be done by carving 20 percent out of the 100 percent and using it strategically.
What should be applied in this 20 percent of a person’s time? How about managing expectations? Sending out calls or messages to stakeholders or clients letting them know when you’re available to meet or when you will be able to return messages in detail. This gives them the satisfaction of knowing they will be cared for and frees you up from having to address people’s requests when you are in the middle of managing something else. The 20 percent can also be used to plan and prioritize your day more efficiently, factoring in time for other necessities—work related and home related—and also prioritizing your highest-value tasks for the time of day when you are at your physical and mental best.
Another use of the 20 percent is in networking and relationship management. A person who is too busy to take time to talk to other team members loses an immediate opportunity to build trust and generate support from colleagues and managers.
On our boats, we spend time before preparing for and discussing the trip, checking all the gear and the weather twice, and filing a float plan. All of this is time spent not sailing—it’s part of that 20 percent—but because of this investment, the bulk of the time can be given over to the act and enjoyment of boating.
For distributed teams, the relevance of the 80/20 rule speaks to the reality that time management has always been important. In the brick-and-mortar workplace, it helped people prioritize tasks in the face of constant interruptions, meetings, and email. Although some might think those things don’t happen for distributed team members, they do. As such it is vital for people working in the distributed teams model to learn how to structure their days along the 80/20 model, for the same reasons. The interruptions, meetings, and messages will still occur, regardless of where a person works. In fact, to quote Anne Chow, CEO of AT&T, “Work is no longer a place.”1
Seeking Purpose
Why would I want to teach someone a skill that they might want to take and use somewhere else? Because that’s purpose. Purpose is the desire to do something that has meaning, that’s bigger than yourself. Purpose is about autonomy. It’s what people of all ages seek as they carve their own path through life.
Giving people the freedom to work their own way and to learn their own way is a method for rewarding them with autonomy, and usually, rather than fly away, they will stay, comfortably aware of their own place within the distributed teams structure.
I started this book by describing my love for boating, and I have used examples from my boating and sailing lives as allegories throughout. I wish to conclude by just adding a bit more about how I learned how to sail and how, in doing, I found purpose.
I started learning to sail in a lagoon near my hometown of Florianópolis, Brazil. We were a team of three: myself, a friend—whom I have continued to sail with to this very day—and our instructor. This was a small team formation in a very controlled environment, in safe conditions, where we were able to learn the basics and some of the finer points of sailing, no matter which direction the wind was coming from, even when it blew from the front. These exercises allowed me to build my confidence, even though—or especially because—we managed to flip the boat a couple of times.
I was able to take the lessons that I learned in that lagoon to help me find my purpose and to channel it. My new skills as a sailor helped me manage boats out on the open ocean. At the same time, I converted those same lessons into techniques for managing soccer teams around my town, and this eventually led to me leaving my small hometown in Brazil, crossing the Equator, and starting to work in, and then oversee, high-tech teams in organizations in the Big Apple, United States.
Was there fear in any of these situations? Sure there was. Fear is natural. It’s the body’s way of saying, “Are you sure you want to do this?” Feeling fear is not something to be ashamed of. It’s how you handle the fear that counts, and I believe that going out there, whether it’s the open ocean or the world of business, with a strong team around you and with a clear sense of purpose, you can neutralize the fear, and you can achieve your goals, even if it takes more than one try to do so.
I still shake my head sometimes, when I see these really smart people who now report to me. Some are American; others have come from other parts of the world, just like me. And these brilliant people are reporting to me? That’s when I realize, “Yeah, I really learned how to sail, and yeah, I really found my purpose.”
And that’s why I decided to write this book. I think every person has the right to experience the exhilaration that I felt and still feel every time I take my own boat out past the safety of the harbor’s breakwater and its lighthouse, out onto the open water. People who wish to lead need to understand the people who work in teams. People who wish to pursue their professional passions also need to understand the dynamics of teams and of all the people and tasks that hold them together.
Teams no longer need a single physical place to define them. They no longer need a room to contain them. In the decade to come, more and more people will recognize that in fact the opposite is true, that the greatest teams exist when there is no single place at the center, but instead that true togetherness and progress happen when the team members hold themselves together and support themselves through the tangible strength of a distributed model.
The future lies forward for those who want to build it together.
Key Takeaways
Distributed teams need appropriate physical tools and settings, just like they would in an office.
A connected culture needs a single source of truth along with awareness of people’s tribal instincts.
Giving people the freedom to find their own purpose is the best way of keeping a distributed team together.